David Brinkley Quotes

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.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

If you love television and you love news, CNN is the perfect place to be.

I've been doing 'America's Newsroom' and lots of other news shows and writing over the years. That's my thing.

I started as a print reporter. I’m a journalist and that’s what I do. My function is an anchorperson, but it’s in a journalism context, and gravitas and coats and ties and haircuts and all that sort of stuff, I’ll leave to others. My thing is just to do my job the best way I know how and as I say I’m very fortunate to be able to do it the way I want to do it.

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.

My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize.

I think that what people want from cable news channels is the sense that if there's hard news, it's going to come up immediately.

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.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.

Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.

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

We report the news. Fox talks about the news.

The highest power of television journalism is not the transmission of information but the transmission of experience.

When I'm in studio, we cover the news. But no one says the news has to be boring.

Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention.

I love doing live TV.

My mentor is Alastair Burnet, the greatest news anchor Britain has had.

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.

Media really excited me. As an undergrad, I majored in radio, television, and film and did internships with CNBC and CNN. My first job was at Sky News in London.

In college, I got an internship at my local station in Honolulu one summer, and I just fell in love with broadcast news, reporting, and storytelling. After college, I started out at NBC, and I worked behind the scenes at 'Today' and 'Dateline.'

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.