If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.
The press don't wake up in the morning simply to be a mouthpiece for pols - they're out to uncover and expose news. That often is at odds with what politicians are setting out to do - it's both symbiotic and antagonistic. They need each other, they work in concert with one another, they work against one another.
The news of Mubarak stepping down came as I was sitting in my Jordanian home away from home.
The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.
I worked for CBS News in the aftermath of all the greatness. I actually brought coffee to Edward R. Murrow.
News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.
The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people.
Tom Browkaw said it best. He said NBC could survive without him or the rest of the news division, but not Nancy Fields.
I actually felt like I was starting a new career as a news reporter while playing in 'Pinocchio.'
If you had the most prestige and you were the network that everybody turned to in times of a crisis, that that was the most important position, in the news business, to hold.
Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.
But my observation has been, certainly in the news business, you've got to give 110 percent.
The whole government publicity situation has everybody in the news business almost in despair, with half a dozen agencies following different lines.
The news business is simple, but it's not easy to do well.
Television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business.
If you're not competitive, if you're not out to make a mark, you shouldn't be in the news business.
I felt like the news business was a little rough for me and a little sleazy. So I glided right over into acting.
When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.
That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.
You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket - I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage - but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.
