70 Investigative Journalism Quotes
Following is our list of investigative journalism quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
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Famous Investigative Journalism Quotes
What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise. — Robert Scheer
Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations. — George Orwell
Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists. — Otto Schily
What journalism is really about-it's to monitor power and the centres of power. — Amira Hass
If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature. — Julian Assange
Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on. — David Remnick
A reporter's ability to keep the bond of confidentiality often enables him to learn the hidden or secret aspects of government. — Bob Woodward
Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them. — Carl Bernstein
You can crush a man with journalism. — William Randolph Hearst
The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know. — Bob Woodward
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct. — Bill James
I've been in journalism my entire adult life and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt. —
Report, report, report. Dig, dig, dig. Think, think, think. Don't stop being a reporter because you've become a columnist. — Allan Sloan
I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world. — Henry R. Luce
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations. — George Orwell
Short Investigative Journalism Quotes
- One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice. — Julian Assange
- Unbeknownst to me, I started doing journalism, just because I was bearing witness. — Tim Pool
- I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge. — Immanuel Kant
- There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil. — Walter Lippmann
- And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place. — Christiane Amanpour
- Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. — Tristan Tzara
- I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. — James A. Garfield
- It's all about one thing: creative problem-solving to get the story out. — Robert Greenberg
- We need an independent media to hold people like me to account. — George H. W. Bush
- Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. — Henry Anatole Grunwald
Good Journalism Quotes
If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism - that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. — Walter Cronkite
Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost. — Napoleon Bonaparte
You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line. — Carl Bernstein
Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over. — Hunter S. Thompson
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism. America is strong because its journalism is strong. That is how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses and that is where we come in. — Scott Pelley
For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news. — Gloria Borger
Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism. — Dave Barry
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in. — Julian Assange
Don't use your mind for a filing cabinet. Use your mind to work out problems and find answers; file away good ideas in your journal. — Jim Rohn
People Writing About Investigative Journalism
More Investigative Journalism Quotes
Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet. — Gwen Ifill
My first real writing job was at 'Rolling Stone,' so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism. — Tim Cahill
The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers. — Matt Taibbi
No one is safe from Mattera’s hard-hitting, meticulously reported, and genuinely funny investigative journalism. CRAPITALISM blows the lid off crony capitalism. — Monica Crowley
The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past. — Jill Abramson
I mean, I think everybody in the world, all the young people in the world, went to journalism school and wanted to investigate everything. And I think they overdid it. I think that you have to investigate things, you have to e skeptical, but you shouldn't be vengeful. You have to be fair and you have to be careful. — Katharine Graham
Al journalism should be investigative, from football to cookery — John Pilger
Investigative journalism and reporting has become much more dangerous. This is especially true for journalists and sources in National Security - but it has been getting pretty bad for beat reporters and small outlets doing local reporting, too. — Chelsea Manning
Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned. — Irving Kristol
At the core of investigative journalism is exactly the same thing that drives a page-turning thriller: telling a great story. — Hank Phillippi Ryan
Moving forward, investigative journalists need to train themselves to be media amphibians - just as comfortable with the classic verities of great journalism as they are with video, Twitter, Facebook, and, most importantly, citizen journalism. — Arianna Huffington
I've talked about how the future of journalism will be a hybrid future where traditional media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism). — Arianna Huffington
Investigative superstar Jason Leopold spares no one, least of all himself, in this devastatingly accurate first-hand exposé. News Junkie provides the best account so far of how, and why, current American journalism has become so pharisaical, spineless, and detached from the truth — T. D. Allman
Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity's constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy — Alma Guillermoprieto
Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Real crime-beat investigative journalism does seem to be really dwindling, especially in this age with everything being centered around iPhones. Everyone's a journalist today, essentially. Every pedestrian on the street has the potential of capturing a big story on their mobile device and then selling it and making a lot of money. — Megan Fox
Government has an obligation not to inhibit the collection and dissemination of news. Im convinced that if reporters should ever lose the right to protect the confidentiality of their sources then serious investigative reporting will simply dry up. The kind of resourceful, probing journalism that first exposed most of the serious scandals, corruption and injustice in our nations history would simply disappear. And let me tell you, reading about ones failings in the daily papers is one of the privileges of high office in this free country of ours. — Nelson Rockefeller
I think the media has become incredibly corrupt. We used to have a profound tradition of investigative journalism in the United States. Some journalists were real heroes, such as Bob Woodward who helped uncover the Watergate scandal. But today he is leading the opposite charge, trying to bring down the careers of people and score easy victories. In other words, those who used to bust the status quo have now become the status quo. — Marianne Williamson
Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful. — Julian Assange
If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be "gotcha" journalism, but it's also good journalism. — Ben Bradlee
Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on. — Ethan Brown
I asked the former director James Comey about the FBI's intersections with Jeff Sessions prior to his stepping aside from the Russia investigation. Mr. Comey said his continued engagement with the Russian investigation was "problematic " and he said he could not discuss it in public. — Ron Wyden
I don't think crowdfunding is a good idea for journalism in general. Good work should be supported by news organizations, and publishers should pony up money to support investigative reporting. But we're in hard times, so there are upsides and downsides to it. — Erin Siegal McIntyre
It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. — Bill Moyers
It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We're seeing, there's no question, that we're seeing a renaissance of that. — Ben H. Winters
I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more examples to which one could point, and there were at last some activist photographers who understood that getting information into the public sphere in spite of military censorship was a right and obligation within democracy. That strain in war journalism did nearly vanish during that time. — Judith Butler
The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's goal is to produce a broad range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers, with a focus on working with the many experienced reporters and writers impacted by the economic contraction. The pieces will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media - including text, audio, and video. — Arianna Huffington
Given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important. — Arianna Huffington
As the newspaper industry continues to contract, one of the most commonly voiced fears is that serious investigative journalism will be among the victims of the scaleback. And, indeed, many newspapers are drastically reducing their investigative teams. — Arianna Huffington
Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the 'Wall Street Journal.' — Noam Chomsky
I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them. — Julian Assange
The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism. — Lynda Resnick
In Conclusion
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