Tim Hetherington Quotes

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.

Of course no documentary is completely 'objective.' Every decision you make - who to interview, how to edit, where to hold the camera - imposes a point of view on the film.

People think they're getting objective information, but they're not. They're getting news wrapped up in opinion.

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.

I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.

I think that as reporters we certainly bring to bear our own set of experiences, our backgrounds, to our reporting.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

The good journalist is never objective. He is always neutral.

You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.

I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life.

No other aspect of filmmaking has tempted me to do a film other than the script and the story itself.

Journalists are simply leftists disguised as reporters. They're political activists disguised as reporters.

I always think that's neat, when you can hear a story told from different points of view, different perspectives.

It's CNN's bigger problem that CNN wants to deny reality. I, too, used to drink the Kool-Aid that it was a top journalism operation that reports without bias. Now that I'm outside the walls of traditional media, I know there is no such thing.