Reporting Bias Quotes

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 think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

In Washington, excessive cynicism is the most prevalent form of naivete. I just wish reporters were as skeptical about bad news as they are about good news.

The news is not gender-neutral, but it's usually reported as though it's gender-neutral.

Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.

I think about the question of perspective in reporting all the time, and since I spent 20 years of my career in Washington as both a reporter and an editor I'm keenly aware that a newspaper should not be dominated by stories in which the only voices and perspective come from those in power.

... the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.

There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.

I do think people have suggested that it would be a good thing if the reporting were accurate on Al-Jazeera and if it were not slanted in ways that appear to be at times just purely inaccurate.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

I think the term 'fair reporting' is overused when it comes to journalism. I think saying they want to report evenly is more accurate.

Do I believe that their coverage is slanted and biased? Yes. I've seen it with my own eyes. A majority of reporters are liberal.

There is a liberal bias. It's demonstrable. You look at some statistics. About 85 percent of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. There is a, particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

I had to learn early on that where conservatives are concerned, the truth about them is the last thing anybody wants to report. It's the lies and distortions, the mischaracterizations, the character assassinations, that people want to report.

A committee appointed by the President of a company will report what the President wishes to hear. Would they dare report otherwise?.

For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.

The center-right alternative media has been playing a passable prevent defense, constantly saying 'That's not right' for consistently biased reporting.

I know you are reporters and I know this is your job, but, you know, take your note pads, take your pencils down, take your grunt-o-meters down, the fashion police, put everything away and just watch the match, you know, from just the fans' perspective. I seriously think that the quality of the match today was great.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to.

If you talk about an issue, what comes back is a description of what you're wearing. Reporters only want to know how tall you are and if your teeth are capped.

I don't think we're getting the empathy, and identifying with the situations that many African Americans experience. That's the problem with how the story is being reported.