Maria Ressa Quotes

Perhaps the biggest problem in journalism is the cult divide between journalists and corporate owners.

CNN is an American symbol of independent journalism and First Amendment free speech. My board and I are clear: CNN will remain completely independent from an editorial perspective.

I'm proud to have played a major part in destroying Fleet Street, a corrupt cartel of unions and proprietors that operated against the public interest.

I developed an interest in supporting independent journalists in a way that leverages their work to the greatest extent possible, all in support of the public interest.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.

We don't go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.

As Americans, we rightfully place tremendous value on having a free and independent press. Our role as journalists is to give voice to the voiceless, and hold our leaders and institutions accountable. But the circle is only completed when that information is consumed by a free-thinking and engaged audience.

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.

More than once at TechCrunch, we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we'd write a post about the whole thing.

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

When journalists forget that our job is to question and annoy those in power, there can be huge consequences.

I knew I wanted to be a journalist ever since I was a teenager. While it is interesting and gratifying to be on the business side and to see how that all works, the main reason I kept a business role here was to protect the editorial integrity of Salon.

Fear rules almost every newsroom in the country.

Some in journalism consider themselves apart from and to some extent above the people they purport to serve.

One of the most important roles of our journalists is to be watchdogs.

One of our greatest glories is closure of offending newspapers. Based on our assessments, by doing this, we have done the greatest service to the people

We can continue to have a policy in which the public interest means whatever they [broadcasters and communications companies] want it to mean in order to make money. Or we can give it real meaning.

The government’s role is to motivate the private sector, to assure that it performs in a way which serves the public interest.

This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.

You hope the American people are fair. We recognize journalists have to kill somebody each week.

Is journalism a profession that serves the public by maintaining high standards, or is it a social construct that should be redesigned to directly serve certain social goods? Some argue that all journalism involves bias, either hidden or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objectivity and fairness are ultimately unreachable. It is another to cease grasping for them. That would be a world of purely private truths, in which the boldest liars and demagogues would thrive.

It's one of the things I respect about Time Warner and Turner: their understanding of CNN's independence.

Newspapers in this country are famously independent of politics.