Peter Jennings Quotes

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

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.

I'm not an advocacy journalist - that's not what I do. My role in journalism is to be able to engage the most interesting people with the best ideas.

I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. it is the absence of news.

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

Larry King and his producers ought to go back to school and learn what 'fair and balanced' really means.

I'm a lousy journalist.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being.

My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been.

I know the difference between journalism and a slogan.

News isn't even the truth on television.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

Journalism is not just a cause, it's also a wacky profession.

Television news is a delicate balance of serving public good and private gain.

I'm very wary of news on television.

At the end of the day, there is still one function of journalism that cannot be computerized, and that is reporters. You're always going to need reporters.

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.

The A-listers and the A+ listers, are reporting the news, they're not making it.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.