There are many hands touching ballots after a voter drops his ballot into the ballot box. There is no guarantee of ballot secrecy for anyone, which makes the whole system vulnerable to intimidation and bribery.
A police reporter walks into the worst moment in someone’s life on every single story that he covers. It’s not like being a sports reporter. That’s a great job and all that and takes certain skills.
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.
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.
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.
One thing young people have to always keep in mind when deciding what they want to do with their lives is, is it fun? Is it something that I’m interested in? Is it something I enjoy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
