“It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.”

“We get a lot of the sky is falling on the weather reports, so when something big does hit, people never expect it. If it's not as bad as the reports predicted, we complain. If it's worse than expected, we complain. If it's just as bad as predicted, we complain about that, too, because we'll say that the reports are wrong so often, there was no way to know they'd be right this time. It just gives people something to complain about.”

“A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.”

“A camera is an opening in a box: that is the best emblem of the fact that a camera holding an object is holding the rest of the world away. The camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the world goes, deserve more praise for confining them, leaving room for thought.”

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

“During the course of his career, [Rather] came to despise the dynamics of pack journalism. The packs were often ugly - reporters shouting questions, pushing and shoving each other, and surrounding their subjects with cameras and microphone booms, blindly following each other and creating an echo chamber of information that rarely served the public. He compared the pack to a flock of turkeys: If two turkeys leapt over a cliff, the rest of the flock would follow.”