Pastoral Resources

One reason I left local news was that I was tired of the constant musical chairs among news directors.

Men still control the news, both on and off camera.

I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I'm not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn't.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

Today they have proven once again that the mainstream media can't print enough bad news about our troops.

The recent history of Ukraine is replete with dead journalists, beaten journalists, news agencies being shut down, and politicians being injured or killed. Most are killed in mysterious auto accidents.

The mainstream press and television do a very soft job of covering the press, either as corporate entities or as news organizations.

You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.

What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey told the staff that he was disappointed and appalled that the front of the book was all commentary and that he wanted hard news.

And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.

The reason why I've been keeping private for the longest time ever here, I've always wanted to protect my wife's privacy. I don't like - I didn't want to put her picture all over the news. I just wanted to keep her private.

At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.

We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

What NPR did, I'm very proud of, and what NPR stood for is non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news.

The perception is that more important people watch news in the evenings than in the mornings.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

All news is an exaggeration of life.

With the recent news that the State of Florida has agreed to purchase 181,000 acres of U.S. Sugar land, we have an historic opportunity for our larger restoration efforts and for the people of Florida. This too will not come without difficult challenges, but it reminds us that anything is possible.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.