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The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.

A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism.

The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.

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.

A journalist enjoys a privileged position. In exchange for not being able to participate in the rough-and-tumble issues of a community, we are given license to observe it all, based on the understanding that we'll tell everyone what happens fairly and squarely. That's harder than it sounds.

We're journalists, so our default position is we're not writing editorial. We're trying to bring information to readers, viewers, so that they can make up their own conclusions.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.

When I was in journalism school, you were taught to be completely objective. But we don't see that anymore.