Tom Brokaw Quotes

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

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

I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst. I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.

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.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

Some people continue to pretend that anchor people are reporters.

I worked at CNN for almost 26 years. I worked in Mutual Radio for 20 years. I've been in the business 57 years. I have never seen a bias off the air or on.

When you make the transition from local news to something like Fox, you feel incredibly blessed because now you have fantastic producers at every level who are helping you do the things you used to do by yourself.

Honestly, anchoring the news on a nightly basis is the hardest job I've ever taken on.

American TV news is much more sophisticated. I think that American TV networks, it looks like, they invest a lot into news.

At the end of the day, my focus will be to make the 'Evening News' as strong from an editorial perspective as it possibly can be.

I love breaking news. And I was always trying to create the new, the next thing in television news. So I was the first to do overnight news.

The format of the nightly newscasts is still very much 1981 - "Tremble, onlookers! I am the anchorman and now here is a miracle: a report by satellite from many thousands of miles away. I will return to introduce another one in due course."

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.

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph.

In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.

I left the golden age of documentaries to go into the golden days of the 'CBS Evening News.' You could see that the audiences were eroding.

The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.

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

I'm 68 and a half years old; I grew up with newspapers; I love newspapers; I love the news business. I started CNN; I'm a journalist and proud of it.

I have this vision of maybe going the way of Bill Kurtis and, I think, Tom Brokaw, to a certain extent - the ability to not be tied to the desk anymore, but to do projects that are meaningful to you.

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

I'd like to get back into journalism. I'm hoping someone will offer me a job as a commentator or one of those political analysts that you see on the news shows all the time.

The only way to do news on television is not to be terrified of it.

There's not a better job in journalism than the one we have, seriously on '60 Minutes' - not a better job.