Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism and I can't live without being online.

I often see cases of Internet news where there's no reconciliation for what's gone before and what's newly arrived. That training for me - which was absolutely brutal and I was terrified - was so important, especially later in life when one was faced with conflicting stories and conflicting evidence.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.