The month of January, we were number one. Now, this is something we're proud of, because we recognize we're up against a formidable operation there at CNN.
The president's poking fun at himself over what goes down. I thought it was a good-natured performance. It made him look good. But he certainly doesn't disguise the record on weapons of mass destruction. And you feel like saying to people, Just get over it.
There have been two Geraldo Riveras through his long career. One of them was a reporter who has done some remarkable work. The other was a television show host who did what it took to get an audience.
There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little American flag lapel pins.
We get a ton of email; everybody does now. It gives us a kind of a pulse that you can feel.We hear people saying, thank you for being fair, for being balanced.
We had a couple of minor coups that made a big difference. We snared away from a competitor a correspondent already on the ground in Afghanistan. That was an enormous help to us, because there we were.
We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
We need more foreign reach; no question about that. And we're working on getting that. We need more people abroad; we need some more bureaus. That is really an important job.
We've had a series of major news stories that have brought in viewers who either were sampling to see what else was available or were normal news watchers. The Florida recount and the end of the election was a huge development. And then 9/11 came along.
What played to what had been a relative weakness for us-this was exploding overseas as well, and we had to scramble to mount some reach and get into places and be competitive on the ground.
When you're five years old, and you're running a business that people did not think there was room for, getting attention is not a bad thing. Letting it be known by whatever colorful language is necessary is not a bad thing.
You can make an argument that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative or a Republican. Bill's kind of unpredictable. Somebody might say that he would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of Scoop Jackson.
You have to have pace, you have to have high production values, you have to have interesting graphics, and you have to have attractive people. CNN could afford not to be so obedient to those commands, and for a long time, it wasn't.
You know, the market was down yesterday... my first thought when I heard-just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, Time to buy.
