Alan Price Quotes

I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.

I said that I'm only there to write the truth, I'm not going to cover anything up, but I'll put everything in context and get as close to the truth of this person as I can.

The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers.

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

It's my job as a reporter to not be about the business of making friends or enemies but just be in the tireless pursuit of truth.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

You have to go where the story is to report on it. As a journalist, you're essentially running to things that other people are running away from.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

The most important thing about my profession is finding the truth, finding the reality of these shows.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, that's what keeps them digging rather than simply accepting the official line, whether it comes from government or corporate bureaucrats.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

No one will ever know the complete truth.

In the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

He [Robert F. Kennedy] is always on the lookout for a 'snow job,' impatient with evasion and imprecision, and relentless in his determination to get at the truth.