Examines the changing technology on journalism. He is in conversation with Susan Glasser of politico. Also the author of a new book overload finding todays truth in news. It is an honor to be with you. I am a little bit humbled to be given the task of interviewing such a legendary interviewer but thank you for taking the time. Time. Guest thank you, and im honored to be interviewed by y you. You are a wellknown person in journalism, and it is good to be with you. Host we are trying to make sense of the effects right now. We might as well go ahead and start with the proverbial elephant in the room, the president ial tweeter in chief. Once again, they are fairly consistent. The president of the United States said it isnt freedom of the press when others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even when it is completely false. That was not an accident. Its frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. The First Amendment seems to allow us to write whatever we want to write. How do we make sense having a president that doesnt seem to buy into the First Amendment . Guest i wish i would have thought of this first because when the president said its disgusting that they can write anything they want to write and we ought to look into this, jake said i did look into this and heres the u. S. Constitution. And thats the interesting part to me. The administration has tried to picture us at the Opposition Party as people that somehow want to run the government or run campaigns. That is not what we do. What we do is remember first of all the politicians deliver a message. That is what they are supposed to do. Our job is to check the message if it is true or false and what the impact will be you cant have our form of government unless they have independently gathered information that they can compare to the governance version of events and then they decide what to do about it. If we do that, we have performed a crucial role and im not sure you can have democracy as we know it without that. It is as important as the right to vote. And yet the president doesnt agree with it. Host if the president doesnt accept the best in the freedom of the constitution. Guest all of this namecalling now ive been called every name one could be called off way back to the Nixon Administration and that i was referred to as a female hygiene product. I get it all but i dont Pay Attention to that part o of allf this that is going on. What i do Pay Attention to and i am very concerned about is when people try to destroy the credibility of the free press. Whether it is the president or anyone else in a position of power. Most president s dont like the press and you can understand why because they are not under this microscope this is what we are supposed to be doing. To somehow suggest that we shouldnt, do they want only a government where the only information comes from the government . Even donald trump doesnt want that if you stop to think about it there are authoritarians around the world often to start off by attacking the press is not that much difference between his tweets about the press and the words weve heard from turkeys leader or vladimir putin. To follow through, overload is the title of the book. How much is it a threat to that democracy that you talk about if we are doing our independent reporting but it doesnt make a difference and people can no longer tell what your gloss is on the news . Guest the first thing we have to do is keep doing what youre doing and that is to sort out the truth from the false and that is an overwhelming job. Its a bigger responsibility than we have ever had because we are dealing with so much more information. We now have access to more information than anyone else in the history of the world. But we are running a little short on kerry hers right now and getting so much information that we really cannot process it with the coming of the web and now digital it is harder and harder to separate this stuff out. We used to hire people to go out and find the news and now we have to have an equally large group of people just sorting through the information we already have defined which is true, which is not true, which is relevant. So it is just this overwhelming overload of information, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And i would argue and i do talk about this in the book that i think the coming of the way is as great and profound an impact on the culture as the coming of the Printing Press on the people of europe and that they. We all talk about for the great thing for a printin about prints an obviously, it was literacy was increased. We saw the counter reformation that we sometimes dont think about the result of the religious war before they reached the story of equilibrium. I dont think we are quite there yet. We are thinking about the first trimester of this revolution of it and seeing it in technology. It doesnt feel like equilibrium i must say. So, tell me, you started this amazing career in the 1950s. How different do you believe the media and the political atmosphere was, obviously there is the centralized world as a reporter, how different wasnt . Guest everything was turned upside down. Nothing is as it was. I got my first job when i was 20yearsold. It was my sophomore year and i went to work at this little Radio Station at fort worth. They had a technological breakthrough. What would happen if we had these trucks loaded up and we would listen to the Police Radios in the raced to the scene and the strokes and with a twoway radio we did on the scene reports. We didnt have even recording devices in those days. We were still on the wire recorder that we couldnt play back a tape from the scene. But he would just interview people on the scene and then later i went to work at a telegram and the Police Reporter whose name was promoted to the night city editor and we covered a lot of the wrecks together and he interviewed me to take his place. The orderly way that we gathered the news in those days and most towns had three television stations in a pretty good newspaper, and whether or not you agree with the editorial policy of the paper, we were generally find something was on the front page of the paper or broadcast on the network is cominnews,you assume it was truy had gone to some effort to check it out and they didnt print things that wasnt true so we base our opinions on the data that we were getting from those television stations and local newspapers. What has changed now and turn everything around is now you have 700 channels on television and even more than that on