Scott Pelley Quotes

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.

The only security of all is in a free press.

The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep he waters pure.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism.

We need a free press. We must have it. It's vital.

A free press is one of the pillars of democracy.

I have sworn to uphold the Constitution ... and a free press is absolutely vital to the freedom of this country.

Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.

We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.

We believe that the remedy to any harm resulting from press freedom lies in press freedom itself.

Being a reporter is at the very core of a democracy, being a free person in a free society.

What would this country be like without the press prying to find out what the government is doing?

A people without reliable news is, sooner or later, a people without the basis of freedom.

Journalist, in my opinion, are mediators between the Information Age and our democracy.

… the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

We are a better country because the press gets 1000 facts right every day.

Flaws and all, I believe the free press is our country's most important institution - one I am more than happy to defend. One I did, in fact, defend for 37 years.

Press freedom is not just about journalists, right? It's not just about us, it's not just about me, it's not just about Rappler. Press freedom is... the foundation of every single right of every single Filipino to the truth, so that we can hold the powerful to account.

I have great respect for the news and great respect for freedom of the press and all of that.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia.

The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.

A free press is the immune system of representative democracy.