Daniel Schorr Quotations

I think it's fair to say that the promise of confidentiality is based on the confidence that what you're being told is true, ... You lose right to any confidentiality if you lie. Sources are whistleblowers - they're people who'll tell you the truth to change something.

I had to fight to keep reality on television, ... Most of the time I lost.

Whenever I'm not sure about something, the ethics of something, the question I ask myself is, 'What would Murrow have done? What would Murrow say?' It seems strange after all these years that I still have him as a kind of symbol and an emblem to live by, but I do.

All news is an exaggeration of life.

Speaker Newt Gingrich says that what is wrong with the present system is not that people abuse welfare but that welfare abuses people.

Power corrupts, and there is nothing more corrupting than power exercised in secret.

Murrow covered something because it needed coverage. He wasn't trying to get an audience just for the sake of it.

There was a vacuum in investigation, and the press began to try men in the most effective court in the country.

I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.

Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone.