Reporting Style Quotes

I think of myself as a reporter. I just rhyme my reports and give them a beat.

For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.

Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.

In a very straightforward way, I am a terrible reporter. I'm not someone who can go into a story and not get involved.

Twenty-four hour news delivers people who stand and talk to camera rather than deliver reported packages with their own camera crew where it's happening.

You break the story first, and then you go into the specifics.

I've never used the word 'I' in a piece in my 18 years in journalism.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.

For me, journalism has been more a matter of projecting a particular approach to covering policies, to covering issues. It was a continuation of what I tried to do in government.

I think once you start as an announcer, you have to decide what kind of approach you're going to have. I decided very early that I was going to be a reporter, that I would not cheer for the team. I don't denigrate people who do it. It's fine. I think you just have to fit whatever kind of personality you have, and I think my nature was to be more down the middle and that's the way I conducted the broadcasts.

I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.

In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, 'She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.' I never understood that argument at all. I just didn't agree with the premise.

I don't see the value of boringly reporting the cold facts.

I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

Geoffrey's personal style was very different from mine. He has a lovely speaking voice, a quiet speaking voice. But at Cabinet we always reported on foreign affairs - we always had this quiet voice. It was so quiet sometimes I had to say 'speak up'. And he gave it in a way which wasn't exactly scintillating. And you know, foreign affairs are interesting. They affect everything that happened to our own way of life, and they are exciting. And so we just diverged.

The reporting I did was mostly entertainment or lifestyle. I took a very different approach than most reporters. I approached it more casually than you would think a reporter would. Now I'm a morning radio personality, and radio is really casual.

Reporters tend to launch on what seems to be the clearest, most stark aspects of someone's life in terms of an interview.

I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.

I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.