Woodward, a registered Republican, did not vote. He couldn’t decide whether he was more uneasy with the disorganization and naïve idealism of McGovern’s campaign or with Richard Nixon’s conduct. And he believed that not voting...

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.

As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why – but we really need to land on that why. That’s what I’ve been exploring in my...

I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody’s walking, you should walk; when few people are reading...

Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.

The type of journalism that relies on the reporter’s notion of what does or doesn’t “seem” correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way...

Don’t tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think...

At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to...

It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with...

You need to know the constituency you belong to…and that is revealed by your constituents. When your constituents are speaking in public and making of stories, your constituency can be “journalism”.

Take away the newspaper—and this country of ours would become a scene of chaos. Without daily assurance of the exact facts—so far as we are able to know and publish them—the public imagination would run...

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly...

Objectivity is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which, as business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic survival. It is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which often, by tradition or...

Everybody comes with prejudices, colored glasses on their eyes. Then they see everything colored according to their glasses. Yes, a few people come just like you, unprejudiced, without any idea gathered from yellow journalism.

They were going to the house of a man who was shot dead. What was with all the exuberance? But maybe that was the only way you could move forward after mindlessly recording stories of...