Christiane Amanpour Quotes

I believe the most important thing for the media is to be objective, fair, and balanced. We should not report a story with preconceptions or prejudice.

A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism.

And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

I think the way to be an influential journalist is to be accurate and to be fair and to get things right and to really characterize things in an honest way, versus being really snarky or cheerleading.

There's a longstanding tradition that journalists don't cheer in the press box. They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work.

I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism.

Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.

The good journalist is never objective. He is always neutral.

You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.

I want to stress the importance of being fair to our readers. You should not impose your own view and prejudice on the readers and try to lead them to a conclusion. As a reader, I understand what a fair report is.

I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to.

As for being an objective journalist? That's easy. I want what everyone else wants: the truth.

I think the idea of journalists being neutral is very important.

I've met many journalists who impress me with their ability to play it straight. I think they're the exception to the rule.

As a pundit, it's important to tell the viewer something they might not know, be unbiased and not sit on the fence.

There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.

History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.

The way we do it on the Fox News Channel is the straight news anchors like us give a hard time to both sides.

When the public sees us taking sides—and the public definitely sees it—we lose the only reason we had any influence with the public in the first place: our credibility. We become just another partisan voice in a cacophonous chorus, one more basement blogger.

I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions.

Well, I don't know about objectivity, but I know for certain that it's always possible for a professional journalist who understands what he or she's up to to be fair, and that's the key word. Fairness to individuals, fairness to ideas, and to issues and whatever - that is critical, and that is also part and parcel of what the job.

I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced.

I think I've earned a reputation of being fair and that I'll hear all sides from the entire political spectrum.

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.