A Quote by Martha MacCallum

I've been doing 'America's Newsroom' and lots of other news shows and writing over the years. That's my thing. — © Martha MacCallum
I've been doing 'America's Newsroom' and lots of other news shows and writing over the years. That's my thing.
My first shift in broadcasting was 2-11 A.M., doing lots of grunt work and running the TelePrompTer for the morning anchors. Luckily, I fell in love the minute I walked into the newsroom, and I've never gotten over that.
I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.
I've been offered quite a few network shows, over the past couple of years, and always turned them down because I never wanted the commitment. The way that it works in America, you do a pilot and then you wait, and I just thought that wasn't really what I was interested in doing, in that moment.
As to a media personality, well that just happened in large measure because people found me amusing, and I did lots and lots of T.V. news interview shows.
Working on 'Newsroom' has given me an appreciation of the struggle that you go through on the 24-hour news cycle. The people who are legitimately attempting to deliver honest news are really facing a tough, uphill climb that's a lot harder than any other time in history.
Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.
I've been very lucky to work in a newsroom where there are lots of strong, funny, clever women in senior positions.
Lots of TV shows say that they are like doing a movie every week, but 'JAG' truly was a huge show. Lots of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, like being launched off an aircraft carrier and being welcomed by military bases all over California.
There are lots of excellent analysts out there. John Holdren at the Harvard Kennedy School, who was just president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has been talking about this stuff for years. There are lots of people out there who understand what’s going on. The problem is, they aren’t much picked up on Fox News.
This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!
I think America is a really interesting place. In New Zealand, we don't sue each other really commonly. There's a really specific reason, like someone's arguing over a fence that's been put up that's too high. Sort of practical things. And journalists are rarely sued for things. Whereas in America, you have a culture where that's the first thing you do. There's an ongoing pattern here where if you've got money, you can bully other people into doing what you want them to do. You don't need to be in it to win, you just need to be in it to be a pest.
Years passed and I hadn't really done much writing. Other than the fact that I'm constantly developing new shows, writing up proposals and stuff.
I fell into presenting after doing about a decade of parody shows of presenter-based shows, and a lot of it was me parodying a presenter, so when I started doing 'Have I Got News For You', I carried on that persona.
I've been a musician and a songwriter for years, since I was a teenager, and made my living doing that on and off for a long time, so when it came to writing comedy material, it was the thing that came easiest to me, the most natural way of writing.
The media is the only business in the world where the customer is always wrong. If you're a news consumer, if you're a customer, and you complain to them, they will tell you that you are not sophisticated enough to understand what they do, and they're tell you to go listen or watch somewhere else. They're not even really doing the news for you. They're doing news for other journalists and other people in government because that's their real audience.
While I was doing 'The Newsroom,' I always had the news on on different networks on different TVs around my house and around my office.
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