Al Michaels Quotes

You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.

I will never repeat something verbatim on the air unless I know it's accurate. And when you go to the source, sometimes there's a better story beyond the original story. That happens all the time.

Everybody's saying, be skeptical of Wikipedia. That is true. They should also be skeptical of everything. We should all be critical consumers of the media.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

Get in the habit of vetting your research as you go - particularly research conducted online. Verify facts from multiple reputable sources before you record them.

Don't believe everything you read.

Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.

Don't take advice you see on the Internet too seriously!

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

Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true.

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

People rely on Wikipedia, and a lot of it is wrong. But because there it is on the Internet, they assume it's right. Rumor gets printed as fact. We may have lost our critical facility as a nation.

There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.

If you're reading IMDB, half of it's made up. You can't trust it or Wikipedia, which is just lies, lies!

You can't be distracted by the noise of misinformation.

If the news isn't there, don't create it. If I look at local news, I don't know what's real.

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

I deal with first-hand sources. And give the people, even John Sununu, the opportunity to respond to what I've been told by first-hand sources.

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

I'm now the poster child for not believing everything I'm told.

Whenever there's a big story with vast potential to get social media content and find out what's happening, your first object is to prod into that and then test it to see whether it's valid. If you don't do the second part, you're basically a bilge pump.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

I don't believe Wikipedia about anything. I don't go there for anything but keywords.