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.
