TV news is what you want it to be, and if you want it to be different, take a look at what you watch.

The spread of communications technologies - social media, TV news channels - aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.

When I was 15, I had my own epiphany about how cool TV news looked.

I was in sixth grade. I loved TV news. I acknowledge that I was also in awe of Barbara Walters interviewing Patrick Swayze and dancing with him.

Let me clarify a few things about TV news on the national level at NBC and MSNBC. We write our own stories. There is no teleprompter for reporters. No traveling makeup artists or stylists. And there is very little sleep.

Early on, even before he was the front-runner, TV news was giving Trump far more attention than other candidates and far more than he deserved.

My friends in the TV news business are in a state of despair about Donald Trump, even as their bosses in the boardroom are giddy over what he's doing for their once sagging ratings.

I don't think we treat people very well in the media, both as customers - and I call them customers - of newspapers and magazines, or TV news, and we don't understand that the greatest story that we could tell, each and every day, is the story of the people around us.

TV news is not very instructive.

Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program, it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

The 800-pound gorillas of TV news are gone. When I was the White House correspondent at NBC, and Tom Brokaw was anchor, the reporters were protected.

We have a responsibility to show the public the kinds of truths that they don't see on the TV news or the Hollywood film.

In a world of cell phones and satellite feeds - a world in which the president can sit in the White House situation room and watch a military action unfold on the other side of the world - it is not realistic to expect TV news to be anything but what it has become: a ceaseless flow of words and images that may or may not be accurate.

When it was announced that I was going to be on 'Castle,' there were immediate messages on all the TV news sites from 'Firefly' fans hoping for a nod to the series - some encrypted business just for them! I can't promise that, but I can say that a few people out there might get a thrill.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.