Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

President Obama has regularly granted special access to reporters who give him preferential coverage.

I don't want to respond to rumors that have no basis at all... But I am willing to respond to questions that the public and the press should know.

The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.

We in the media should be breaking the news and not making the news.

I apologize for what the media has done.

It’s always a danger when an institution like the press becomes disconnected from the people.

In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.

The press aren't willing to wait for whatever the truth is - the truth never catches up with the lie... Destroying people ought not to be a competitive business.

The media is done, they don't do journalism anymore, it's activism, nothing more, right?

We in the media accept the responsibility of what we do.

There are media houses which put headline with a question mark, and that is how they can get away without taking the accountability of the allegation. They put the question mark. Let's analyze it a little - a common reader will not remember the question mark: they will remember the allegation.

Many of the most important stories in the history of modern journalism have come from sources who have taken information without authorization.

Our focus is and should be on the leakers, not those that are obtaining it as part of legitimate newsgathering.

The media is fully fine and hunky-dory with the idea that they may destroy somebody, and they think that's part of the job description. But you turn around and criticize them, and that's not permitted in the vacuum in which they live. They have free rein over you, because I guess this is how they define their constitutional responsibility. And since they have constitutional recognition, somehow they've all been taught at journalism school that nobody may assail them, that nobody may criticize them.

My whole model, from the beginning, was not to personally publish a single document. I provided these documents to journalists because I didn't want my biases to decide what's in the public interest and what is not.

I think that the media should stop with this unnamed source stuff, put names on a piece of paper and print it. If people aren't willing to put their name next to a quote, then the quote shouldn't be listed, period.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.

The press has become so dishonest that if we don't talk about, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk to find out what's going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.

It is completely irresponsible, if not worse, for members of the media to be calling our press secretary a liar and worse. On Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. And in articles. That is not the way to start relationships with the press.

If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?

One of the important things about being a small-town reporter is knowing what not to put in the paper.