Bob Schieffer Quotes
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And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.
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But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.
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Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.
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Well, you know, in any political campaign, you're gonna have people on one side that are gonna slip a reporter something because they think it'll hurt the guy on the other side.
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My job is to give everyone a chance to catch their breath and step back from all this and get back to work.
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The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.
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But if you're going to go out on a military unit, you've got to allow yourself to be under the control of the commander because you really could put the troops in danger.
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I want to try to talk like normal people talk, not just stand there and bark at the camera.
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I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.
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I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.
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But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.
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The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.
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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.
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The best thing about the Congress is that it is the last place where you can have face-to-face interviews and interaction with the newsmakers themselves.
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But here's the deal: If I were smart, I could figure out curling. If I were even smarter, I could figure out why people would actually watch other people doing it. I have tried. I can't. I can't even figure out the object of the game. Is it like darts? I just don't get it.
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Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.
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But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make.
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In so many of the other beats these days, there are these layers of public relations people that you have to go through to get to the newsmakers themselves.
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The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.
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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.
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It's no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.
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I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I'm not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me.
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And as a result, I guess I'm just kind of a rubberneck. I'm kind of a - someone who likes to see things and likes to see these events and talk to the people who make them happen. But I don't think journalists are as important as the people they cover.
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I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.