Top 202 Reporter Quotes

I have been a print reporter my whole career. It’s all I ever wanted to be. I specialize in political profiles. I have probably profiled hundreds of people over the years, people in very powerful positions. People don’t always like what I write, but most people still talk to me.

But when my mother ran for City Council, that was the moment when I knew I wanted to be a political reporter. Some reporters asked her about being married to my father – they have an interracial relationship – as if that was somehow a negative thing.

During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic: anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The ‘Guardian’ stood against it and ran a campaign for peace while the brilliant ‘Guardian’ reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British.

I started as a print reporter.

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, ‘Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.’

The world reacts very strangely to people they see on TV, and I can begin to understand how anchor monsters are made. If you’re not careful, you can become used to being treated as though you’re special and begin to expect it. For a reporter, that’s the kiss of death.

I think of myself as a reporter. I just rhyme my reports and give them a beat.

If you’ve read my New York Times bestseller ‘Stonewalled’, you know that I’m a fan of an intellectual exercise I call the Substitution Game. It involves comparing how the press treats similar events or people depending on how the reporter or news organization feels about the issue or the newsmaker.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college… I did other things.

It’s absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I’m not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night.

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people’s favorite team.

If someone asks about sexual reassignment surgery, you are supposed to say, ‘Why are we talking about that?’ But I am a post-op transsexual. And I am a reporter. If you can explain and talk about it, you demystify it. And if you demystify it, it’s not an issue.

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.

No reporter is flying around in borrowed twin-engine airplanes.

Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called ‘Reporter’ about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.

My degree was in education, but the idea of being a teacher lost out to being a reporter. I worked at a newspaper for a while, then went to New York and worked in PR at RCA and NBC, and at ‘The United States Steel Hour,’ a drama series.

I have gone on the air and announced my telephone number at the Washington Post. I go into the night, talking to people, looking for things. The great dreaded thing every reporter lives with is what you don’t know. The source you didn’t go to. The phone call you didn’t return.

Trade shows such as the wire tappers’ ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers’ ball – including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military – were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.

I don’t think a reporter should give advice or make predictions.

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people’s words – I just didn’t get the appeal of that.

During the whole time we were covering the Bulls, I would get blasted by every other sports reporter who thought I had unfair access. I don’t think it was unfair. It was just fortunate for NBC.

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren’t so different.

I don’t like to put labels on anyone. I’m a reporter. I’d rather observe and describe and question.

I used to be a print reporter.

Going from reporter to anchor is like going from wide receiver to quarterback. As anchor, you’re running the plays and having the feel of the show – and knowing when to be more upbeat or slow down.

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can’t prove, which means you can’t put them in the newspaper. But they’re good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.

I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening… A reporter who doesn’t quickly tell readers what they most want to know – the score – won’t last long. Better he should teach political science.

I think as an investigative reporter I had tough standards, but I don’t think of myself as a tough person.

Obviously, if the commander makes certain decisions that the reporter thinks is inhibiting his right to report a legitimate story, he has to appeal to the commander’s boss to get that changed.

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word ‘I’ carried a lot of fright for me.

I don’t sleep well. I’m a very nervous – by my nature – anxious, almost paranoid person and reporter.

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.

Everyone is wanting to make a name for themselves, and Dominick Cruz has been doing that by talking. He’s been behind a desk, being a reporter, talking about fights.

While I am not saying Facebook cannot be a wonderland for marketers, I am still waiting to see the proof of it, and so should every reporter.

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.

Any reporter who’s ever covered the Middle East can tell you about the Arab leader photo op. It is one of the most curious acts of solipsism ever invented. The beloved leader-for-life, a king or a president, always a man, appears on some hideous filigreed-and-gilded couch or chair, chatting with an important visitor.

The day of the daredevil reporter who refuses to see obstacles to getting the truth, and seeing it with his or her own eyes, seems to have died.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It’s not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It’s always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There’s nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I’ve done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom – it’s gone.

I was the first reporter in the country to get a U.S. Senator on the air during the 9/11 attacks – I was broadcasting from the Hart Building.

It’s always unfortunate when a reporter is sent behind bars for failing to turn over sources. There’s no way to say what the long-term outcome will be.

Even a liberal reporter is a patriot, wants the best for this country. And people, your fair and balanced friends at Fox, don’t fully understand that.

I’m an international studies major. I’ve been a reporter. I was always interested in media, but I just didn’t know specifically what.

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

If I’m being interviewed by a reporter, I take my time to answer the question.

I’m not Ben Askren or a lot of these fighters. I’ve never called a reporter like, hey, I want to be on your show, book me, you know?

I know better than to ever attempt to get a reporter removed from covering any topic. That would never be an option.

I don’t miss being a reporter as a job, but I do miss the everyday interaction with the front line of law enforcement. I still have a cadre of cops who keep me up to date, but I don’t have the access I used to.

I’m interested in Russian language, culture, history… and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.