Bob Woodward Quotes

The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair.

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.

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

It's the broadcaster's dilemma. Are we true journalists? I don't know if I am or not.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

If establishment journalists were to replicate actual stenography, it would be an improvement on most of the work they produce.

When we are reporting the news, we make every effort to report it in as factual way as possible.

You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story.

Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.

I'm supremely uninterested as to what is written in many of the newspapers.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

There is a bias in the press for facts over fiction.

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

My job is to cover the news and do it accurately and fair. And we do.

Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.

I don't think much of the journalism that I see.

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

I believe there are two kinds of journalists. One who sells a story by being creative, and one who sells a story by being sensationalist.

If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. Don't just swallow what politicians tell you.

Journalists prize independence - not teamwork.

Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.