Barbara Boxer Quotes

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.

Dan Rather is guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded.

The media does play a vital role in our democracy, and if we cannot depend on journalistic ethics, the nation's in trouble.

I just love when the Internet is wrong. It's the only thing that will save journalism.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

When the crisis at the core of our nation’s political decline is a direct attack on the truth, the institution that should take the lead in confronting and correcting that danger is the press.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.

When you are a journalist, you have a big responsibility towards your audience and it is important to respect that responsibility.

I would love for us to get back to a place in this country where we have real journalists, where we have real news reporting.

Journalists have to call out and correct the lies and smears polluting the air waves.

Understanding how the media actually works is critical. Because editors depend on ignorance and media illiteracy to ply their trade. The fact that many readers expect fact checking, editorial oversight, and ethics actually makes it easier for the media to be lazy.

[Some outlets] shouldn't even call themselves news providers; they're just entertainment gossip without any sort of accountability or fact-checking.

When did fact checking and journalism go their separate ways?

I treasure the fact there's media freedom, but with that goes responsibility. I think that there should be a self-regulatory organization and that they should start to think about standards. Because I think a lot of people say, "I don't know how to read what is true versus somebody else's interpretation."

People should fact check. People shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.

News is not a game show. You don't win a car if you happen to be right.

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.

Journalism is kind of scary and of it we should be wary.

When "news stories" are broken, do we not expect a certain amount of fact-checking or source-checking? One has to ask if this falls under the guise of sloppy reporting or deception as a source of spin. We seem to accept a certain amount of deception and we seem to be helpless to doing anything about it, as illustrated so clearly by where we are right now in this moment in history.

[CNN host] doesn't know what's going on in the editing room. She knows what he's told happened, and she's reading it off the teleprompter, and she just accepts it. I'm not saying that they're IQ dumb or any of that. I'm saying they're not curious.

The way we get our news is very important, and the idea that the media doesn't always do right by us, and that they focus on things they shouldn't for ratings, is very important, and it's absolutely worthy of ridicule.

We're going to fisk the 'New York Times.'

Omidyar Network first supported Africa Check in 2014 when they were a team of just three dedicated people intent on building a more fact-based environment for public debate in South Africa.