I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.
In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.
At the 'Times,' all journalists on every subject followed the same rules and were supposed to meet the same standards, so I never really thought about fashion writing as being in a bubble.
We have got to make sure there is proper independent scrutiny and accountability for people in the press, just as there should be in any other industry where things go wrong. But let's not try and think it is for politicians or governments to tell people what they stick in newspapers. That is deeply illiberal.
I think a lot about something: Abe Rosenthal was once asked what he wanted on his headstone, and he said he wanted it just to say, 'He kept the paper straight.' And I think about that a lot.
Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.
The news is best when it's serious.
We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.
The quality of news coverage has diminished, because giants of the print media are no longer being nurtured properly.
It's worth knowing that there's very different sets of regulation for the print press and for broadcast media. They're different things, particularly during campaign periods.
There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.
For those of us who spent our careers competing with David Broder, the hardest thing to abide was the inevitable comparison. If someone said Jack Germond - or Jules Witcover or Walter Mears or whoever - 'is a pretty good political reporter,' the default response would be, 'but he's no David Broder.'
I wholeheartedly agree that many media 'standards' can feel disingenuous or, in fact, be a cover for less-than-honest behavior.
But, I don't know, the violence, I can't even talk about. We don't do a lot of violent shows. When I started in television, breaking a pencil was a violent act.
The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.
Our legislation addresses broadcasts over the public airwaves, but I hope the cable and satellite industries see the importance of this issue and voluntarily create a family tier of programming and offer culturally responsible products.
What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they're too stupid to know the difference.
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.
Let me say this: I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind.
In the beginning, YouTube content wasn't up to the same standard as traditional media. Now, people are using it as a launchpad.
Tabloid stuff just offends.
...when a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel.
To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.
It is an outrage that Donald Trump can swear and scream on national television and no one says boo about how he presents himself.
I treasure the fact there's media freedom, but with that goes responsibility. I think that there should be a self-regulatory organization and that they should start to think about standards. Because I think a lot of people say, "I don't know how to read what is true versus somebody else's interpretation."
