Journalistic Identity Quotes

Years ago, NPR tried to stop me from going on "The Factor." When I refused, they insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to budge.

I'm still hesitant to call myself a journalist. I see myself as a documentary maker who is trusted with hard-hitting current affairs issues.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

I don't want to be an opinion anchor.

The problem isn't getting your hands on a press pass - it's acquiring one of those wide-brimmed fedora hats in which to keep your press pass.

I don't consider myself a celebrity. I'm just a journalist.

For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place. Now, I see the human rights movement as opposing human rights.

I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

I used to think that the image of the press in the 1940s - a bunch of guys in hats screaming on the courthouse steps - was all baloney. I used to say, 'I know reporters. We're not like that.' But we are.

I feel really blessed to work in a place that values me for what I bring as a journalist and as a professional storyteller and navigator of the news. But I also know that they appreciate about me, my perspective as a woman, as a black woman.

I'm not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I'm going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I'm not a foreign correspondent.

I am not covering stories as a transgender reporter. I'm a reporter who is transgender. Otherwise, it would be like having a black reporter only cover stories about blacks or a Hispanic reporter covering stories about Hispanics.

The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.

I do not subscribe to the advocacy journalism school. It's not who I am and not who CNN wants me to be.

It greatly upsets me when I'm called a journalistic toad - I mean, I am a journalist!

A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling.

journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I'd witnessed for the public.

I very much wanted to be accepted by my peers, to be considered a serious journalist.

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.

Interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and John Galliano in Paris, both for 'Pop' magazine, were huge for me, not just in learning about fashion and writing but about how little desire I had to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator so much as a kind of travel diarist.

As journalists, because you don't carry a gun, you sort of become this observer.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?