the web. We are not getting the same facts. If you listen to this source over here and somebody else listens to this one over here, you bring different facts and so people are basing their opinions now on different data, not on the data that they used to and i think that is the number one change that has come about and only now are we coming to realize how profound it is. Host you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own set of facts and that has been reversed. Talk about the policy. Obviously you mentioned on negativism. In the 1950s during the mccarthyism we have seen president ial campaigns in which the media were pointed out and you were called names and everybody else, so how is this different from the point of view in the Political Press . It is more intense because there is more of it and also because of the lightning speed that the news travels. In my early days in fort worth covering the politics about ten days out from any election, there was always a Whisper Campaign that one of the candidates had a girlfriend on the east side. Why, i dont know. We would check these things out and most of the time they didnt amount to anything. There is no such thing as the Whisper Campaign in politics anymore. Some of the signs of Something Like that, they put it on a blog and suddenly it is out there. Taking it down, its had more of an impact i think on politics than it has as journalists because the person running for office, he or she has to decide do i ignore this and hope it goes away . Do i comment and give it wide distribution, and even we see now if people deny things that are made up, they still hold on. It is still a percentage of people in the country that think barack obama is not an american citizen. How much Fact Checking will it do to finally knock that down . Pizza place in washington. I Hillary Clinton in the basement totally in the foundation. They fired her weapon and he was going to shoot the doorknob off so he could go down in the basement and rescue his children. The first thing he found out his there is no basement of their. He was arrested, taken away and is in the court system now. But there are still a number of people who believe that. Demand he leaves it still has to have private security because hes getting death threats. That is what has changed, the speed with which this stuff happens. Mark twain or winston churchill, somebody said a lie can go around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on and that is more true today than ever, that is what we are dealing with. Thinking back to the 2016 campaign, as i try to inflict on what went on, it wasnt that journalists didnt do a good j job, but including unprecedented amounts of Fact Checking of the public statements and the fact that we are already on the record made many of them very alarming and that is what this challenging for us as journalists we have more transparency and information about the public fingers than ever before and less accountability. It didnt seem to matter. Host people who have done the psychological studies about what has come to become known as fake news and why is it so difficult to take them down. One of the things that happens is you counter this like we did in the obama a birth certificate saying heres the newspaper article that appeared in the paper the day that he was born. But there is a certain number of people that they see what they call kind of a backfire effect, and that becomes part of it. They say no, that isnt true. I. This just made up. And once it is there and they believe these things like america never went to the moon, it was all made up, you can always convince people with the facts, and that is the part that is very hard for us. How do we do this and i think in most cases we will never be able to completely take down some of the stories that are made up of the whole cloth. Host the golden age of conspiracy theories. So, lets stifle back for a second. This is a really interesting project that gave rise to the buck. When you decided to step away from face the nation, you decided to be a podcast or which i am now, too and i guess like you i wasnt listening to a million podcasts five years ago. This is a whole new medium. Some you have this series and its given rise to this transformation in the media. Tell me about how that came about. Guest i know so little about podcasts i thought they were called an ipod. Andrew schwartz is the chief of communication. We got to know about rumors and all this stuff going on. By people having a credible press they can believe what do you read and what is reported and so we started kicking this around and decided to start coming to these podcasts called about the news. One thing led to another and somewhere along the way they said maybe we ought to put out a study like think tanks to. If we are going to do that, i would assume write this book. We must have interviewed 45 or Something Like that and i need from places as some of which i had never heard of and it turns out that they were very influential. The good news about the podcast and the good news about the internet is the internet makes all of these kind of things possible and that is great news. The bad news is that they can all find each other now. When i came into journalism and people used to talk about maybe we should license journalists. Our licenses the First Amendment and anybody in the Printing Press is the publisher and nobody can tell them not to be. You dont nee need the inc. Or e Printing Press anymore because anybody with a phone is the publisher of the point i try to make in the book is that everything that you see on the internet is not embedded in the way organizations like you and i work for. We give it the oldfashioned way and that is we do not print or broadcast anything unless weve made a effort to find out if that is true. Especially now that we are into the social meeting and it is just a different deal that people are still getting that information. How do you find them to be different than face the nation interviews . Guest when he tried to time them about the time a person would work out, most people were killed about 40 minutes, so that means the most popular links that we do not have any set, ten, nine, eight and you are off kind of thing. I really like them because you can do like we are doing today. We can talk about a lot of Different Things in some details. Face the nation in a lot of the interviews are eight minutes long and that is pretty long for an interview on the daily news. I think it is just the time that you have and they are a little more informal which i think is good. I am more of an advocate on parenthetical phrases and all dot. So the podcasts fit into my way of viewing and reporting. Host we talk a lot about the crisis of newspapers for example, but it strikes me that podcasting and the ability to go along and pursue your interests is a pretty direct challenge to other broadcast mediums as well. Guest im not sure that i would call it a challenge but i think it is a great new innovation. If i do not get a chance to read the newspaper, i read it when i get to the office. I read the times and post and the wall street journal that are delivered to my house. They do read the news apps on their phone, and i think eventually that is where most newspapers if they are going to succeed. I think tv is going to be around. It is the service we have now, basically a 24 hour news chann channel. It is a streaming service aimed at a file, we want everybody to watch it but it is aimed at a younger audience. Lets just say i think the morning shows are going to be around for a long time. They already know what the news is, so it is our assignments to try to broaden that are in some way into the more analytical than we have in the past. I want to turn on the television in the evening and see what cbs thought it was the most importanwas the most importantt. I think 60 minutes is going to be around forever. The sunday morning shows like face the nation and meet the press have a long line and we may see the evening news broadcasts go the way of the afternoon. But right now, theyve still got five to 7 million people. That is an enormous audience compared to what you see on cable, but they are there all day. They turn on their tv at 6 30 at night we are going to provide a service for them, but that may change and it may be generational. The ages for a Network Programs are older folks. Those audiences are getting bolder but i think you will see most move to a streaming kind of Service Program and face the nation i think they are going to be there for a long time. They add to repeat. Guest they are expensive to produce. They spend a lot of money and it is obvious because they investigate for months when they are doing these programs and it takes a large workforce, but the difference in that we have to maintain a reporting staff in the newspapers around the world to be able to cover the unexpected. What they can do any reasonable way if they dont have to be prepared to cover the unexpected. When something happens they can pick and choose. They dont have to be responsible for telling you every single thing that happened that day so that is the basic economics of it. Host what surprised you in this as he went around and interviewed the sort of types of the new media . Guest it was fun to start with. They are not all young. I call him the bridge between old journalism and new. He is just a fascinating character. I lovi love to be around report. I think they are funny and interesting. David eisenhower said that they are not as interesting as they think they are but they are probably interesting like david eisenhower. Hes a nice fellow. I shouldnt say that. I will tell you something, it is also a good way to figure out who is getting their news and where the resources are. If you talk to enough reporters covering the white house host which is what your podcast has morphed into. Guest and we decided that the interesting story right now was donald trump and how he is being covered. So we are basically just kind of talking to people only in the white house and its really fun because they all have tale to tell. People always ask me what is your favorite beach, because ive covered them all. They say i guess its the white house, right . Theyll work for the same guy. My favorite has always been capitol hill as they are all independent contractors and that is how you get news. But that isnt really apt anymore because now there are as many factions in this white house as there are on k. They pretty much o are on the se page for the most part and there was a certain discipline. They all talk to reporters and talk about each other. A lot of them dont like others in the white house and its most unusual, that would be the best way to put it back from the standpoint of being a reporter, you are under pressure but its also google turned up some news. Host how does it compare with the Ronald Reagan white house . He came to blow up some of its orthodoxies. Guest you know, he did. He put together a great team led by jim baker. Not the best person for the best politician. Thats what im saying. The second best i would say is melvin who was the secretary of defense. Secretary of defense. He had been on the hill and was a master of understanding mike johnson. And a the third one was jim bakr but somehow or another had thiss ability to understand how to make things work. He understood perfectly how the press operated and he didnt see them as an enemy, he saw them as something he could use and sometimes heated probably more than the press would like to admit. He knew part of that was communicating in the press. If he was going to be on face the nation he would have a mock court or something where he was prepared for that. He had an enormous influence and was also very good at having so much they brought john kelly as the chief of staff and all of that. Baker is a master of that and he wainfamous to close friend and bought that he would be the chief of staff. He picked him to be his chief of staff. Host a friend of his primary. Guest exactly. He had it organized down and they would get together every morning to decide what would keep the story of the day and then they focus on that and have a very good ability to present him at his past. He knew what he stood for and was comfortable in his own skin and he knew who he was. When things were not going right, he sensed that and his wife played a huge role in that. She was the best of all hollywood lives and always had his back and was always keeping in touch with things he didnt have time to but i think baker was a terrific politician in the best sense of the word. But politicians, we need good politicians, we do not have many anymore, and he was the best. Host so hes missing jim baker or is there Something Different but you perceive compared with Ronald Reagan and previous. Guest without talking about the position on the issues, he has a striking unfamiliarity with how the process works, and he said he was going to drain the swamp and i think that its good to change folks in the white house. They shouldnt be career positions in all of that, but the interviews they