Tom Brokaw Quotes

I think a lot of people in television news look at the cable networks with great envy.

The current wisdom now is that if the three networks are covering the news the same way the difference is the anchor people. I think that won't be true in the future.

My role at NBC was president of 'NBC News.' I had that role for eight years.

The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.

I did everything when I started. In Miami I did news, I did weather, I did sports, I did disk-jockeying. And I did a sports talk show every week - every Saturday night.

Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.

Little did we know then that CNN would become the big league.

The 800-pound gorillas of TV news are gone. When I was the White House correspondent at NBC, and Tom Brokaw was anchor, the reporters were protected.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that I would somehow become a sports commentator.

Radio is the art form of sports casting. If you're any good, you can do a great job on radio.

Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.

I did everything - I did newscasts, I did sports, I did dramas.

I've worked with Ed Bradley, Dan Rather and lots of different local news anchors.

Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

I think that Peter Jennings is the only decent one of the big three.

I had fun pretending to be a sportscaster. People always think that was a down thing for me. I had the best job in sports broadcasting for two years.

The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap—and they know it

I worked for CBS News in the aftermath of all the greatness. I actually brought coffee to Edward R. Murrow.

Cable news is 24 hours long, so you have to fill it up with something.

Our news is Fox News. It's a cable channel and has nothing to do, frankly, with the entertainment area of the company. It's the model of how this company was launched, and there are a lot of independent stations and Fox O&Os who have hugely successful news that our programming is the lead-in for.

Where nationally televised news had been a once-nightly ritual, it has since grown into a 24-hour-a-day habit, available on channels devoted entirely and ceaselessly to its dissemination.

I'm pretty sure the last time any anchor could honestly ignore ratings was well before I was born.

It has been wonderful to be the home port for the brave and brilliant forces of ABC News around the world and to feel every single night that you and I were in a conversation about the day together.