Journalistic Integrity Quotes

The job of the reporters in Vietnam was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America. To the ambassadors and generals, on the other hand, it was crucial that the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.

One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.

It's CNN who really should hold Trump accountable. And because they are trading the short-term fix of increased ratings by focusing on Trump drama - and I'm not saying they shouldn't cover the Russian investigations, of course they should - but the blanket coverage, it's not about news values. It is about ratings. And it comes at a tremendous cost because Trump supporters are fully defended against this. As far as they're concerned, this is a vast conspiracy, it's fake news, it doesn't impact their daily lives, it makes them see Trump as a victim, which he wants to be seen as.

Relationships with the media are really important. The media has a more important voice today than it has ever had. We don't advertise. We only have one marketing vehicle, which is editorial, and our ability to get our message out and communicate it effectively.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.

Even though the press at times made me completely crazy as they followed me around the hall, and asked tough questions over and over again - now believe me, every politician feels this way - it is a necessary part of our life, and we must have a press that isn't cowed and won't be afraid of ratings if they get put to the back of the room at a press conference.

Trump doesn't have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies, big foreign money, are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

The press is, almost without exception, corrupt.

We've seen the bankruptcy of many newspapers. We've seen a further erosion of the line between news and entertainment. But I do believe that there is reason to hope that over time we will see the higher-quality journalism rise to the surface.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

Is journalism a profession that serves the public by maintaining high standards, or is it a social construct that should be redesigned to directly serve certain social goods? Some argue that all journalism involves bias, either hidden or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objectivity and fairness are ultimately unreachable. It is another to cease grasping for them. That would be a world of purely private truths, in which the boldest liars and demagogues would thrive.

I think the media are so hypocritical a lot of the time in the way they chastise something just so that they can print it again.

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.

I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced.

The judgment means a lot. As a journalist being accused of invading someone's privacy, there is always a risk that it will stick to your name.

You don't just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at 'SNL' is writing to go after someone.

I think as journalists, we have to keep our distance from power.