Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.

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.

If we have no respect for our viewers, then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do?

But to be self-obsessed is simply not o.k. for the most important country in the world, the United States, which affects every other country in the world.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.

And then theres always the crying and the weeping that we hear-children, women, even men. And these images and these sounds are always with me.