did with donald trump during the campaign had little he knew about American Foreign policy and the relationship with japan and with the allies. Its how the government works. He picked tillers and who is the kind of person who in private life that you think like people of that nature can come into government and bring what they knew and what they learned. They wont let him bring in while he does say something, trump doesnt hesitate to cut his nails off underneath him. When you look at the business background come he is basically a mom and pop Grocery Store run by the family. But it is wrong in that way. He was the boss and everybody did what they were told to do and the presidency is just a much bigger and more complicated job than that. Host what about the journalists that are covering him . You do these each week. Who do you think has had a good response to figuring out this new presidency and be overload factor, who do you think is a good model for its . Guest i think the New York Times and wall street journal is doing a great job and i think politico we dont realize that political has been there for a while now. One thing they can take pride in is where the reporters have go gone. What the post figured out early on is the current model wasnt working and when they bought the spectrum they said i want to make this the best newspaper in america and it may or may not be. They are reaching millions of people now. The circulation is about 400,000 but i think last november they got 70 million views. It wasnt too long ago when politico was reaching more people than the Washington Post. Its been the same but with these newspapers have done, they are no longer newspapers. Theyve reinvented themselves to become Media Companies and they have six or seven platforms. I wrote an oped page during the campaign about the role of the moderator in the president ial debate. It shows up on their website and i called ruth marcus and i said is that it lacks she said no, they have a nice pace reserved for you on the sunday paper but the idea that the opposed or even cbs news would someon withe that would put something on the website before it appeared in newspaperthe newspaper, they did a couple days later somebody called me from the opposed with a Television Department they pulled a few excerpts from others. How about if you come down and we will work on a Little Package which i did and it was great. My story went out on basically four platform. Thats how to make it work and that is what theyve done. The post has integrated the paper wishes they had his i think if newspapers survive we will look back and say he is the one that is most responsible for that. The healthy readers are the ones that benefit from that because we are seeing both of those organizations along with politico and more news is coming up, but some of the things that theyve done have seven respondents and i think they said six and want to have one more. The cure of chief at the times, i had known her for years and she was talking about all the changes. I reminded her that i always say have you noticed we have the internet now and i used to work at a morning newspaper. I know how this works. Then the reporters go off to cover the beat and they go to have lunch with important sources and everybody comes back around 5 30 and write for a 7 00 deadline for the first edition. They are putting out newsletters and analysis and running commentary when there is a big story. Elizabeth now has two people on the white house staff. My husband of course its a correspondent and he breaks up into donald trump is tweeting at 6 00 in the morning hes already written one or two stories by the time we are getting our son off to school. Then he is finishing up going on tv at 11 00 at night writing a story at 6 00 in the morning. It is a complete merger its not that there arent platforms, but it is a wire Service Report and newspaper reporter and commentator paul wrapped up into one. Guest the good thing about that is when you have this enormous staff and your husband told me all of the reporters think they have a piece of the story. But that is the good thing. We also have an editor working all day. The post is doing the same thing and i dont know who started this, but they now tell you the number of sources that theyve talked to him i think the highest so far as i saw the other day according to the seven sources, why do they do that . Host it is a good question. The white house has been talking to journalists and there are so many factions we all know one of the laws of the washington reporting is if you want somebody to call you back, tell them that you are writing a story about them and they will call you back. But ive got to get back to what you learned in the course of reporting this book. You talked about the good news. What keeps you up at night and what are you worried about that you might not have been until you started . Local newspapers and this is where the crisis in journalism is taking place. I found a couple of pretty startling statistics. 126 newspapers have closed in the last 12 years. Mostly middle size and smaller communities. In 2004, one reporter lived in washington and new york and los angeles and with that we are down now to one in five. You get out into those rust belt areas and they are not exactly overwhelmed with news. They are not getting any news and it seems to be moving forward as we move onto digital and i think in the end that is what they are going to have to do. What they have to do though is a Digital Product has to be better than the product getting in the newspaper now but that is possible and thats how they survive. When you get out into those communities, everybody has a phone that they do not use it as a newsgathering appliance as it were. If you are a minimumwage worker, youre not going to be able to afford the act for the New York Times or Washington Post or journal. They ara journal. They are reasonable but that is a cost. Its optional. Youre probably not going to be able to do that. You probably do not get cable anymore because the fees for that have become so high and you may not even have a Television Set anymore. Many times the news that you are getting your just coming into contact by accident or you can buy facebook. I think when i started writing this book it was 62 getting news on facebook and social media. I think it is 67 now. But an enormous number of people are, which is fine. It is a wonderful thing, but what you are getting is not in the way that we have expected of the traditional news outlets but if the local newspapers go away and