reporter for reckon. also in alabama, and mark fisher senior at the washington post and executive director of the national association for media literacy. anna clara, first to you. these are alabama s biggest paper this is morning, all saying that roy moore should be rejected by the voters and the democrat, doug jones, should be elected. does it make your job harder on the news side when the opinion side is calling for moore to lose the race? well, being part of the media here in alabama, which is a very conservative state, we re used to hearing the fake news leveled at us pretty much all the time. all i can do is do my job that my sources and do journalism the best that i can. it seems this is a situation where it s not just random
this intermediary who has been described in the past as somebody in the media, on the opinion side, an american, of a libertarian bent. it is as if that s adding to the mystery. if he s gone into this committee and being asked to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, i don t know why he hasn t come one the nail of this intermediary. he said it was an off the record conversation. at some point this person s name is going to come out so he has to come up with it fairly soon. right. off the record is a term of art. as promised, you have tangled with roger stone for a long time. something we revisited on msnbc and you had a lot of choice words for him so let s look at that. total nonsense. never happened. wrong, wrong. ture man behind this whole
after coming here except to pass him in the halls or something. he gave me the independence to do what i needed to do on media buzz. he hired me after i covered him writing tough stories. he was a controversial and colorful character for two decades. the fact he brought me in said a lot about the news side of fox news network at which the opinion side gets a lot of attention. there are so many fine journalists that work here and that s sometimes overlooked in evaluating ailes and fox. bill: very interesting. shannon: he loved, as we ve talked about, a good fight. he loved taking on the media competition and he wanted us to dominate the market and the field out there and he was extremely driven. extremely driven and yet i think there were a lot of stereotypes about him that were not true in my experience once i came to work at fox news. for one thing, even beyond politics, and he was a genius at politics. he was an incredibly good
press, we re reminding people of the historic role of the press. and that ads to me harkens not only to our coverage of the nsa but even the pentagon papers. it s a reminder of what we do under all presidents. and that all governments trying to keep a lot of secrets. our job is to try to figure out why and what those secrets are. that s right. let me ask you about this weekend s controversy. i m sure you ve seen this. some folks on twitter are saying they re canceling their subscriptions because of brett steve stevens, the new york times op-ed columnist. here s his headline over the weekend. he came over from the journal, conservative anti-trump columnist. now he s at the times and now there s all this backlash. what should people know about stevens and why he was hired? two things. first off, to remind people there s a separation between the news side which i run and the opinion side which james bennett runs, so brett doesn t work for me. but let me say something else, the
distortions, particularly on the opinion side. i think the news side is just basically a conservative news organization and stripped of the opinion people like fox and nenews which is a clown show. you mean fox & friends. fox & friends. if they were serious about being in the news business they would get rid of that program. let s face it you and your fox & friends but the point is, if they had wanted to start in a new direction after roger ailes, they had a chance last july. and a chance again just now, tucker carlson taking over at 8:00, the five at 9:00, the numbers very strong for fox, good week in the ratings. bill o reilly meanwhile is on the web doing a podcast. has has he essentially disappeared? a podcast is not the same as a fox news primetime show. i m dubious about these reports that somehow the old gang is