Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism.

I'm always trying to get those interviews that are impossible to get, because they are the ones that are most interesting to the audience.

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.

No one ever wanted to hire me. Ever. I've never been recruited anywhere. I have beat my head against every wall, at every place that I worked.

America is strong because its journalism is strong. That's how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses. And that is where we come in.

Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

Science doesn't care, by and large, what the answers are. It's only interested in getting the right answer. And journalism should be very much that way.

The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.

We have entered a time when a writer's first idea is his best idea, when the first thing a reporter hears is the first thing that she reports. We live in a time now when we have seen major television networks take video off of YouTube and broadcast it to millions of Americans without verifying whether the video had been fabricated or not.

America's demographic shift was obvious to everyone in the 2010 Census - but Republicans stubbornly rejected math, facts, and polls to their electoral peril. While Republicans tailored their platform by and for the pale stale and male, among us, Obama and Democrats are embracing America's diverse mosaic.

Baseball calls it a curve ball for a reason: you just don't know where some pitches will land. Your ace could get injured. Your golden glover could err. Your team could sit through a rain delay. Your manager could get ejected. Your bench must be broad and deep enough to overcome.

Baseball fans are collectively the '10th man' and needed most when team performance is shaky. When mistakes are made, there's no need to heckle your team - that's what the other side is for!

Campaign boot camp started as an opportunity to work in a grassroots way with people who were running for Congress. Colleagues on the Democratic National Committee were batting around different possibilities. I said, 'We should have boot camps.'

Conservatives and companies condoned Rush Limbaugh's politics of personal destruction when it came to smearing elected officials. 'Fair game,' they said, even when crass and crude. That's just the way it is.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

Having seen my mom in community volunteer work my whole life and in Congress for 25 years, it is true as she often says that she sees her service as an extension of her role as a mother and a grandmother.

I worked as a prosecutor watching Catholic priests charged with sex abuse and saw firsthand how the 'circle the wagons' mentality revictimized the innocent, coddled the guilty, and made matters worse for everyone.

In politics, all candidates and volunteers are ambassadors to voters who expect better than parroting the politics of personal destruction. Being able to find common ground at the higher ground is what separates the stateswoman from the stuntwoman.

Most Americans believe that with freedom comes responsibility - and that one measure of responsible gun ownership is a background check. There must be an app for that.

My earliest memories of my mom were of her multi-tasking - preparing dinner while checking on homework and housework; clearing the dinner plates while setting out bowls for breakfast; making sure we ate our breakfast while lining up bread, lunch meats, apples, and snacks assembly-line style so we could make our lunches.