Objectivity in Journalism Quotes

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.

The media is done, they don't do journalism anymore, it's activism, nothing more, right?

I think in politics, in Congress, you often do things that are Republican, or you do things because you're a Democrat. Sometimes that's good, obviously, and sometimes that's obviously bad. But in the news business, there's no such thing as Republican or Democratic news. News is news.

In most news, if you hear a conservative point of view, that's called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that's bias.

What I say is that there are not half a dozen papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish what they know to be false. But if I thought I had done no better than that, I would be ashamed to own a paper. You have to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.

I've been in journalism my entire adult life and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt.

I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.

If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn't think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.

If they're going to write a story they're going to write the story whether it's true or not.

All in all, I just don't trust journalists - and I don't think it's a good practice for me to trust journalists.

In my experience with print journalists, the distinction between remarks being uttered on- or off-the-record is held sacrosanct, but the distinction between truth and falsity sometimes isn't.

Facing fewer subscriptions, ratings drops, et al., media is catching on: people don't want endless editorializing. They want the facts, Jack. If you're going to be op/ed, at least be up front about it.

Protestations of impartiality I shall make none. Theyare always useless and are besides perfect nonsense, when used bya news-monger.

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.

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.

I don't trust a lot of journalists.

You don't tell us how to stage the news and we don't tell you how to cover it.

The tradition and style of the 'New York Times' make it very difficult to have objective coverage of China. If we could purchase it, its tone might turn around.

I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about - and I think there are some writers who do that - but that hasn't happened to me. I do think it's dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.

CNN International, Al-Jazeera and BBC are the same in how they report mostly that America is wrong and bad.