Press Reporters Quotes & Sayings

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people. — Bruce Jackson

There is a curious relationship between a candidate and the reporters who cover him. It can be affected by small things like a competent press staff, enough seats, sandwiches and briefings and the ability to understand deadlines. — Ronald Steel

My wife and I have just returned from Belgium where, courtesy of the hotel TV, we acquired a new perspective on the Iraq war. The difference between BBC, ITV and CNN on the one hand and the channels from Belgium, Germany and France on the other was stark and disturbing. The 'coalition' output, which strongly influences public opinion in Britain, comprises reports from 'embedded' reporters telling us about the mud and dust, press conferences by generals describing the tip of the iceberg they wanted us to see and studio debates among armchair pundits. — David Walker

The free press guarantee does not only protect corporate reporters but anyone engaged in journalism, whether employed or not. — Glenn Greenwald

Reporters were ill paid in those days and lacked the resources in staff or money to dig deeply into McCarthy's charges. The Washington press corps was small. It was not until later, amid growing anger about a "cover-up" during the Vietnam War, that significant numbers of reporters became obstreperous in challenging "official" sources. Only in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, did this attitude become widespread among political journalists in the United States. — James T. Patterson

I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers? — Sarah Stillman

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. — Pete Rozelle

It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. — Joseph Mitchell

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. — Helen Thomas

From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty - print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. "Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?" he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means "steadfast" and "brave" and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder. — Richard Engel

As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job - popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else - they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press. — Evelyn Waugh

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. — Michael Hastings

They're a slow-moving lot, reporters. Slothlike. Weighed down by all that righteous indignation about the freedom of the press and the public's right to know, not to mention the liquid lunches they see as their constant due. Go out now and you're playing right into their grasping, ink-stained hands." He cocked an ear to the door. "I'm doing my best to protect your reputation here. It wouldn't do to have a serving wench caught in a compromising position with the lord of the manor."
"You don't have the cleavage to make a good serving wench, Eli. — Kate Meader

Local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged "player interviews," that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as "like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled, — Hunter S. Thompson

Unlike any other player on the board, the press has no oversight, no mandate, few penalties, and even fewer consequences. Because there are not enough reporters on the ground, too many bureaus have outsourced both their reporting and standards to third party stringers whose spectacular videos of explosions and inflated body counts have shown up on both jihadist recruiting sites and American television screens, simultaneously. — Matt Sanchez

But even though nobody from the government ever says anything out loud about a lack of evidence being the real reason nobody from these companies goes to jail, we're all - including reporters who cover this stuff - still supposed to accept that as the real explanation. It's a particular feature of modern American government officials, particularly Democratic Party types, that they often expect the press and the public to give them credit for their unspoken excuses. They'll vote yea on the Iraq war and the Patriot Act and nay for a public option or an end to torture or a bill to break up the banks. Then they'll cozy up to you privately and whisper that of course they're with you in spirit on those issues, but politically it just wasn't possible to vote that way. And then they start giving you their reasons. — Matt Taibbi

Well, President-elect Barack Obama and his family are gonna spend the holidays in his home state of Hawaii. And you know who couldn't be more thrilled with this? The press, the reporters who follow the president. Well, think about it. After eight years of spending every holiday cutting brush in Crawford, Texas, they get to go to Hawaii! — Jay Leno

But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party - after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually - responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team. — Gloria Steinem

For nearly a decade, their secret remained safe. Rumors of a lab study devoted to sex, operating in the heart of St. Louis, never appeared on television or radio or in print. As a personal favor to Masters, St. Louis Globe-Democrat publisher Richard Amberg vowed his daily newspaper wouldn't breathe a word to its readers. The city's other competing paper, owned by Pulitzer, stayed mum. Reporters for the Associated Press and United Press International, the two wire services beaming scoops across the world, also knew of this sensational human experiment but refused to say anything to the American public. — Thomas Maier

Though reporters made much of the challenge of keeping up with Patton, he was never far away from the press. (...) Presiding at a ceremony to open the Roosevelt Railroad Bridge near Mainz, he was invited to cut the ribbon with a large pair of scissors. He gave them back demanding 'a goddamned bayonet' adding he wasn't 'a goddamned tailor' - as if anyone in their wildest imagination supposed he might be. — Barry Turner

Senators from his own party soon began to warn that Obama was secretly expanding the government's surveillance powers even beyond those authorized by Bush. Obama allowed the civil liberties panel that was supposed to provide oversight of the government's war on terror to remain idle and only partially staffed for years. His administration launched a draconian crackdown on the press, spying on reporters while prosecuting more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. — James Risen

Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II
and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions. — David Frum

Most reporters who come to me get their stories directly from press releases. Very few do what one would consider to be their professional duty. — Joey Skaggs

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. — Kate Adie

Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a 'bionic face,' why didn't they do a better job of it? — Jack Palance

Clinton ... believes that the Washington Press Corps is so out of touch that it is absolutely inconceivable that reporters would understand the issues that people are really dealing with in their lives. — Bob Woodward

A generation of reporters saw the Washington Post win a Pulitzer for exposing the scandal, and many dreamed of being the next Woodward or Bernstein. A strong and skeptical press corps is good for democracy. Often the media's first instinct is to portray every story as a scandal, however, which presents a distorted picture of government and leaves the public cynical. — George W. Bush

Children and journalists need what they don't need actually. — Raheel Farooq

The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth. — Chris Hedges

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. — Charles Kuralt

The reporters who came to the press conference in the
office of the John Galt Line were young men who had
been trained to think that their job consisted of
concealing from the world the nature of its events.
It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some
public figure who made utterances about the public good,
in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning.
It was their daily job to sling words together in any
combination they pleased, so long as the words did not
fall into a sequence saying something specific.
They could not understand the interview now being
given to them. — Ayn Rand

Bill Clinton also benefited from a friendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.) — George W. Bush

So Dan Miller decided to roast a pig. The idea took hold of him after another eruption on August 7. He would roast a pig in the steaming volcano fields at the base of St. Helens. Being a scientist meant that he would do it in a methodical fashion: notes would be kept and he would document everything. The operation needed a cover name because reporters and others were monitoring all radio communication around the volcano, so he called it the 'FPP temperature experiment'. FPP stood for Front Page Palmer, a name the scientists had given a local geology professor who had irritated the Survey geologists by grandstanding for the press. Miller would roast a pig and Palmer at the same time. — Dick Thompson

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. — James Fallows