Chris Hansen Quotes

Each story we approach in the same way, with curiosity and interest and determination to get behind the image.

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism.

I'm not in the judgment part of journalism.

The courage in journalism is sticking up for the unpopular, not the popular.

As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past.

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

What you realize hanging out with investigative reporters is that, while they may be personally liberal, they don't let that get in the way of a good story.

It's my job as a reporter to not be about the business of making friends or enemies but just be in the tireless pursuit of truth.

Being an independent reporter with legal knowledge fits me better than being an attorney who is representing one side or one goal.

With years of experience doing whatever it takes to get to the bottom of each story, I am looking forward to covering the stories in the human dimension and impart the passion and visceral reactions the audience seeks.

I always saw the best reporters as ones you hardly ever saw other than when they were back in the newsroom, writing their stories.

If the interview was done in the studio, Frank McGee would automatically do it. But if I went out and got it, then the interview was mine. So I was considered a pushy cookie, because I would get the interview.

Interviews, and hence interviewers, are there to help shed light, and to let viewers judge for themselves. We are not judges, juries, commentators or torturers - nor friends, either.

Newspapers that are truly independent, like The Washington Post, can still aggressively investigate anyone or anything with no holds barred.

It is easy to make stuff up - and easy to dig up information and repeat it or report it to others. But to find a real life story with real people in real life situations is quite difficult and time-consuming. Yet, the rewards are worth the effort.

Journalism, for me, has always been a calling. There are things that must be exposed to the light, truths that must be uncovered, stories worth risking your life for.

What I do for a living is ask questions.

What is a reporter except a kind of house detective, scavenging through the bureau drawers of men's lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse that is stored away like a dirty pair of drawers.

We are not a paid bunch of bullies. Our job is to get the facts.

He [Robert F. Kennedy] is always on the lookout for a 'snow job,' impatient with evasion and imprecision, and relentless in his determination to get at the truth.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

I'm astonished by how much journalists stay with the story, try to get to the truth of the story, maybe give years of their life to it, maybe go over to Syria, maybe lose their life. Then, the next day, it's a new story.

If I wasn't a writer/director, I would be an investigative journalist. There's something about being an undercover journalist. I mean, that's freakin' cool!