Tom Junod Quotes

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

We have rights in America. In tandem with those rights, we have responsibility. Whatever type of journalist we are, whether it be in the entertainment business, or as professional journalists, we always have the consequences of the way we present fact and information.

More and more, journalism seems to have hopped out of Truth's pocket and crept into another.

I don't think much of the journalism that I see.

You have to be careful not to go overboard. How do you balance what is clearly great television with good journalism?

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

I fully acknowledge that I am not a journalist.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.

I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising.

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth.

It's hard to know now who, if anyone, in the media has any credibility.

Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.

Profiles aren't journalism.