I'm just a journalist. I shine a mirror to the culture. I give the cop-out answer.
In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.
As a journalist, your job is to bear witness.
Because I would never work for a niche publication or a niche program on television and because I am a journalist and not an opinion person, my job is to try to see how many different points of view I can represent or how. It's not even a question of who you don't offend because you are always going to offend somebody. The question is how can you get people to listen to the information you have to present.
I love the idea of a shield law; I don't know of any journalist who doesn't love the idea of a shield law. It's all in the details. Some of the shield laws that were floating around sounded good, but when you looked at them, exceptions or exclusions or broadness in the language really invited some problems.
I'm not making a movie about the real people. I'm making a movie about what they did, and what happened to them. But I will create characters so that I can have the freedom to make them say and do what I want. The real-life journalists were fine with that.
One of the problems with the media covering this place is that there are stereotypes of news, one of which is "war rages" and the other is "peace dawns." And there isn't much in between. When I talk to foreign journalists, often they are gritting their teeth because they've been asked for a piece about how shops are reopening and restaurants are reopening and so forth - happy pieces. And it just ain't so.
The responsibility of the scientist or journalist is to convey the context. If you're talking about the Arctic Sea ice, you have to embrace the reality that there's a huge number of other things that influence that on a year-to-year basis.
There is no journalist without opinions, and there's no real objectivity, but we can strive toward it.
I respect journalism. I was always very aware of journalism from a very broad point of view, but I'd say my baptism by fire was doing the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still. That for me was a real education because I spent a lot of time with some incredible journalists, war reporters particularly - Bob Woodruff, Dexter Filkins - people who were very helpful in painting the picture for me and reading the accounts of people and what they experienced, a lot of PTSD.
It amazes me to witness the masochism with which some journalists characterize their industry as a dying species. The future belongs to citizen journalism and blogs.
I think that some of the greatest muckrakers and some of the greatest investigative journalists of all time had strong feelings about civil rights. There is a role for the journalist-advocate. And as long as you play your cards on the table, I think thats a role that we should allow.
Having been a journalist for thirty-nine years, I've developed a pretty thick skin.
But I still have him in the form of the finest and highest standard of what it means to be a journalist and critic. All my life, Roger Ebert has always been the bar I've tried to reach. I never will. But his example has made me stronger through failure.
If I am traitor, who did I betray? I gave all my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who they think they're working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.
The problem of journalism is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn't' witness it personally. They are entirely dependent on self-interested sources to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.
I think that part of being a good journalist, part of being an awake member of the world youre in, is to view yourself as an outsider, and I always have, to some degree.
I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.
I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.
Under Syrian law, a journalist is not allowed to report on military matters. This may be wrong or right, but that's just the way it is.
As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers.
When interviews are good, the conversation can be amazing. Sometimes I've had conversations with journalists that I've never had with anybody else.
I knew I had to be a journalist because I'm deeply curious about the world.
There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
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