as you know because you are in the industry if they go the way we will have production that weve never experienced before so someone has to fill out that void. Host we are not quite a year out from the 2016 election and learning the efforts by russia to infiltrate and they appear to have launched a campaign of targeting americans through facebook and twitter that might not be visible and dont reach. How does that affect your view of the platform and is it something that comes to the democracy . Guest what theyve discovered and what they are doing across central drug they dont have their tanks across the border anymore. They have cyber and they go in and day by the loca they bribe l officials. They put fake news to try to destroy the credibility of the countries media. They are in total control. Its really under the control of russia right now. They have the kremlin playbook where they studied i think it was five countries across Central Europe and what the russians were doing and this is what they were doing in each one of them. When you see and understand that you have nothing to do with the election, of course all of our intelligence agencies say they didnt when you add on to what theyve been doing in europe and its working, the National Security expert at harvard and in government thinks they were just trying to disrupt and stabilize you could destabilize whether they were colluding with russia. They were doing this an and they got the involvement, so thats why i think we have to keep up with the investigation of whats going on. Its someone who doesnt like to talk about this and for whatever his reasons. This is going to go on for a while but i think it is going to be very significant. Host you covered washington during watergate. Do you think there will be echoes of that period in the decisiveness of the possibility that Congress Might have to decide what to do about the president . Guest perhaps the. Im not trying to dodge the question but i think we are seeing echoes of that sort of thing and where it goes. People are already talking about the 25th amendment. I think we are a long way from that. If you could remove the president because of some sort of medical issue i dont think that is the way that you resolve the problems quite frankly so i do not see that happening. But what goes beyond that i think a lot of it will depend on how the investigation comes out. We are not through this yet and its going to be a problem for a while. We just have to keep doing what we do and keep asking questions until we get answers. Host im glad you brought that up because i do think that we should bring this full circle. Its been almost a year amazingly enough and we are still examining what went on and what went wrong or not with journalism in 2016. I see that you are still an optimist on the reporting about factoffacts and why they matter. But how do you be an optimist when it comes to the fact there were so many facts out there on the record and they didnt seem to matter . My concern has been about accountability that accompanied the transparency that the journalism was unearthing a. Guest you can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink. We have to put it out there and people will come to a conclusion sometimes it takes a long time for the American People to come to the conclusion. We went to hamilton after the book and hbuck and he says in tk the founders didnt promise us a perfect government, they promised a selfgovernment. That is where we are right now and our job, we cannot be intimidated and deterred because we are going to play an Important Role ive never seen anything like it thus became a game i think they all have designated drivers as far as i know there were no injuries that came out of that but i think this has something to do with the change in the way we get the news and onto our politics. The way we select the candidates is in worse shape. He is a reality tv star and on the other side i like Hillary Clinton and i think shes eminently qualified to be president. They have only one person with enough of a National Following to be a candidate. How did that happen . They were running the office and serving in Public Office so awful that the best and brightest wants nothing to do with it. They turn away. The senate is in the most powerful country in the history of the world and she says my time is better spent doing something else. A good citizen on a free account what we are seeing now is the beginning of something happening in both parties. On the republican side there is a widespread war within. And its not much better over on the democratic side. I think when i was writing the book i came across something. Its anytime in the histor any f either party i wouldnt despise that we dont have a third strong thirdparty candidate whether it is from the left or the right. Because what i have seen is that the Republican Party seems to be using more to the right, the Democratic Party seems to be moving more to the left. So, it is getting deeper and wider and i had no idea who the candidates would be next time. Host you are such an optimist about the idea that we should keep practicing event and hes uncertain times. So if you were the chair in the podcast, who would you want . Guest i think the pope would be an interesting interview and does he have anything to do with this political situation. Number two, i find this one the most fascinating. I am not a religious person in any particular way but i think thats about as far as it goes but ive always been interested in religion and i would like to talk to him. Donald trump called up and said come over here i would like to debate. I always tell people who are the who would you like to interview and i say whoever the president is because the president always makes news and ive interviewed trump over the years. My first interview with him is when they couldnt get the ice to freeze over in the skating rink and they spent a bunch of money and he said let me do it i will get it done. It was a great story, private enterprise over the bumbling bureaucracy and all that kind of stuff, it was a good story. Ive interviewed him time to time over the years. Sometimes he likes me and sometimes he doesnt but ive learned to live with that. Host president of trump and the vatican, Bob Schieffer would like to talk to you. Thank you for this incredible conversation it makes me feel better about journalism. Guest thank you. Ive really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Host . [inaudible conversations] could afternoon. Iom a Research Scientist at the global forum