Journalistic Scrutiny Quotes

Sometimes, when you look at an adviser's failings or perceived failings, I think the tough question you have to ask as a journalist is, 'What does this say about the president?'

All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf.

Where there's smoke around a conservative, there are journalists furiously rubbing two sticks together.

The Factor concept is very simple: Watch all of those in power, including and especially the media, so they don't injure or exploit the folks, everyday Americans. Never before in the United States had a television news guy dared to criticize other journalists on a regular basis. The late Peter Jennings, a friend, told me I was crazy to do it. "These people will not allow anyone to scrutinize them," he said. "They will come after you with a vengeance." And so they have.

There is an institutional cynicism that causes reporters to question everything the President says, and the motives of everything the President and his Administration try to accomplish.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News that's quite outrageous.

A person does feel sheepish picking on journalists, a class already so richly despised that if a planeload of them crashed in flames, most people would smile from pure reflex.

When I was twelve or thirteen, if you liked something that was outside of your friend group genre, you had to rationalize and explain it in some way. It's totally irrelevant, I think, now. I don't think anybody cares. Not young people, at least. Maybe journalists.

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

Actually, it doesn't matter to the papers why you left Glasgow. They never look at the roots of the problems you had, and you simply end up being painted as un-nationalistic.

My relationship with the journalists who covered the campaign was complicated. I often hid from the critical eye of their cameras and their omnipresent digital recorders, wary of the critique implicit in every captured moment. But I also grew to respect and understand their passion for their work, their love for the journey we were sharing.

You can count my interviews this season on one hand, so maybe when I do speak, people want to turn it into something sensational.

When Nancy Reagan was newly the first lady of California, Joan Didion came and had an hour-long interview. She thought it went great, and then Joan Didion just eviscerated her in the most - possibly not inaccurate - but in the most devastating way.