There's fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.

But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

It's getting the right person that's the challenge.

I used to be a print reporter.

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.

American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.