Journalistic Insight Quotes

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

At Al Jazeera, we are getting our local Somalis, Yemenis and Sudanese, local correspondents from within the society, who understand much better than the people who come from overseas. We will get a much better insight.

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

I've learned in my years as a journalist that when a politician says 'That's ridiculous' you're probably on the right track.

When you're a crime reporter, you see the nub of what life's about, and you don't have much patience for the falsity of politics.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

The point is, the political reporters are the ones who no longer understand the ritual they are covering. They keep searching for political meanings in the tepid events when a convention is now essentially a human drama and only that.

I was at CNBC for 20 years. I felt really great about covering the stock market, being on the floor, watching the daily knee-jerk reactions to the stock market..but the last three years, being at Fox, I've grown. I've learned more.

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.

In my kind of reporting work, you don't parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It's the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals' lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.

I used to be an actor, I used to be a journalist and I used to be a publicist. I know how all these people think.

Chats are so new to newspapers, historically. But they're so incredibly valuable because editors/reporters/columnists get to find out what's on the minds of our readers, what you think we should be writing about, what ticks you off, what makes you happy. Sometimes it can confirm what you think readers are interested in; sometimes it can turn you around 180 degrees.

I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called "the significant trifle" - the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.

It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.

I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences.

Politicians and journalists share the same fate in that they often understand tomorrow the things they talk about today.

In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers.