The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.
Ron Suskind
If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.
To try to be authentic these days, to ask questions of the people in power - it's difficult. This administration has evolved new techniques to handle people like me. Their strategy, in a word, is simple: ignore them.
Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.
I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.
I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.
I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.
By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.
The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.
When you get people standing up saying, 'I'm going to just tell the truth; what do we have to fear?,' it encourages others, and it creates a counterresponse.
If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'
Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.
The fact is, I can vote for anybody; independents, Republicans, Democrats. But I'm a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia.
Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.
All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.
The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.
The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.
The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.
