My mom is from Canada. Both my grandparents were from Canada.
Jake Tapper
There's no bias when it comes to facts, and there's no bias when it comes to decency.
The only politician in my family was my grandfather's grandfather, who was the mayor of Winnipeg from Jan. 1, 1917, until Jan. 5, 1917, because he lost the recount. So he was mayor of Winnipeg for four days.
My dad's a hero in a lot of ways. He was a 1960s and 1970s hippie and a member of the protest crowd.
Don't get me wrong: politicians have been lying for a long time, long before Donald Trump was born, but the degree of just nonstop rage, grievance, prevarication, I haven't seen, probably because we haven't had a direct line from a politician's id to the public before.
Whenever journalism students ask me what they should be doing, I say that if you're on social media, you should be following a ton of people that you don't necessarily agree with just to get their perspectives.
They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Exercise has its hazards. Runners are sidelined by shinsplints, freestylists by swimmer's ear, and who hasn't heard of tennis elbow? But the fitness buff of the '90s has a far greater worry. StairMaster Butt.
McCarthyism and Trumpism are very different. They stand for very different things, but the technique of the big lie, smearing and telling lies, you know, McCarthy was doing that. At the time, the media, Democrats, and Republicans were all paralyzed - not all, but most of them were paralyzed. They didn't know how to deal with this.
I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo - a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.
CNN wants me to tell the news in a way that seems genuine and authentic. They don't want me to be Ron Burgundy.
Mean is easy. Mean is lazy. Mean is self-satisfied and slothful.
My kids are good artists, and they do a pretty good version of Dad in their caricatures.
It's not always easy for a mainstream organization to accept what a blog is.
I have a wife and a son and daughter. What do I need to do to make their lives better, happier? What can I do in terms of my time or my attention given that I am very busy at work? That's a personal rule of thumb I live by from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed.
It's the exact opposite of my job to take what the government says at face value and say, 'This is the truth because the government says it, and the government never lies.'
I generally feel that the solution to speech that people find offensive is more speech. You should talk about it, discuss it.
I don't want to compare President Obama and President Trump on these issues, because they're different, and the scale isn't even remotely the same. But President Obama said things that weren't true and got away with it more for a variety of reasons, and one is the media was much more supportive of him.
There's a long tradition in this country of questioning generals.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
President Obama was not friendly to the press, but the press was very friendly to President Obama.
You know who has done a lot of questioning of generals? President Trump.
I've conditioned myself to believe that almonds are a completely delicious snack, and that they don't taste like paper or get stuck in the back of my mouth.
My journalistic heroes are Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel and Tim Russert and Edward R. Murrow, among others, because they were tough.
Everybody should work in their nation's capitol and see how politics actually work because it was the most eye opening experience of my life.
In 2009, 2010, the Obama people were the ones mad at me.
I still think of myself as a Philadelphian. I still root for the Philadelphia teams. Other than my house, I still feel most at home in terms of cities when I'm in Philly.
There are a lot of good writers in TV!
You know what takes effort? Being kind, being patient, being respectful, telling someone how you feel politely instead of just avoiding them for six weeks.
Actors are tough because they're not used to challenging questions - other than from paparazzi. And so you just ask one perfectly legitimate question, but one that they're not comfortable answering, and all of a sudden they look at you, and you're the paparazzi.
I'm quite calm when all is well.
My first race was '99/2000. At that time, I was at 'Salon,' and I was basically their campaign reporter, so I would just jump around from race to race, candidate to candidate.
I did freelance cartooning off and on from college graduation in 1991 through ABC News hiring me in 2003. I did a weekly comic strip for 'Roll Call' for about nine years. I sold cartoons and caricatures to 'The Los Angeles Times' and 'The Washington Post.' I drew as much as I could. It's really tough to make a living doing it.
Nastiness and mockery and meanness sometimes seem as if they're spreading like a contagion.
'MAD Magazine' put out a book that was a collection of Trump cartoons, and they asked me to do the forward because they knew that I was a fan because I'd done stories and tweeted about 'MAD.' So I did the forward and asked them if I could do a cartoon. They let me, and I did caricatures of myself and Wolf Blitzer.
My mom is a hero in a lot of ways because she's the most empathetic and kind person I've ever met.
My job is to be skeptical: skeptical of people like Edward Snowden and skeptical of the U.S. government.
Normally, at a debate or a town hall, I would be quick to say to someone, 'That was rude,' or, 'We're going to try to keep it civil here,' or, 'Let's not have personal attacks.'
When you write fiction, there were things about Washington that I've experienced and wanted to write about, including the swamping nature of it, the compromises people come to town and are forced to make, and also, when writing about Joe McCarthy, the indecency and lies that he put forward that people didn't take a stand about.
I'm not a particularly good liar.
Politicians lie.
My back isn't great.
I don't really get nervous anymore unless there's a big interview.
I certainly don't think that it's the job of any journalist to make the presidency work.
We've gone through many different permutations of coffee-making, from grinding our own beans to the regular drip to an iced coffee maker.
My job is to not take for granted when somebody says, 'Oh, this is all just a made-up, phony scandal,' or, 'What this person did put the U.S. government at risk.'
Equating brutality and despotism with leadership is not an American value.
There are news sources that are just out-and-out lies coming from Europe, coming from other parts of the world.
My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!
We often think our legacy will be our achievements. But often our legacy will be whether we set a moral standard.
