Washington tends to be full of too many traps. I think reporters there do a lot of attending news briefings and news conferences expecting to get the real news out of those relatively sterile environments. But you've got to deal with the obscure people as well as the names.
Hunter and I never got proper journalistic accreditation to go anywhere. Nobody was giving us passes to go in here or there. We always had to somehow talk our way in.
The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism.
It's impossible for an editor to know every source for every story.
I actually wanted to publish [ interview with Donald Trump about Citizen Kane] in the New York Times, but the circumstances under which I did that movie made me vulnerable to a lawsuit and at this point in my career, I don't want to go there. But it's amazing.
With news, especially investigative pieces, you've got to be really smart and really lucky to be timely and to not get beaten by the big guys. You can't go head-to-head with the networks.
And it's a necessity [for journalists] to pretend to be competent on every subject, some of which they really do not understand. They are under that necessity, I regret; I'm sorry for them. But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.
It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.
What I learned is that there are indeed some stories that are too true to tell, too revealing for the general population to metabolize. And too challenging to your reporter colleagues, whose turf or toes you might have tread upon.
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.
One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.
One of sports journalism's great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.
I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.
It's harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed, you know, with limited resources is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me?
Is it shocking that it's very difficult for a news organization to do news in America now? It's not shocking because we're a culture that doesn't want news. We want entertainment. We want info-tainment. That's why CNN is having problems.
I do think that there are gray lines of morality in a newsroom, when it comes to some stories. The best-intentioned journalist still has a difficult mission, to try to boil down people.
In the most polarized and passionate, the most angry and aggressive news environment in recent memory, my job as a journalist requires me - often - to push back in live interviews against comments that are unfair, untrue, or leave me thinking, 'Is this seriously happening right now?'
I know from experience it's very hard to get access to a prison to take pictures.
People love to talk about the things that are important to them, but oftentimes as a journalist, if you're entering a world that's pretty esoteric and difficult to penetrate and has many barriers to outsiders, then the people inside that world just don't have the same language as you do.
It (broadcast journalism) is a brutal arena where the knives are sharp and the toughest Kevlar vest in the world will not protect you forever.
A police reporter walks into the worst moment in someone's life on every single story that he covers. It's not like being a sports reporter. That's a great job and all that and takes certain skills. But, you know, they're glad to see you when you show up to cover the football game. Nobody is ever glad to see a police reporter when he shows up.
I'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.
I've been a performer in the public eye for many years now and it's much darker. It feels so worse now. It feels heavy; it's difficult to deal with. The hatred is unbelievable, but I actually feel a lot more compassion for the journalists and people who aren't used to that. At least on some level, it's been a part of my world for a long time, so I can handle it. I'm not going to say that I'm used to it, because I'm not. I think it's really difficult for people who are just doing journalism and receiving death threats on a very consistent basis.
