Alma Guillermoprieto Quotes

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.

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.

What would this country be like without the press prying to find out what the government is doing?

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!

I think the job of a good journalist, especially in Washington, is to create discomfort, and I think for a certain class of people, and for whom life is quite comfortable, I've created discomfort. So I take that as a badge of honor.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

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

Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

Journalism is irrepressible. It can't be taken away.

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

The truth is, I don't have any problem with journalists - I count some of them as friends - also some of my heroes are journalists, I'm a big fan of Robert Fisk - great people or crazy people who are prepared to stand up for what's right.

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

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

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.

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

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.

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.

Being a reporter is at the very core of a democracy, being a free person in a free society.

We "muckraked" not because we hated our world but because we loved it.

Muck-raker

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

We are not a paid bunch of bullies. Our job is to get the facts.

The best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.