Mark Halperin

and um i loved it i loved it from the first day i loved seeing how the news got made back then dan rather tom brokaw and peter jennings were everything you know they were more famous typically than the presidential candidates they covered and peter became my mentor and from the very first day i got to work with him in the sense that i sat in the newsroom and photocopied and ran script packets around but i just learned a ton about right away about how the news business worked and

and got to see 24-hour news.

Again, pre-internet, but they had telex machines and they had wire services in the computer terminals.

And although I was interested in covering other stories, the presidential campaign was underway.

And ABC had made a huge commitment to covering it.

They had what were then called off-air reporters.

I think there were like 16 presidential candidates in 1988 because it was open race, so there were a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans.

And I got to interact with all those young producers who were out in the field.

And literally, I probably worked there for three weeks.

And I just said, this is it.

This is what I want to do.

I want to work for a big news organization like ABC.

And I want to cover presidential campaigns.

I've never had a bad job.

I had all good jobs.

But I did have bad experiences.

And one of them was in my very first job, my assignment was to

one of the things I did was there'd be a script, a correspondent would write a script in the computer and they'd print it out and then you'd need to photocopy it and you'd need to make like 70 copies and then make a script packet, right?

So the scripts of a show with what Peter Jennings would say, what the announcer would say, what all the correspondent scripts, it'd be like, I don't know, 50 pages.

And you had to assemble them.