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There aren't enough good journalists. There are too many who really weren't groomed to be reporters and, as a result, some of the reporting is shallow.

We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.

Once Iraq became a hot bed for kidnapping, reporters had to use every kind of trick they could manage to avoid it. This included chase cars, security men for more prosperous agencies and networks, and GPS signals on satellite phones that could pinpoint the journalist's locations.

Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

I don't appreciate, really, talking to journalists when there's a sense of wanting to kick up dust to sell more papers or get more hits on their Internet site.

The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.

People want to have a voice and a say in what is news.

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.