A great deal of our ratings on the morning news are people who died during the night with their TV on.
BOB SCHAFFERThe 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.
More Bob Schaffer Quotes
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It is unlikely Yanukovich won. If he did, his government made it impossible to determine.
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Mitt Romney is betting big on himself and left no doubt about it.
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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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I can’t think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.
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There’s fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.
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It’s getting the right person that’s the challenge.
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The Russians have a lot at stake, and the power of Moscow pride should never be underestimated.
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Good policy always trumps bad public relations and the best PR can’t trump bad policy.
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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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Though there is growing division among the Ukrainian military ranks as to loyalty in this revolution, the possibility of violence looms over the entire situation.
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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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But if you don’t enjoy doing something, you’ll be miserable no matter how much money you make.
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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 had the chance to make every possible mistake and figure out a way to recover from it.
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I would love to see the French spending money to restore Iraq.
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I think journalism is a great way to do public service, to have an impact on your community.
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Parents don’t like it, administrators don’t like it, and kids don’t like it, but politicians and bureaucrats in Washington love it–which should be the first indication to you that it is a troubled program.
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The first thing the federal government can do to help is get out of the way.
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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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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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My bladder cancer was related to smoking, and I think smoking kills people.
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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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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.
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They’ve asked me to do this temporarily. I don’t know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.
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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 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.
BOB SCHAFFER