Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf Quotes

The press briefing today I believe has lost much of its usefulness.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.

News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.

Print and television journalism are very different, and it's not like one is better than the other.

It's the media who love statistics.

Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.

If you look at the New York Times, it says X; if you look at the Washington Post, it says the same thing. And if you turn on any television newscast it's the same thing you already heard, that's research. And that's one of the ways it's done. Authority ends up being imputed simply because of volume. I mean, all of these different news organizations reporting the exact same thing.

If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Hard news really is hard. It sticks not in the craw but in the mind. It has an almost physical effect, causing fear, interest, laughter or shock.

The government is just you know, blowing the doors off the media. And not everywhere, and I think, this is where you know, a lot of those blog reporters and all of those things are bringing a lot of urgency and a lot of momentum to stories that wouldn't normally carry any momentum.

Journalism has become the art of "intelligent anticipation of events."

I believe in the power of journalism. To make informed decisions, you have to have an understanding of the dynamics of a situation. And journalism does bridge gaps and creates dialogue.

They are achieving nothing, they are suffering from casualties. Those casualties are increasing, not decreasing

News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day.

Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.

I wrote an article about the marine landing [in Haiti] right away, but barely mentioned the oil, because my article would come out two months later and I assumed by then, "of course, everybody knows." Nobody knew. There was a news report in the Wall Street Journal, in the petroleum journals, and in some small newspapers, but not in the mainstream press.

They are again in the dirt in the desert.

You break the story first, and then you go into the specifics.

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.

That's what I try to do as a writer and as the editor of HuffPost: cover important stories in an obsessive way that enables them to break through the din of our multimedia universe.

They are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

I never joined the army because at ease was never that easy to me. Seemed rather uptight still. I don't relax by parting my legs slightly and putting my hands behind my back. That does not equal ease. At ease was not being in the military. I am at ease, bro, because I am not in the military.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.