Vote counting and ballot collecting does not occur in the light of day. There are too many occasions when observers and opposing parties lose contact with the ballots.
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.
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.
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.
One cannot help being impressed by the protesters. They have begun each day of the protest in Kiev in prayer and all activities are accomplished with a collective sense of respect, kindness, and an intention to conduct a peaceful revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
