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"I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story."
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"The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."

"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."

"The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views."

"Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing."

"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."

"If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats."

"I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism."

"Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it."

"What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise."
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"My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been."

"We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat."

"On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there."

"I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four."

"If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it."

"Everyone should get their news however they want to and in whatever form they want. I'm not going to sit back in judgment of other people and the way they do it."
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