Richard Grenell Quotes

A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.

The media's job is to question a premise.

The most important responsibility we have as journalists is to question those who are in power. I honestly believe that.

Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.

In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power.

There's some irony in playing a journalist after some of the stuff that has been written about me, but it's a great profession, particularly investigative journalism.

I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government - to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering.

The courage in journalism is sticking up for the unpopular, not the popular.

Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.

I'm in the business, as a journalist, of asking tough questions.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

The point of journalism is to hold people in positions of power accountable.

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report.

Essentially, there is no media, folks. There just isn't any media in the sense that there are reporters out there uncovering things you and I don't know and telling us what they are.

I normally have a healthy fear of journalists.

No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.

The people, as much as it's fun to hate us, they need us. They need good, strong, skeptical journalists to be covering whoever it is - whether it's Barack Obama or President Donald Trump.

When I was counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, about 25% of the important leads which our committee developed came from newspapers. This increased my respect for those courageous newspapers which assisted us. It also caused me to look with wonderment at some of the newspapers that did not.

Part of my job is to read the paper, watch C-Span and show things that haven't been shown or were buried.

My dream was to do political journalism.

Press freedom has great virtues. It is not about irresponsible scandal-mongering, although that may be part of the picture. It is a means of revealing wrongdoing.

I want to be a journalist; I want to ask tough questions.

I think of journalists as being bullet-proof in a way.

The most important newspapers in this country need to exist. Our democracy needs them. Life as we know it would be unthinkable without them.