Janet Malcolm Quotes

And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story.

Most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.

I would never let myself knock out a journalist.

Anderson's muckraking is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable works.

If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I'm not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.

Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.

CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.

The true knowledge of good and evil arouses disturbances of the mind

None of us are good or evil, and that frustrates us because we want to see others as wearing a white hat or black hat. My hat is grey.

Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone.

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

The lesser evil is also evil.

Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.

Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.

I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful.

If anybody ever tries to do an investigative report on a journalist, much like the kind and the way a journalist would do on a public figure, have you ever seen a stuck pig? Because that's what the journalist looks like.

When people are uncertain about what is right and what is wrong, and anxious about being considered old-fashioned, it seems to be worse than folly that Christians are still arguing about doctrinal matters which can only bring needless distress to a number of people.

The press in America has never been stronger and never been freer and never been more vibrant, sometimes to my chagrin, and a lot of times to my delight.

A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.