Amy Goodman Quotes

The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.

Throughout the lead-up to the war, CNN worked hard to air all sides of the story. We had a regular segment called Voices of Dissent in which we spent time covering antiwar protests and interviewing those who were opposed to the war with Iraq.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

Reporters were all part of the war effort. They went along with it, and not only that, they abetted it.…It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.…They wrote only a part of the war

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here.

War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.

The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides.

The job of the reporters in Vietnam was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America. To the ambassadors and generals, on the other hand, it was crucial that the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible.

Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.

Historically, war journalists have embedded themselves with one side, which means the greatest threat comes from the clearly delineated enemy of that side.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.

Many journalists seem to believe that we have become little different from our enemies.

I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that.

You know it's always amazed me - I think the most startling thing that's happened in the last couple of decades is that there is no sort of objective reporting anymore.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.