Bob Woodward Quotes

You’re not buying news when you buy The New York Times. You’re buying judgment.

The decision of what, when, and how to publish is for editors, not judges.

Every editor of newspapers pays tribute to the devil.

Show me a contented newspaper editor and I will show you a bad newspaper.

I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.

A newspaper may somewhat arrogantly assert that it prints "all the news that's fit to print." But no newspaper yet has been moved to declare at the end of each edition, "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite does.

Movies such as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Front Page' portrayed an era when driven newspapermen would do anything to get a story. The U.K.'s rough-and-tumble Fleet Street remains something of a throwback to that era, as demonstrated by the recent phone-hacking scandal - which led to the demise of yet another century-old paper, the 'News of the World.'

What editors are obliged to appear to say that

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle... Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.

I was interested in creating things that I could be proud of and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, things that I could be proud of, and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, but in order to be an editor of a magazine I had to become a publisher as well. I had to pay the bills. I had to worry about the printing and the paper manufacturing and the distribution of that magazine.

The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe.

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.

The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd.

[Max Askeli] started this very good magazine [The Reporter]. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there.

I was spurred by the fact that having worked for women's magazines myself as a journalist, if you go off and interview a female celebrity, I'd just go in and interview them like I'd interview any human being and talk about the things that interested me. And you'd come back, and you'd file your copy. And then my editor would read through my copy and go, why haven't you asked them if they want kids? And I'd be like, well, I don't know, I interviewed Aerosmith last week. And I didn't ask them that.

I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists.

Journalists are interesting. They just aren't as interesting as the things they cover.

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

I think there are a lot of great journalists out there. I don't find much fault in the journalist in general; I think everybody would like to break a good story.

If you dared to put your opinion into a factual piece, your editors said, "You can't do this. Write an op-ed."

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to.