Information Reliability Quotes

Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle... Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

We live in a world with fake news being put out there. You don't really know what to trust, and it's a real danger to society.

I deplore with you, the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.... As vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless, by forfeiting all title to belief.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.

Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in the open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

A reporter is no better than his source of information.

When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.

As a member of the mainstream media for many years, I've learned just one thing: never to trust anything I read in the mainstream media - not because of any agenda or deliberate dissimulation, but simply because it's filtered and comes very often from someone whose judgment I might not trust in other circumstances.

One of the problems with the Internet is that a lot of times it is inaccurate.

I read the 'Times' and 'Post,' but I have nothing against the 'Daily News.' I also fish around the Internet for entertainment news but find most of what I read to be untrue or partially true.

I think more and more people are starting to understand that you can't believe half of everything you read or what you see. There are so many information outlets that are available that it's almost too much, there is so much misinformation out there.

I can't believe anything I hear on television anymore.

As we have learned to our cost in recent years, much “secret information” is simply wrong, while information that is public … is too often discounted.

With media companies today owned and sponsored by large corporations, it is difficult to know whether the news can be trusted.

I find myself believing everything that journalists tell me.

But it is almost impossible to communicate with them [one's spies in the enemy camp] and receive the information they possess ... Even when the general receives from his spies information of movements, he still knows nothing of those which may since have taken place, nor of what the enemy is going finally to attempt.

Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves.

It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?

Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.

Matt Drudge's role in the Monica Lewinski scandal] strikes me as a new and graphic power of the Internet to influence mainstream journalism. And I suspect that over the next couple of years that impact will grow to the point where it will damage journalism's ability to do its job professionally, to check out information before publication, to be mindful of the necessity to publish and broadcast reliable, substantiated information.

Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

Studies are studies. You get all kinds of studies.