Jonathan Franklin Quotes

In the best of all possible worlds, everybody would be honorable, but that's not the way the world works. Reputations for reporters are made by discovering things underneath that rock.

Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.

I think it's like everything else; one shouldn't dig too deeply. It's silly to say that with a journalist, but sometimes there is not a truth to be found.

A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government.

What is a reporter except a kind of house detective, scavenging through the bureau drawers of men's lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse that is stored away like a dirty pair of drawers.

I always loved digging away at the story, trying to find out things that people don't want you to find out and piecing it all together. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it, the thrill of the chase.

I think he came to the front door and rang the bell, and Maggie let him in, and he said he had forgotten his key; so I think she must have been down stairs.

Often I used my gut instinct to ask the questions and get the answers I thought the audience wanted to hear. Sometimes the interviewees said things that surprised even them.

You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past.

I had my guitar at the set of 'Lost in Space' every day. I was the only one in the cast who had a stereo in his dressing room. So while I was in school or when I was in there working with Dr. Smith and the robot, half the rest of the cast was in my trailer listening to their records that they would bring.

For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.

You can have all the information you want in the world. If you don't have the people raising questions and looking beneath the surface, and people being paid to do this, you're not going to find the answers.

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

Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time.

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

Journalism, for me, has always been a calling. There are things that must be exposed to the light, truths that must be uncovered, stories worth risking your life for.

No one will ever know the complete truth.

Go ahead and investigate the bastards.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

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.

I'm astonished by how much journalists stay with the story, try to get to the truth of the story, maybe give years of their life to it, maybe go over to Syria, maybe lose their life. Then, the next day, it's a new story.

If I wasn't a writer/director, I would be an investigative journalist. There's something about being an undercover journalist. I mean, that's freakin' cool!

Normally, the action is just a gratuitous thing. In the case of Bourne, he was going to learn about himself in the action scenes.

My interest is in turning over a rock and seeing what's underneath. It's a personality trait more than anything; it's what made me want to become a crime reporter, even though I was not suited for it personality-wise.