There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little American flag lapel pins.
You have to have pace, you have to have high production values, you have to have interesting graphics, and you have to have attractive people. CNN could afford not to be so obedient to those commands, and for a long time, it wasn't.
The Clinton administration hated us, and it was a terrible struggle with them. I think that they felt if they didn't play, they could strangle us in our crib.
We had a couple of minor coups that made a big difference. We snared away from a competitor a correspondent already on the ground in Afghanistan. That was an enormous help to us, because there we were.
We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
The president's poking fun at himself over what goes down. I thought it was a good-natured performance. It made him look good. But he certainly doesn't disguise the record on weapons of mass destruction. And you feel like saying to people, Just get over it.
We need more foreign reach; no question about that. And we're working on getting that. We need more people abroad; we need some more bureaus. That is really an important job.
MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.
I don't think very many people would accuse Paula Zahn of being a conservative.
If the markets had behaved badly, that would obviously add to people's sense of alarm... but there has been a lot of reassurance coming, particularly in the way the Brits handled all this. There seems to be no great fear that something like that is going to happen here.
We've had a series of major news stories that have brought in viewers who either were sampling to see what else was available or were normal news watchers. The Florida recount and the end of the election was a huge development. And then 9/11 came along.
You can make an argument that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative or a Republican. Bill's kind of unpredictable. Somebody might say that he would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of Scoop Jackson.
What played to what had been a relative weakness for us-this was exploding overseas as well, and we had to scramble to mount some reach and get into places and be competitive on the ground.
Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.
Geraldo has been in Lebanon. He has done some excellent reporting out of there, and of course, we now know by virtue of the president's speech on Tuesday night that the terrorist organizations that operate in that area are now on the list.
