John King Quotes

In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.

There was a time when I first started when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years, that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing.

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

To conflict journalists, a tiny, tight-knit tribe, tragedy is practically an occupational requirement: our work requires us to seek it out, measure it, contextualize it, and chronicle it.

CNN was one of the first news organizations in the world to train and equip its journalists before deploying them to dangerous areas.

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

You have to go where the story is to report on it. As a journalist, you're essentially running to things that other people are running away from.

Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

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

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.

The function of the New York Times is to enter the battlefield after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.

My journalistic heroes are all the guys like Peter Arnett of Vietnam, and my style in journalism is you got to stand there, and you got to see it with your own eyes.

As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get.

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?