Scott Pelley Quotes

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

There's a great appetite for smart television. Every day I get up and there are interesting stories I want to do.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.

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.

Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

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

We all know that there are different scripted programs out there, and we're all facing the same challenges in terms of ratings and everything else, but I think that there is a lot of opportunity to be had as well, and what I'm excited to do is to get to explore that.

There's a lot of politics in television and a lot of in-fighting and all that sort of stuff, but in the end, we are purveyors of entertainment. Viewers are not really bogged down in who's doing what and who hates who and who's doing best in the ratings. They watch television to be entertained.

I hate how on TV they have to fill so many minutes. It means they have to put in anything, and by doing so they sort of trivialize news; news becomes this commodity that they need to fill dead time between commercials with.

I have no interest in Trump TV. I hear it all over the place.

The story of journalism, on a day-to-day basis, is the story of the interaction of reporters and officials

If you just turn to your paper or television each day, there are thousands of stories that are much more shocking than the gallery artworks.

You break the story first, and then you go into the specifics.

I will be in Melbourne, Florida, and I just heard the crowds are massive that want to be there. I turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos, chaos, yet it is the exact opposite.

Journalists are interesting. They just aren't as interesting as the things they cover.

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.

We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour.

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.

I have no problem at all taking my shirt off to tell a story.