Best Reporters Quotes

I’m not a politician. I’m not a policy wonk. I was a political reporter, but that’s not really what turns me on. What turns me on is how people perceive the issue and how people see people like me.

A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

As long as American democracy remains healthy, there will be reporters willing to pursue the truth, even if that means incurring the wrath of the most powerful person in the world.

I always get a little uppity when I hear the phrase ‘TV actor.’ It’s like saying you’re a magazine reporter. I was in the theater for ten years before I ever had a TV audition.

After nine or 10 years of being interviewed, you start wanting to team up with the reporter and get the job done.

Mr. Weasley was unavailable for comment, although his wife told reporters to clear off or she’d set the family ghoul on them.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings.

Do you know what White House correspondents call actors who pose as reporters? Anchors.

I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period.

I’ve been an investigative reporter for a long time, and almost always, the government says that [‘you can’t publish that because of the national security risk’] when you write a story. And then they can never back it up. They say that about everything. And it’s like the boy who cried wolf. It’s getting old.

No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

When the Lakota leader Sitting Bull was asked by a white reporter why his people loved and respected him, Sitting Bull replied by asking if it was not true that among white people a man is respected because he has many horses, many houses? When the reporter replied that was indeed true, Sitting Bull then said that his people respected him because he kept nothing for himself.

I’ve reported in countries where leaders not only complain about a critical press, but also try to shut it down, throwing reporters in prison or worse. I’ve seen my colleagues risk their lives and, with increasing frequency, lose their lives in their pursuit of the truth. We are not about to stop doing our jobs because yet another president is unhappy with what he reads or hears or sees on TV news. There is a reason the founders put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution.

My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

In Chicago some anti-Mitt Romney protesters told reporters they’re being paid to protest. They said they’re being paid by Democrats to stand outside and chant anti-Romney slogans. Well, who says President Obama isn’t creating any new jobs?

The legions of reporters who cover politics don’t want to quit the clash and thunder of electoral combat for the dry duty of analyzing the federal budget. As a consequence, we have created the perpetual presidential campaign.

The owner of a local cannabis café told reporters George Clooney was no stranger there.

What I hear about the book does not sound like the Scott McClellan I knew for two years. I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I knew Scott better than any other White House correspondent or Washington reporter.

I think that we need to be careful, as reporters and as journalists, not to take the bait and not to get into an endless discussion about issues that are trivial.

There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.

The plain truth is that the reporter’s trade is for young men. Your feet, which do the legwork, are nine times more important than your head, which fits the facts into a coherent pattern.

I’ve always believed that you should stick as closely to the science as possible. And my biggest advice to reporters has been, if you’re doing a climate story, talk to climate scientists. The best climate stories are done by the people who talk to climate scientists.

I didn’t run from the situation. I didn’t hide the ordeal from the reporters like the sissy baseball players. I fought it head-on… We dealt with it. It’s over. And now we’re moving on.

My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn’t relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.

The Donald Trump I knew as a young reporter in New York was nothing if not media friendly. And for most of the past Republican primary, he was the most accessible major candidate. No one else was close.

When my TV show, ‘Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,’ assigned me to be a ‘Sports Illustrated’ reporter for a weekend, I didn’t realize I’d have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull.

If I have lived by any maxim as a reporter, it was that every person is an expert on the circumstances of his life.

It was always hard work to push through a crowed of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils. You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens…The strength comes from some mysterious place-and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too.

The world comes second hand – fifth hand – to us and the illusion that it is fresh because it is shown as a picture of an actual place or is given as a ‘true account’ by some reporter who claims to have been ‘there’ divides man into incalculable parts without any true center.

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

It’s easier to make a reporter into an economist than an economist into a reporter.

Truth is the hardest substance in the world to pin down. But the one certainty is the awesome penalty exacted sooner or later from a society whose reporters stop trying.

A good reporter remains a skeptic all his life.