Michael Kinsley Quotes

There are all sorts of despicable people who journalists have done interviews with, and it's been useful. Isn't more information better than less information?

The democratic approach to news is a very valuable thing. We're always going to be dependent on the quality of reporting of mainstream media.

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.

It is the business of the journalist … to stand in permanent Opposition.

Is journalism a profession that serves the public by maintaining high standards, or is it a social construct that should be redesigned to directly serve certain social goods? Some argue that all journalism involves bias, either hidden or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objectivity and fairness are ultimately unreachable. It is another to cease grasping for them. That would be a world of purely private truths, in which the boldest liars and demagogues would thrive.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

Now everybody is questioning everything, so it's up to journalists who really care about the truth to fight for their corner of the truth and journalistic freedom.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

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

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.

Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.

It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.

I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

Some in journalism consider themselves apart from and to some extent above the people they purport to serve.

If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.

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.

I happen to believe that any legitimate news organization in the world would do that interview. And if the United States is going to be a proponent of a free press, it has to walk the walk.

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

You hope the American people are fair. We recognize journalists have to kill somebody each week.

The job of media is the accountability of government.

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.

Journalists play God when they decide for their readers when to hide information from them. Frequently, those choices are unavoidable.