Subjective Reporting Quotes

If a reporter doesn't like the person he's writing about, it shows up in his article.

I don't know if I ever believed in the infallibility of a journalist's objectivity, but I definitely stopped flirting with the notion as a young adult.

The difference between Koppell and Olberman types is that one gives editorializing in all its editorial frankness so there are no mistakes as to bias, and the other passes off a subtler bias as objectivity.

It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.

Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.

I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.

For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

In a very straightforward way, I am a terrible reporter. I'm not someone who can go into a story and not get involved.

The problem with not having a camera is that one must trust the analysis of a reporter who's telling you what occurred in the courtroom. You have to take into consideration the filtering effect of that person's own biases.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words "impartiality" and "objectivity" is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over. "Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view.

I think, though, that people will read into a reporter's story a bias that they want to see in a reporter.

We are inflicting opinion in our newscasts like never before. That was never done and never taught in our journalism classes.

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.

If you look at any station, you will see that what people are reporting comes from what they believe in, where they stand, their background, what their countries believe in.

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

Yeah, I think of what I do as a work of journalism. It's more like the op-ed page, though. These are my opinions. My point of view. The opinions are mine and I let you make up your own mind.

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

...I gave up on being a journalist - I thought having a point of view was more important than being objective.

Of course it's contrived, but once you know how its contrived, you can understand the editorial viewpoint. CNN, for example, when you see where they're really coming from, you can subtract their bias, and get some sort of facts. Sometimes the amount of bias that is imposed in these things is so laughable that it gives you an extra layer of entertainment.

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

Reporters tend to launch on what seems to be the clearest, most stark aspects of someone's life in terms of an interview.

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.