Michael Hastings Quotes

I'm in the business, as a journalist, of asking tough questions.

Journalists prize independence - not teamwork.

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

I know we journalists have a reputation for being cynics. We do. It's our job to question - everything.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story.

As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits.

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.

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

I reject the idea that journalists are messengers of the truth. It’s arrogant. I think journalism is a search for the little relative truths that at best keep us relatively sane.

There is always sleaze in the news. And you know what? The news is always a combination of things that are interesting and things that are important.

I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

We need ethical journalism. There is also capacity limitations in journalism.

Journalism is a messy business. For every prize-winning story there's plenty of gossip and garbage.

It's been said that no man is a hero to a newspaperman, and I spent too many years as an ink-stained wretch.

Great questions make great reporting.

Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.

All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.