Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to be a print reporter.
We're far from perfect. It's a human enterprise.
Go vote now, it will make you feel big and strong.
It's getting the right person that's the challenge.
Mitt Romney is betting big on himself and left no doubt about it.
I guess the worst snow was the Kennedy inauguration in 1960. Heavy snow.
The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game.
My bladder cancer was related to smoking, and I think smoking kills people.
I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.
When Sam Snead was asked how to putt, he said, 'Putt for one hundred dollars'.
People are more sophisticated in the way they go about dealing with the press.
Good policy always trumps bad public relations and the best PR can't trump bad policy.
I want to try to talk like normal people talk, not just stand there and bark at the camera.
I think journalism is a great way to do public service, to have an impact on your community.
Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.
With Vietman, we found ourselves involved there before we really understood what was going on.
But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make.
They've asked me to do this temporarily. I don't know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.
A great deal of our ratings on the morning news are people who died during the night with their TV on.
My job is to give everyone a chance to catch their breath and step back from all this and get back to work.
I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I'm not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me.
I always thought writing was the foundation and the basis for journalism in the same way being able to draw is the foundation for art.
Whether or not the President is sleeping well won't be a factor in his re-election. That will depend on what he does while he is awake.
Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?
Had there been a reporter along with Lieutenant Calley when he massacred those people in Vietnam, I think that probably wouldn't have happened.
American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.
The best thing about the Congress is that it is the last place where you can have face-to-face interviews and interaction with the newsmakers themselves.
It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.
In so many of the other beats these days, there are these layers of public relations people that you have to go through to get to the newsmakers themselves.
There's fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.
But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.
But if you're going to go out on a military unit, you've got to allow yourself to be under the control of the commander because you really could put the troops in danger.
I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.
Well, you know, in any political campaign, you're gonna have people on one side that are gonna slip a reporter something because they think it'll hurt the guy on the other side.
Any time you get into a presidential campaign and the stakes are so high, all candidates - they want to be in complete control whenever they can. And you can't blame them for that.
One thing young people have to always keep in mind when deciding what they want to do with their lives is, is it fun? Is it something that I'm interested in? Is it something I enjoy?
I had the chance to make every possible mistake and figure out a way to recover from it. Once you realize there is life after mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away.
For sure, the American people have access to more information now than any other people who have ever lived on earth. And I think we do a pretty good job of sorting out what's important.
Obviously, if the commander makes certain decisions that the reporter thinks is inhibiting his right to report a legitimate story, he has to appeal to the commander's boss to get that changed.
Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.
But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.
At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.
The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.
And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.
The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture, like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays - beyond their meaning - a factor in our economy.
And I came away from that experience, and it was a very difficult experience - I came to understand that you have to practice at being a good father and practice at being a good husband, just as you have to practice at being a good journalist.
And as a result, I guess I'm just kind of a rubberneck. I'm kind of a - someone who likes to see things and likes to see these events and talk to the people who make them happen. But I don't think journalists are as important as the people they cover.
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.
The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.