Tapper on the Trail: “It Beats You Up, But It’s Worth It”

By SteveK 

Last Thursday, I spoke with ABC News’ new White House correspondent Jake Tapper for mediabistro.com’s “So What Do You Do?” series.

He talks about his new job (he’s “honored” but “it’s also intimidating”), press bias (“there were enough people that the playing field was not even”) and the campaign trail (“It beats you up, but it’s worth it”).

He also gives advice for young journalists, in the context of his negative comments about now-colleague George Stephanopoulos in 1999:

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The lesson is, for any young journalist, that generally speaking, things don’t vanish after you write them, and you’re not going to be 28 forever. It’s not a particularly unique story — I think most journalists have something they’ve written they wish they could go back and erase. But especially those people who start off in the quote-unquote alternative media might feel that way. Seinfeld had this great routine about people who get drunk and go out and live all night and they think that “Sunday Jerry” is a different person. Like, ‘Oh, Sunday Jerry will have to deal with this hangover or get up at seven in the morning,’ as if it’s an entirely other entity. And in a broader way, younger journalists just have to remember that eventually they’ll become Sunday Jerry.

Click here to see the full interview.

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