Susan Stamberg

I tell you, Bill Seymour, your station manager, to whom my book is dedicated, by the way, an extraordinary human being and a wonderful broadcaster,

was telling me that apparently there was quite a bit of resistance at the beginning.

They very kindly protected me from that.

Maybe that's good management.

I don't know.

I didn't hear about it.

And probably if I'd heard it, it would have shaken my confidence a lot and upset me greatly and changed in some way.

The way I broadcast.

The objection in the beginning was, you don't sound like CBS, you new network.

And his point was, that's right, because there is a CBS.

We don't need to sound like that.

We need to sound like real people.

And some of us are women.

They're real people, too.

And they can certainly present information in a reliable and authoritative way.

What do you mean by that?

Well, it's the old English major in me.

I don't know.

Maybe it's fancier than I can explain or analyze to you.

But I come to news from a background in the arts, in the humanities.