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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
I want to try to talk like normal people talk, not just stand there and bark at the camera. |
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. |
People are more sophisticated in the way they go about dealing with the press. |
It's getting the right person that's the challenge. |
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 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. |
Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer. |
I used to be a print reporter. |
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. |
We're far from perfect. It's a human enterprise. |
With Vietman, we found ourselves involved there before we really understood what was going on. |
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. |
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. |
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. |