News Business Quotes

If you had the most prestige and you were the network that everybody turned to in times of a crisis, that that was the most important position, in the news business, to hold.

Many people who know me call me 'the hardest working man in the news business' because you're never, ever going to outwork me.

I'm 68 and a half years old; I grew up with newspapers; I love newspapers; I love the news business. I started CNN; I'm a journalist and proud of it.

The news business is simple, but it's not easy to do well.

The media, while they won't admit it, are not in the news business; they're in entertainment. We tried to create the most entertaining, visually attractive scenes ... so that the networks would have to use it.

Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.

I think in politics, in Congress, you often do things that are Republican, or you do things because you're a Democrat. Sometimes that's good, obviously, and sometimes that's obviously bad. But in the news business, there's no such thing as Republican or Democratic news. News is news.

For anyone in the news business, just the name 'Cronkite' conjures up images of a bygone era when journalists covered, and could at times impact, the most important stories of the day, rather than the most 'compelling' or salacious.

I've been in journalism my entire adult life and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt.

That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

Frightening media messages...pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives.

The trouble with Trump's father was that he was a totally naive man. He had no idea that you could buy the whole news reporting business in New York City with a return phone call.

But my observation has been, certainly in the news business, you've got to give 110 percent.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.

My parents got ahead in the news business with wits, guts, and a creative interpretation of 'fair game.' They leased their first helicopter in 1985, when KTLA news crews were on strike. Maybe the crews had good grievances, maybe not. Either way, my parents ignored the strike and went to work.

Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that . . .

I'm not in the news business and won't tell people how to do their job. I'd like to restore trust in the news business, though, and feel that restoring fact-checking will really help. News business realities mean that such fact-checking has to be practical, it has to be fast and cheap.

When you're in the news business, you always expect the unexpected.

Television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business.

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

I am in the bad news business. Seldom do I get to report on puppies, rainbows, or the sounds of children giggling. Well, never.