Jim Lehrer Quotes

As Walter Cronkite would say, that's the way it is.

If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow.

The only way to do news on television is not to be terrified of it.

In journalism the gold standard has become punditry rather than reporting.

Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention.

Gravitas is the soup bone in the stew of television news.

I started off wanting very much to be a newscaster.

I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.

The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.

I'm 68 and a half years old; I grew up with newspapers; I love newspapers; I love the news business. I started CNN; I'm a journalist and proud of it.

I like being involved in the lighter side of journalism because it serves a purpose, and it's fun. And I can keep my opinions off camera if I want.

I give Cronkite a whole lot of credit.

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

The highest power of television journalism is not the transmission of information but the transmission of experience.

Television is to news as a bumper sticker is to Shakespeare.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to have thumbsuckers and pundits on television than it is to have reporters and news bureaus around the world.

I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.

There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially … a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful.

If you love television and you love news, CNN is the perfect place to be.

I've been a journalist for too long to stop calling myself a journalist, and also when I'm doing 'Fake or Fortune?' I'm going through a rigorous investigation.

In college, I got an internship at my local station in Honolulu one summer, and I just fell in love with broadcast news, reporting, and storytelling. After college, I started out at NBC, and I worked behind the scenes at 'Today' and 'Dateline.'

The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!'

For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.

I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst. I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.