The Mirror: How did you get involved in journalism?
Brian Williams: The way you are. I was interested in current events. I mean my family traces it to about the age of eight and I made a deal with myself to start reading The New York Times everyday at 14, and I’ve never missed a newspaper. It’s just probably a function of growing up in the Cold War. Growing up, color television arrived in our house in 1968, I was nine years old. The Vietnam War was going on, the space program, the Johnson presidency. With all of that, I found The Times so interesting and I couldn’t think of anything I would rather do [than read the paper]. I was the editor of my high school, college and local papers. Fortunately for me, about the only thing I can do without concentrating is writing. I write for a living, I write all day long. People don’t understand that we, as anchors and managing editors of these broadcasts, write most of what we say, so that’s primarily my job.
TM: Do you get a chance to do creative writing or just nonfiction writing?
BW: It’s all nonfiction. I do an occasional piece for The New York Times or Time or Newsweek when they ask.. I like doing book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, but never delve into the unknown. I am such a creature of the known that it’s tragic. Really, when I read for leisure it’s all nonfiction, it’s all biography. I’m a presidential history buff. I’m really boring, is what I’m trying to tell you.
TM: This is just sort of just a fun question. I remember a couple of weeks back you were on Conan O’Brien doing a skit.How did you get involved in that?
BW: Conan is five floors above me. The true answer is I’m on his cancellation list. So when you’re in the talk show business there is always some young movie star who can’t get out of her hotel room in the morning and people’s life get cancelled. So there are a number of us, there’s Roker, Brokaw, Lauer, me. We just kind of make ourselves available. The company comes to you and says hey, if Conan loses a guest do you guys mind going on short notice. I think I’ve probably done 14 Conan’s. I’ve done six or seven Leno’s, five or six Letterman’s. I go on Stewart a lot. For a while I was known simply as the giant head of Brian Williams on John Stewart’s show. A brilliant idea he had just to take my head. We are going to do some more of that and it’s fun. I have a very one-dimensional business. My own children, I have a daughter in college, a son in high school, don’t really know the person who’s on a half hour a night. That’s not who I am, it’s not remotely who I am at home, so the reason I did SNL three weeks ago was to have more fun. Life is awfully short. In my day job I often get shot at; I cover terrible things and it gives you a different dimension of life, that’s all.
TM: What issue do you think students or most Americans should be focusing on now?
BW: Well I think, obviously, we have a chance here to make a huge choice. Not since 1952 has the United States not had a candidate already set up with one party or another, whose vice president is someone else and coming forward to run. This is an open election. We’re at war on two fronts. One of the messages I plan to give voice to today is that I think we ought to bear down and concentrate. We are a nation of 98 million blogs. We’re all talking, we’re all pretty obsessed with our own lives. Some things are bigger than us and in the America I grew up in, we had so many fewer medial choices that families would actually gather for the evening news, which I am on now. We don’t have that anymore, so I think there was something, in a way, better about our collective viewing experience, in our involvement in society. I think we felt more of an investment in the country and the direction that it’s going in. Now we are so torn up, our attention span is going 500 different ways. When we gather at Nightly News every morning to have our editorial meeting, you put 30 people in a room, no two of them will have seen the same thing the night before. That’s a change we have seen in the 48 years that I’ve been alive. So, I think we have a big year ahead. Everybody ought to buckle down and make sure that these two choices we get for president are going to be the very best, because this is the last chance we are going to have in four years and the times are very important right now.
TM: Do you think with the advent of all the new media, mainly the Internet, that this is helpful or hurtful to society?
BW: I think it’s a mixture. The fact that I can Google, first of all the fact that that’s a new verb, the fact that I can Google right now with my Blackberry a diagnosis of an ailment, look up a medication, find out what Mark Twain’s second published work was in three seconds, is an amazing development. The fact that I can also go home and write a blog about the paralyzing choice I faced for lunch, ham salad or chicken salad. That I would take time to write it, post it, would be an assumption that people would be interested in spending some of their day’s time to read it, and then post a comment about it, that’s where I think we have to recognize it’s a new invention. We’re going a little crazy, let’s calm down and let’s buckle down and get to work.
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