Top 140 Reporters Quotes

Bloggers are not reporters.

Reporters do decide what is news, but they don’t invent it, even if they sometimes become part of the story by risking their lives in a danger zone, as in the case of ABC’s Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.

Sometimes in the moment when I’m doing a press conference, one of my favorite things is to watch reporters.

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.

As I got older, I got comfortable with revealing myself. In the past, I’ve feared a lot of things. I thought people just hated me, maybe because I was criticized a lot since I was young. Even when facing reporters like this, I just came to the conclusion, ‘They will hate me.’

Never look for the story in the ‘lede.’ Reporters are required to put what’s happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.

I always saw the best reporters as ones you hardly ever saw other than when they were back in the newsroom, writing their stories.

People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.

I’m delighted to carry on in the tradition of the great reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, and Geraldo Rivera to probe vitally important issues of the day, starting with whether I’m Hispanic or Latino.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That’s not a record to be proud of.

There has always been tension between reporters and the administration, particularly when it comes to war in the modern era. You can go to Kennedy or Johnson and see that they weren’t happy with David Halberstam or Morley Safer.

The experience I don’t want to see repeated occurred in ‘Bush v. Gore.’ The Court divided five to four. There were four separate dissents, and that confused the press. In fact, some of the reporters announced that the decision was seven-two. There was no time to get together.

The Times’ new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which I think is a really good thing.

Every exchange between reporters and officials is important – that’s why every State press briefing is put into the archives.

I will say that the idea of a woman being deceptive came from that original discussion with critics and reporters about if woman could do that kind of thing. Evelyn, herself, grew out of the discussions about how capable women are of deceit and lying and manipulation.

In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren’t just covering a story, they’re a part of it – influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates – and despite what they tell themselves, it’s impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively.

Yesterday, the Pentagon warned U.S. reporters that they should get out of Baghdad as soon as possible because the U.S. could attack at any time. Then the Pentagon added, ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Geraldo.’

I know what people say about Fox and about what they say is a tilt to the right. Meanwhile, the reporters I know, like Bret Baier, are right down the middle and are tough on everybody.

President Obama has regularly granted special access to reporters who give him preferential coverage.

Trump’s inability to face the truth of his loss to Biden might explain why he has barely faced reporters at all in the closing weeks of his presidency. Even more remarkably, he rarely ever called into his favorite TV shows.

Reporters aren’t actually people!

All our reporters and editors now work seamlessly in print and online. This integration has transformed the way we work. I believe this is vital to the success and growth of newspapers.

I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits.

A lot of players act one way with teammates, one way with reporters, another way for fans, another for their friends. I’m just me all the time. I’m normal. Everyone else in the NFL is weird.

There are many great outlets that we love and respect, but ‘The North Star’ really is going to be a hard news outlet with reporters and journalists, White House correspondents. I think we’ll be hard news with some cultural commentary.

People thought I was cocky because I didn’t talk much. When I first turned pro, reporters asked me who was going to win. I’d say, ‘I am’ because it was the easier than giving some long, drawn-out answer.

Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.

When you speak of the press, of course, you have to speak of different segments of the press. Reporters, straight reporters, wire services, you stick to the facts; you don’t create the story, per se. You cover what is happening.

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.

There should be no doubt about my commitment to responding to questions from reporters in the same language that the question is asked.

I’ve seen Jordanian television lead its newscast with three identical, consecutive scenes, all on the same royal couch. It’s hilarious, and most Western reporters cackle sarcastically when they first see it. I certainly did.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there’s more news that’s falling into books.

Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.

Here in New York, we’re media obsessed. Writers write about writers who write about writers and reporters and freelancers, and it’s just a festival of information. We’re all analyzing and examining and predicting, and I can’t imagine that it’s like that everywhere else.

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn’t be any press without the censorship.

Trump did not reverse a policy that allows the mentally ill to purchase firearms as reporters, media pundits and anti-Second Amendment activists have recklessly claimed. Instead, he’s given millions of individuals their constitutional rights back.

I used to have trust with reporters. Give them scoops. Those were the old days. It’s very strange, when you give a story and it doesn’t come out the right way.

It’s a weird scene. You win a few baseball games and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by reporters and TV men with cameras asking you about Vietnam and race relations.

Wherever Mantle went in the great metropolis – Danny’s Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the ’21’ Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor’s – his preferred drink was waiting when he walked through the door. Reporters waited at his locker for monosyllabic bons mots. Boys clustered by the players’ gate, hoping to touch him.

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

Network reporters dont go to the field anymore. The local news has been gutted.

The kind of in-depth investigative journalism we practice at ‘Frontline’ is thoughtful, rigorous, and time-intensive. It requires us to constantly seek untold stories and to give our producers and reporters the time and resources to dig into them deeply.

I don’t believe reporters are supposed to be the story. That’s how I was trained.

