Posted on 01/01/2009 1:30:17 PM PST by STARWISE
Here's the extremelty candid and touching segment about his reactions after the suicide of his son.
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And on the particular night, he was drinking and speeding, I guess, afterwards down on Canal Road and the police chased him.
He tried to get away. Ran his car into a puddle. Stalled the car out. Got caught. He thought it was all over. He thought this was a ruinous development from which his life and career would not recover.
That was crazy.
He committed suicide.
Fortunately, for me, I was – I escaped the terrible burden of guilt that one might have when you think, if only I’d had a better relationship with him.
I had a wonderful relationship with him. And I didn’t – I didn’t have to look back and say, if only I’d done this or done that. I mean, it was – I had none of that, which was a tremendous relief.
The other thing was that a time like that, Brian, is when you find out what you really believe.
And I grew up in Washington. I went to St. Albans School nine years. Church school. Baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church. I was a kind of nominal Christian all those years.
Suddenly this unspeakable tragedy hits. And at a moment like that you find out what you really believe.
And the one thing I recognized almost instantly was that I believed in God and I believed that God would come to my rescue.
And I remember I said to people and it was kind of a half in jest, but it – there was truth to it, that I kept expecting in the days after what happened to Sandy that the phone would ring. And I’d pick up the phone and the voice on the other one would say, this is God. This is what this was about, because it seemed so inexplicable.
And it seemed so undeserved for him, for me and for everyone else in the family. Well, obviously, nothing like that occurred, but something did occur.
Somewhere in the middle of that, I felt closer to God and to Christ than I had ever felt in my life, which is in a sense paradoxical. But there it was. And it was unmistakable.
And I got – I don’t think what the exact number was within about three weeks of his death, I had received in my mailbox, this is quite apart from any emails, and a reason I have a number in my head is that my assistant and I were sending out thank you responses to the people who wrote to me. The number within three weeks had hit 973.
Now, look, my program on Fox was just starting then.
BRIAN LAMB: 973 letters.
BRIT HUME: 973 letters, prayer cards, expressions by mail to me of sympathy, support and so on. I would go home at night and my mailbox would be crammed with them.
Sometimes, there’d be some on top of the mailbox. And I read everyone of them. Everyone of them. And I remember, I wept over some of them. And I – but I was enormously buoyed by this outpouring.
Now, think about this, Brian. I mean, my – Fox News was really kind of nowhere. This was 1998. We were just in business a couple years. We were mired deep in third place. The ratings for – we were doing 25,000, 30,000 viewers tops some nights. My show had just started. I’d been – had some people who knew of me from my days at ABC News, but I was--compared to where Fox News and the people on it are now, we were nowhere.
So, somehow, this event touched these people and somehow they found in them to respond. I consider it to be sent a miracle. And it was – and I, I mean, I just felt so buoyed by it. So supported. So loved. And I thought, thank you, God.
~~Very interesting interview .... PING!
BRIAN LAMB: What this – let me stop for a second and ask you about this.
David Brinkley, Dan Rather, John Chancellor, Jane Pauley, Barbara Walters and Nina Totenberg and others, are they all objective?
BRIT HUME: None of us is objective. You can’t be objective. But what you can try to be is fair.
I mean, David Brinkley, as I recall, is one of the first people I ever heard say that. You can’t be objective. You’re a sentient, thinking, human being. You’re going to have views in reaction to things.
But I’ll say this about it. I believe that fairness begins with an awareness that no, you’re not objective. And it is your professional duty and responsibility to be aware of that. And to carry that with you into the work that you do so that you can be fair. So, you could screen out.
You can be – you can think if you go to a hearing and you think that the politician whose running the hearing is obstreperous personality, whether it’s Phil Graham or Barney Frank, that you think, I got to be careful here, because I don’t particularly cotton to this person. I need to make sure that I play this straight. That I’m fair. I think that’s where it begins. I’ve always thought that. And it’s not that hard to do.
I mean, think of the people in the professions that we – other professions that we – in the practice of law. Lawyers represent clients they disagree with. They even represent viewpoints they disagree with. They do it all the time. And they do a good job of it, because they’re professionally trained to do it.
We as journalists are or should be professionally trained to do that as well. To go out and assess a story based on its news value and to order it and prioritize what we see in such a way as to reflect news values and report it that way.
BRIAN LAMB: Did Roger Ailes ever say to you in a conversation, we’re going to use this fair and balanced slogan and it’s going to drive them crazy?
BRIT HUME: He said, it was going to drive them crazy. He said, he knew it was going to drive them crazy.
BRIAN LAMB: But let me show you.
BRIT HUME: It does drive them crazy.
Now look, Brian, the examples I cited to you earlier – the earlier example of that story is a meaningful example is the kind of thing that where we see opportunity where others see nothing.
Now, can anyone, Geneva Overholser or anyone else seriously argue to me than when a report comes out from an administration that a year ago said that progress – satisfactory progress was being made on half of these political benchmarks, which had been so much at the center of the debate. And a year later comes along and reports more than twice as much. That that isn’t news. Of course, it’s news by any reasonable, fair-minded standard.
Our colleagues neglect such stories with some regularity, providing us a competitive opportunity. We pickup on stories like this.
~~~
Brit will be missed.
FNC isn’t perfect, but where would we be if we learned news the way we did BEFORE FNC?
This was a great interview. I caught probably the last half of it. Brit seems like a great guy, like your neighbor.
Thanks for the thread!
Brit is a wonderful MAN and a marvelous JOURNALIST and it
shows in every segment of his show. He is just the BEST
there is!
Thanks for this report...I had missed it on TV.
Very sad about his son...I didn’t know about his suicide. =\
Thanks for the thread.
Brian Lamb and Brit Hume are the best media guys on TV. Period.
God Bless CSPAN.
Great guy...and the best news man in the country...maybe the World.
Didn’t realize that you could watch THE WHOLE INTERVIEW with Brit Hume, but there’s a link on the article page I just discovered ... to the right. It’s a fantastic interview.
http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1189
It crashed Firefox for me, but I reopened the Q&A site in Internet Explorer, and it’s playing just fine.
He is such a decent professional. FNC and we will be poorer without his presence every day.
Excellent interview. I watched it last night.
Brit Hume is a class act in every sense of the word. Special Report will not be the same without him.
BRIAN LAMB: Did Roger Ailes ever say to you in a conversation, we’re going to use this fair and balanced slogan and it’s going to drive them crazy?
BRIT HUME: He said, it was going to drive them crazy. He said, he knew it was going to drive them crazy.
They bent too far back with their ‘fair and balanced’
Thanks for the ping Star! This is a phenomenal story, just phenomenal.A real inside look at Britt! What a great American.
I am really going to miss Brit Hume. I think you know why. Fair is so hard to find these days.
No other network offers what they do ... zero, nada.
They broke the steel barrier of the lib press. Sure, they hire folks with a more liberal bent, but you won’t find ANY of the conservative viewpoints in the numbers they do anywhere else.
Other networks have been forced to add conservatives .. a totally new wrinkle .. due to FNC, to stay competitive, and FNC is #1.
He truly is .. the last of the real journalists.
4 later
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