Bill Callahan Quotes

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

Whenever you can bring your chops in as a reporter to unearth a cool story, that's always a good thing.

I want to be the greatest investigative reporter of my generation.

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism.

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.

I'm not in the judgment part of journalism.

I tried to steer the student newspaper toward more pertinent information instead of the usual gossip and bull.

The most important responsibility we have as journalists is to question those who are in power. I honestly believe that.

People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media.

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.

Confrontation is not a dirty word. Sometimes it's the best kind of journalism as long you don't confront people just for the sake of a confrontation.

What I love - and I'm a journalist - and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters.

I've always loved shows like '48 Hours' and 'Dateline,' and I've always been passionate about getting to the truth, and journalism.

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.

The first essence of journalism is to know what you want to know, the second, is to find out who will tell you.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

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

It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.

Interviews, and hence interviewers, are there to help shed light, and to let viewers judge for themselves. We are not judges, juries, commentators or torturers - nor friends, either.

What I do for a living is ask questions.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.