Sharyl Attkisson

Sometimes I rub people the wrong way, although I'm very polite.

News organizations would best serve the public by sticking to the facts and the news. Speculation should be minimized.

When analysis and opinion are invited, various viewpoints should be represented. Allegations of political blame, when they occur, should be reasonably challenged on all sides, as good journalism requires.

From what I can tell, pollsters are generally fairly stick-to-the-facts folks. They deal in facts and statistics.

The bottom line is: Polls can be provocative, informative, fun or maddening. But as we move into 2020, it's important to be mindful that news organizations or those interpreting their polling results may not always be providing context that would allow us to have the most complete and accurate picture of the public's mood at a given moment.

My own view is that only under very limited circumstances, and on a case-by-case basis, should we make advance policy decisions to artificially minimize information or censor it from the public's view.

Early coronavirus fatality rates as often cited may appear worse than they actually are for a majority of the public because they do not include the many undiagnosed, asymptomatic cases; and because they do not reflect the dramatically elevated risk for the elderly compared to the rest of the population.

I'm not a professional political analyst, so my political analysis is worth about what you pay for it.

My prediction for the 2016 race was based on a variety of observational and anecdotal evidence. I listened to Democrats, Republicans and independents across the U.S. I talked to people who consider themselves apolitical.

In fact, by Democrats pursuing the strategy of attacking everything President Trump does as the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stuff, their criticism has just become white noise to many Americans.

I just don't care what people think. I'm just trying to do what I think is right.

Obviously, if I cared about what people said about my reporting, I wouldn't be a good journalist.

I gave up a long time ago thinking that people had to like or agree with what I was doing.

Even amid the heated political rhetoric that dominates the news media and social media, resurrected false claims about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., stand out as egregious.

Much like CBS and CNN are run by liberal billionaires, Sinclair is run by a rich conservative, so there are natural questions to be asked, especially when Sinclair is poised to become such a powerhouse.

But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That's why my case is even more dangerous than the others.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods.

My court fight is clearly an uphill battle. The Department of Justice has unlimited tax dollars to spend obstructing and fighting my case, which is now in its fourth year.

We Americans like to believe we live in a free country with the right to use the justice system to ensure that government abuses are stopped or redressed. That's far from the truth, and it's an awful thing to experience first-hand.

Yes, there's still much good journalism to be found, if you know where to look. Yet, ask reporters who've been around a while, and many will tell you that a lot of good journalism is being left unpublished.

Formerly well-respected news organizations and experienced national journalists are making the sorts of mistakes that aren't tolerated in journalism schools. When their mistakes are corrected at all, it's with little seeming regret.

Many Americans are eagerly watching the devolution of traditional news with relish because they agree with the prevailing narratives, whether based on true facts or imagined fiction.

Obama administration officials who were in key positions on Sept. 11, 2012, acknowledge that a range of mistakes were made the night of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Benghazi, and in messaging to Congress and the public in the aftermath.

If you've read my New York Times bestseller 'Stonewalled', you know that I'm a fan of an intellectual exercise I call the Substitution Game. It involves comparing how the press treats similar events or people depending on how the reporter or news organization feels about the issue or the newsmaker.

As reporters set aside their traditional role as fact seekers and veer into advocacy, they find themselves on a slippery journalistic slope.