The post-war American newsroom resembled a vast factory churning out multiple editions through the night. Reporters spent days, sometimes weeks, on a single story.

The reason I wrote ‘Hit List’ is the 50 mysterious deaths of witnesses to the JFK assassination. We’re talking about CIA agents, FBI agents, reporters, people who had foreknowledge, or people who spoke too much afterward.

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.

My guess is more reporters probably vote Democrat than Republican – just because I think reporters are smart.

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.

Unfortunately, the reporters ask the same questions over and over again. When reporters keep asking the same questions, they’ve got to recognize I may hear these questions 20 to 30 times in a matter of days. It gets to the point where I think, ‘Read the other interviews!’

I used to think that the image of the press in the 1940s – a bunch of guys in hats screaming on the courthouse steps – was all baloney. I used to say, ‘I know reporters. We’re not like that.’ But we are.

There are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I’d put Dexter Filkins. He’s an extraordinary man in terms of his nerve and ability to get into dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He’s bringing back real human stories. I admire that.

Reporters now are better educated than the crowd I knew when I broke in. We still had guys shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, so the news business still had badly paid people who loved it for the life, because every day was different.

As reporters set aside their traditional role as fact seekers and veer into advocacy, they find themselves on a slippery journalistic slope.

Trump flourishes the more the White House press corps is riddled with political activists posing as journalists. But the country might fare better with more informed questions from reporters able to think through issues less politically.

In 1977, when I became Speaker, I started meeting with TV reporters each morning when I arrived at work. Later in the morning, I would hold a news conference before the House opened. I always told the truth and almost never answered with ‘no comment.’

If you’re curious how Lance Armstrong got away with cheating for 15 years or why Manti Te’o’s fake girlfriend went unnoticed for five months, it’s because sports reporters are really just starstruck fans, not hardcore journalists.

In the ’50s and ’60s, journalism wasn’t a profession. It wasn’t something you went to college for – it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what’s supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.

Reporters no longer ask for verification, thus they print charges no matter how outlandish they may seem, and once having done that, when the truth comes out, it’s buried in the back page or never makes it on the air at all.

Political reporters and political professionals rushed to judgment against Romney because we crave clear, unambiguous story lines.

There aren’t enough good journalists. There are too many who really weren’t groomed to be reporters and, as a result, some of the reporting is shallow.

Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery.

That first week, I also went to Washington. That was really tough. I sympathize with those Washington figures who have to face 40 Times Washington bureau reporters. They ask hard questions and they’re relentless. And they were quite suspicious and quite dubious about me.

Usually I go to bed around midnight and wake up around 6, unless I have to do TV, in which case I get up at 5. I grab my phone, check my email, check Twitter. I have push alerts for the president and some other reporters.

In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs.

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father’s hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.

I was famous in a way that was kind of terrifying. I had no protection. When reporters showed up at my house, there wasn’t even a sidewalk. They were literally parked on my front lawn.

I think a lot of the media and reporters, they let what I get into and my outside life interfere with my boxing life, and they let that cross, and that should never cross.

In the 1970s, ‘The Boys on the Bus’ exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus – and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.

A lot of celebrities promote their films to entertainment reporters and feel like they need to entertain them.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

In the best of all possible worlds, everybody would be honorable, but that’s not the way the world works. Reputations for reporters are made by discovering things underneath that rock.

Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day – race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.

The studio rented a house for my wife in Los Angeles under a phony name to keep reporters away. Whenever I wanted to visit her and my children, I would have to sneak in the back door after dark.

There is no debate that social media is a great tool for networking with others in our industry. It can lead to friendships, support, and serendipitous connections with reviewers, agents, reporters, or editors.

I don’t think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.

What’s so crazy is when you give interviews to reporters that don’t really care too much for you, basically what they’re going to do is write what they want to write and discredit you. They’re going to write and say what they want to say, no matter what you tell them.

There is evidence Rand Paul has a real problem with women reporters.

There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state.’ Reporters continue to promote this fallacy and scare Christians out of standing up for their beliefs.

Reporters often forget that athletes are human beings.

Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I’m like and I don’t really know myself, so how can I tell them?

I scarcely talk to reporters at all.

As I watched on TV the nest of reporters and groupies surround Palin at the Iowa State Fair, I couldn’t help but sit back and wonder if she’s become the ultimate party crasher for the Republican Party.

I have a platform, and I can help. I can be in spaces that reporters will never be in because I’m a protester.

I’m unique for a suspense author in that I don’t have a specialty background. A lot of suspense writers used to be lawyers or crime beat reporters. I didn’t even know a cop when I started out. I finally figured out that I could visit prisons – I just had to be willing to make the phone calls.

Reporters have to use their imagination, really put themselves in the shoes of the person they want to interview.

Our embedded reporters during the war agreed to guidelines established by the military.

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous – from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.

