Richard Quest Quotes

Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?

The day that I spearheaded the passage of America Fast Forward... the newspaper of record did not put it in the newspaper; what they put was my breakup with my ex-girlfriend. I took umbrage with that. A great newspaper ought to be printing things that people care about, issues that people care about.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

I know journalists like to think that they are read by people like me, but I don't read them.

The lead story on MSNBC was the news that there was nothing new to report in the Gary Condit story. So remember when there is nothing new to report, MSNBC will be the station not to report it first.

I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day.

I have always been a big meta guy because I think the way journalism is practiced in Washington, and the way everyone sort of cohabitates in the same fishbowl is ultimately a bigger part of the story than people outside of the fishbowl really know.

The focus of entertainment is taking away from what the public needs as news. I think investigative journalism will always be important and always find its way, be it on the Internet or wherever.

The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

I think the press has an interest in communicating to its viewers or readers, and their viewers or readers drive profit for those news organizations, so I think those news organizations have a certain bias toward their own readers. Yeah, I think they are a special interest. Of course they are.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

The duty of the media is to observe truth and social responsibility.

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.

In any event, the proper question isn't what a journalist thinks is relevant but what his or her audience thinks is relevant. Denying people information they would find useful because you think they shouldn't find it useful is censorship, not journalism.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

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.

I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

The old newspaper adage, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' is as true today as it was a century ago.

The papers, you know, they're always gonna just make stuff up. They think it's in the public interest.

I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.