When you walk into a doctor’s office, you’ve got to have the same attitude you would about anything else. You’ve got to ask tough questions, and you’ve got to not be afraid to challenge their credentials.
Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.
After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It’s almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.
I guess the issue that I have with all the news organizations that have a political MO, if you will, attached to them is that they sometimes jump to conclusions about what this will mean. Get ahead of themselves.
In the seasons of life, I have had more than my share of summers.
One of the advantages of being a national journalist of some recognition is that you come across high-profile people, and many become your friends.
The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we’re going to die, I suppose.
I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They’re family to me.
Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now.
I believe you make your own luck. My motto is ‘It’s always a mistake not to go.’
I’m not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science – and then learn to write.
The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early ’60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
The disquieting news of Danny Villanueva’s death brought back memories of our time together at KNBC in the early 1970s.
Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa’s sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.
During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.
1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen.
In Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of anchoring the news right before Johnny Carson came on, so to see him, the Hollywood stars watched me first.
Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.
Peter, of the three of us, was our prince. He seemed so timeless. He had such elan and style.
I had gone to all the big stories of the ’80s, which was one of the most fertile times in American journalism, around the world and here as well.
I’m the father of three daughters, and they’re all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.
Our obligation at the network is where do we fit into that and how can we best capitalize on that to make sure that our piece of that remains important to those young people.
Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was, and he didn’t require consultants or gurus to change him.
People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.
I was a young man working in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1960s when I received a call, and I was summoned to Atlanta to work at WSB. It was, for me, the beginning of a real education about the South.
It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.
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