When my father, Ronald Reagan, was running for president in 1980, my mother, Nancy, traveled with him on the campaign trail, but she did not give speeches or even many interviews. She never stood in front of a group of reporters and expounded on her views and opinions.

There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton’s many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.

I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.

We are the recorders and reporters of facts – not the judges of the behaviors we describe.

We have the wrong people chasing Osama bin Laden. It ought to be athletic directors and reporters. They’ll find you.

Seeking of the truth should be not only part of the Justice Department and part of our judicial system, but also should be… a goal of reporters today.

I have a little secret thing I do – maybe not secret because I’m telling all of you. But when when reporters are getting really loud, or they’re starting to ask crazy questions, I just slow down my pace, and I talk very quietly, and I treat them like I’m an orderly sometimes in an insane asylum.

Here’s a little newsflash for those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve this great country.

It’s about being right and trying to get the facts and get the story right, and inform, you know, the readership or the viewership. And there are some reporters that do that.

Why do you think the fans like us – why they prefer our street raps over all that phony stuff out there? Because we’re telling the real story of what it’s like living in places like Compton. We’re giving them reality. We’re like reporters. We give them the truth.

Pro-Israel media ‘watchdog’ groups and other activists in Canada, the United States and the U.K. are quick to attack, characterizing reporters whose coverage they don’t like as Israel-haters or anti-Semites, urging their readers to mount letter-writing campaigns.

Television reporters aren’t really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that’s really all they are.

We were the underground reporters.

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.

Just because reporters say something over and over and over again doesn’t start to make it true.

These newspaper reporters… ever since Sullivan versus New York Times… have got a license to lie.

Even the most liberal reporters I know have a sense of drive and curiosity about what the Clintons are hiding, because they know it’s always something.

I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences.

I’ve learned that the best political reporters never make predictions!

I’m trying to get on the yoga/pilates train, but I can’t seem to sit still. I imagine a lot of reporters would say the same.

My grandfather used to own a production company called Everlasting Pictures. I grew up with a lot of artistas and reporters and I’d always be starstruck.

After directing broadcast media coverage for seven House committees, I know the signs of a sideshow – and delivering demand letters to reporters before they go to the person being asked to produce documents is one of the chief signs.

I totally alienated some reporters as I retreated.

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I’ve covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that’s what this book started out to be.

The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we’ve got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.

What happens also is that a lot of those people and reporters who vote for Hall of Famers, some of the people who were around when Ray Guy was around, are deceased. And some of the reporters don’t remember Ray Guy. He should have been in the Hall of Fame 15 years ago.

At last, someone came to tell me I’d been selected as commissioner, which gave rise to the line that I took the job with clean hands. I was then taken downstairs to a press conference, and the reporters were as surprised as I was.

The case against Susan Rice has been building for years with little fanfare. Not surprising, the mainstream media reporters based at the U.N. have either ignored her mistakes or strategically covered them up.

One of sports journalism’s great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.

We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day – go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists’ job in a free society.

When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the President and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.

We were just expressing stuff that happens in the ghetto, just being like reporters.

The best crime reporters don’t mind charging in – but they also know how to do it as decent human beings.

I have been active as a writer and journalist for nearly forty years. But the number of great reporters I have run across in that time would make, as they say, a slim book. Without question, the top man on my list would be Tommy Thompson.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can’t go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

Twitter’s had a little fun with me because I say, ‘I’m going to circle back. I’m going to circle back.’ Now, I will say, and my very hardworking team can confirm, I’m obsessed with circling back with reporters, and not just saying it, but after the briefing getting back to them.

When I say I don’t get involved in politics, I merely mean that I don’t talk to reporters about it.

Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn’t think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.

Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of ‘Embedded’: go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening.

If you’re following candidates in a campaign, you get on their plane, and what they’re generally doing is they’re dividing the cost of that charter flight by the number of reporters they’re carrying aboard. In effect, the press is buying them that campaign flight.

Like all young reporters – brilliant or hopelessly incompetent – I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits – the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you’re working, and I find that a real violation.

One of the great pressures we’re facing in journalism now is it’s a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.

I won’t say that the papers misquote me, but I sometimes wonder where Christianity would be today if some of those reporters had been Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

‘Recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists… meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’

The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters’ disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.

One of the local reporters assured me Garrison would put in an appearance for the cross-examination, but as the courtroom settled down and the rear doors were closed, there was no sign of him.

Lexicographers are language reporters.

When we are out there selling a new picture, when did it become part of the deal that you have to sell the family? To use the juicy part of your life to get attention? I’m not blaming the reporters. It’s the system.

At the end of the day, there is still one function of journalism that cannot be computerized, and that is reporters. You’re always going to need reporters.

Those media reporters who know me well and my friends know what my real personality is. Those who read newspapers and watch TV don’t know what my real personality is.