When you practice reporting for as long as I have, you keep yourself at a distance from True Believers. Either conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
The reporting I did was mostly entertainment or lifestyle. I took a very different approach than most reporters. I approached it more casually than you would think a reporter would. Now I'm a morning radio personality, and radio is really casual.
Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.
As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.
Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.
My goal, as always, is simply to inform the public about an issue that is nearly impossible for them to learn about on their own. That is my only goal as a reporter.
The first step in good reporting is good snooping.
Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.
Good reporting is good reporting, regardless of the newness or oldness of the medium.
I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.