Pastoral Resources

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

Practically every day, there is a story in the newspapers about a new breakthrough drug on Parkinson's.

One of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn't care.

My reputation was a bit exaggerated. Things were written in newspapers, then copied, then doubled. One of the reasons why I never disclaimed that, was because I found it amusing. But I also constructed such an image for myself in order to gain more of a private life.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.

I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.

Its only when you are a great actor and are recognised for your good work that you become famous. Unless you are in the news for the wrong reasons!

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.

To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.

At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings.

Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast, the disk jockey is not allowed to talk.