Source Verification Quotes

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.

I think people have a responsibility, if they write a letter, to make sure that they saw it themselves and it's not hearsay.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

Don't believe something just because you didn't read it in the papers. Wait until you haven't seen it on television.

Nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it.

Everybody's saying, be skeptical of Wikipedia. That is true. They should also be skeptical of everything. We should all be critical consumers of the media.

Google' is not a synonym for 'research'.

I'm against the people that make up stories and make up sources. They shouldn't be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody's name.

There's no question that sources sometimes have interests aside from the truth when they talk to reporters. That's why reporters have to very aggressively report against their own theses and against their initial information.

WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in which it does it, with its - the concept we have of scientific journalism, I find very important and really appeals to me, that all of the source documents should be there.

How do you know the news is reliable if you didn’t gather it yourself?

I always tell my fans that are closest to me, if it's not coming from my mouth, my website, or my appointed person, then it's generally not true. Or it's an exaggeration.

If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same - whether they come from a credible source or not.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

You have all these people in the press who are ringing their hands over fake news stories. That actually became the narratives for critics.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

Good reporting should have the same standard as in a courtroom - beyond a reasonable doubt.

I've learned the hard way at the national level that any erroneous statement will very quickly be magnified. So, as someone who talks for a living, I've learned to check, double-check and triple-check my sources.

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

If a journalist comes to you with a great story, one of the first questions you ask is how did you get it. How you got it is relevant to judging its accuracy and preparing yourself for any legal challenge.

How can an article about me or the Batman be the true story when I am not consulted or interviewed?

If someone appears on television and makes a comment, and we quote that comment, we are being accurate. But are we actually being sensible if we don't know if that comment is based on any facts whatsoever? It is something that journalists have to be much more aware of.