We don't print the truth. We don't pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It's up to the public to decide what's the truth.
The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.
This was a report from a single source. It was an established and reliable line of reporting. It was quoted from a senior Iraqi military officer in a position to know this information.
The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.
If information is true, if it can be verified, and if it's really important, the newspaper needs to be willing to take the risk associated with using unidentified sources.
If a journalist comes to you with a great story, one of the first questions you ask is how did you get it. How you got it is relevant to judging its accuracy and preparing yourself for any legal challenge.
Believe half of what you see and only some of what you hear, unless you hear it from me.
I don't trust news sources, and neither should other people. They should use them in the same way that they use medical opinions and get more than one on the important issues. Trust is the most precious thing you could possibly give to another person. But to institutions? Publications?
You find actually over the years that you get attributed with a lot of things you didn't do and you don't get reported on a lot of things you did do and I must say, when I read some of these things I wonder where the journalists get them from. They generally speak to somebody who's spoken to somebody who was down the back of a pub who heard the barman say, and gradually finds its way into magazines or articles but no, that's not the case.
The entire report [on Russians hackers attacks] is based on unnamed sources who are perhaps doing something they shouldn't be doing by speaking to reporters or someone talking out of line about something that is absolutely not true.
Quite frankly, I'm a member of the investigative committee, one of the senior members of the panel. I don't take our investigative facts and information from a magazine or some article.
The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.
I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.
Only one thing is worse [for a CIA Agent] than having no sources, and that is to be seduced by sources telling lies.
Don't believe a thing unless you hear from me directly because there's a lot of bad info going on out there.
Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
We don't know for a fact that Donald Trump did. We only think we know because it's been reported by how many unconfirmed, anonymous sources? Two scoops of ice cream, Trump's so selfish, guests only get one. The contrast is stark. Trump on this trip and the Trump in Washington. My contention is that Trump is Trump. What's different is the reporting.
You can't believe everything that's written or reported in the media.
You shouldn't presume that all quotes that are in a magazine or a newspaper are accurate.
It's the nature of journalism to need to be close to your subjects. And either you're able to be tough on them, which a lot of us are, or you get in bed with them, and some people do.
Just shouting about 'facts' will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.
Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.
People think that if they read something in the newspaper or see it on TV, it has to be true.
