Quotes About Reporting

“What I want people to realize is that "transitioning" is not the end of the journey. Yes, it's an integral part of revealing who we are to ourselves and the world, but there's much life afterward. These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos.”

— Janet Mock

“Just as there are legal guidelines concerning the police use of provocateurs, there must be limits to how far the media can go in setting up a misleading situation ... I, for one, can simply not accept that telling a lie is an acceptable way of reporting the truth ... Every poll of public opinion shows that there is a suspicion among the general public that the media do not tell the whole truth, or that they distort things, or that they exaggerate, or that they are biased.”

— Peter Robinson (australian)

“Like so many others of my tenure and temperament-stubborn ancients, I suppose-web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn't write stories anymore; I 'produced content.”

— Chris Rose

“Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.”

— Tom Rachman

“Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate”

— Patricia Cornwell

“And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide,”

— Paul Monette

“He was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about "Basel" more than anything
as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.”

— Philip Roth

“The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst ... said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley's money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way of getting to the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor's picture of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.”

— Philip K. Dick

“The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“I think people in Botswana are pleased that my books paint a positive picture of their lives and portray the country as being very special. They've made a great success of their country, and the people are fed up with the constant reporting of only the problems and poverty of the continent. They welcome something which puts the positive side.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“On scores of sites, users can upload illegal files of my books. As per 1998's toothless Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I bear the burden of discovering and reporting each theft.”

— Peter Lerangis

“In hindsight, Watergate was a curse as well as a blessing for American journalism. The courageous reporting of the 'Post' and the 'New York Times' - coupled with the favourable Supreme Court rulings on publication of the Pentagon Papers - were landmarks for the interpretation of First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press.”

— Lionel Barber

“I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.”

— Sebastian Junger

“I have quite a bit of experience reporting on corporate behavior, both doing it with independent operations in early in my career, in the underground press, to magazines like 'Rolling Stone,' to regional newspapers and television, and television news programs, to papers like the 'New York Times' and public television.”

— Lowell Bergman

“I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.”

— Lorraine Adams

“I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest ... Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately ...”

— Ken Kesey

“TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.”

— Tina Brown

“Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.”

— Tom Rachman

“The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.”

— Josh Fox

“In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything.”

— John Pomfret

“The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.”

— Dick Morris

“There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.”

— Jonathan Galassi

“The night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's 'The Making of the President,' the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting.”

— Michael Hastings

“The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.”

— Barton Gellman

“I'm in the reporting part of journalism.”

— Jim Lehrer

“NOVEL, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes - some of which have a large sale.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“And then I saw it.
The mirror fogged over as I squinted at my reflection, and I scrubbed it with the heel of my palm. My skin squeaked against the glass, I turned my head to the side. I peered at my reflection from the corner of my eye.
Toothmarks.
Jesus.
"You left a bite mark on my neck!"
Jacob opened the shower curtain just far enough to look out at me. He knuckled water out of his eyes and grinned at me. "Good thing you don't have to woke tomorrow."
"You shit."
He grinned wider and whisked the curtain shut.
Way to go. I'd look real slick reporting for duty at the Fifth Precinct covered in hickeys like a slutty teenaged girl. Damn it. I rubbed at the toothmarks, which raised a pinkish blotch around them. "It better be gone by Thursday," I said. I'm sure Jacob felt very chastised. Not.”

— Jordan Castillo Price

“I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called "the significant trifle" - the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.”

— I.F. Stone

“It is important to have a reliable and substantive publication such as World Screen available as a source for information. The magazine's reporting is always on the cutting edge of the global television business.”

— Jeffrey Bewkes

“Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.”

— Rodney A. Smolla

“There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.”

— Sarah Stillman

“I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.”

— Sarah Stillman

“For some reason that only a sociologist might be able to accurately explain, the Brazilian Press was extremely unkind to me, reporting only selective derogatory untruthful rumors (some of which are still around), harsh criticism, and unwarranted sarcasm. I was very hurt by this. It was such great disappointment ... When I came back from Brazil at that time, I made a promise to myself that I would never, ever again sing in Brazil. So far [as of 2002], I have kept this promise, having declined each and every invitation or proposals to perform in Brazil. Once was enough!”

— Astrud Gilberto

“Each day is a surprise - and each day I learn something wonderful and new. Both in writing thrillers and in reporting the news, I work to change the world a little bit. I want readers - and viewers - to be surprised and captivated and even inspired.”

— Hank Phillippi Ryan

“Some blogs have become the best check on monopoly mainstream journalism, and they provide a surprisingly frequent source of initiative reporting.”

— Harold Evans

“Rawhide Down is full of spectacular, original reporting.”

— Bob Woodward

“I think because I came into journalism by way of the Black Panther Party - and not J-school or a corporate bourgeois institution - I tried to do news, writing and reporting that had social, political and racial content and context.”

— Mumia Abu-Jamal

“Credible reporting indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process ...”

— Tom Ridge

“So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.”

— Tony Hoagland

“What I remember most from reporting both the stories are the women. Going into the first piece, I didn't have a super fixed idea about abortion. I'd helped a high school friend get to a doctor once. I always assumed that what a woman did was up to her. But I could also see the pro-life point of view that human life should be sacred in whatever gestational form.”

— John H Richardson

“Covering Africa is 80 percent logistics and 20 percent reporting.”

— Johnny Borrell

“English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.”

— Mark Twain

“Even the new feminist research on sex-role socialization and sex differences has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of creating a new set of stereotypes about what women feel and how women behave. Despite the large amount of overlap between the sexes in most research, the tendency to label and polarize and thus to exaggerate differences remains in much reporting of data, which may, for example, report the mean scores of male and female populations but not the degree of overlap.”

— Rosabeth Moss Kanter

“Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism ...”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“If I am traitor, who did I betray? I gave all my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.”

— Edward Snowden

“The truth is the committed left press in America is not longer interest in reporting the news. Anything that hinders a favorable view of the far left will be ignored; anything that advances liberal causes will be celebrated. News reporting today is largely about ideology and shaping the culture, not about informing the public.”

— Bill O'Reilly

“Manage by exception.Only require reporting when there is a deviation from the plan.”

— Brian Tracy

“They've gotta stop reporting wind chill. That's nonsense. It really is. I don't know where they came up with it, why they came up with it, but it's a lie. They come on, "Well, it's 27 degrees today, but with the wind chill, it's minus 3." ... Well, then it's minus 3, asshole! I don't need to know what the weather was like if the conditions were perfect!”

— Lewis Black

“Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination.”

— William O. Douglas

“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.”

— Condoleezza Rice