Bestselling biographer walter isaacson, nbc news katie tour and many other authors. For more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch previous festival coverage, click on the book fairs tab on our website, booktv. Org. Next on book tvs after words, bob schaffer, former host of face the nation examines the impact of changing technology on journalism. These and conversation with Susan Glasser of politico. Im delighted and honored to be here with the legendary journalist bob schaffer. Bob has shown that there are is no such thing as retirement in the media anymore and after being the host of face the nation for many years, hes come back not only as a podcast or in a journalist whos helping us make sentence of this trump era but also the awesome new book overload finding the truth in todays deluge of news. Bob, its an honor to be with you. Im a little bit humbled to be given the task of interviewing such a legendary interviewer but thank you for taking the time this morning. Guest im honored to be interviewed by you because youre a wellknown person in journalism and its good to be with you. Host we are all trying to make sense of the same sort of overwhelming as you said or overload of facts right now. You might as well go ahead and start with the proverbial elephant in the room. As president ial tweeter in chief, you have a lot of strong views about the media and we seen in recent days they are fairly consistent. Each waited is not freedom of the press when others are allowed to say and write whatever they want, even if it is completely false. That was in august. A few days ago he made it clear that was not an accident and tweeted it is frankly disgusting the waythe press is able to write whatever they want to write. Okay, the First Amendment seems to allow us to write whatever we want to write. How do we make sense of having a president who doesnt seem to buy into the First Amendment . Jake tapper at cnn, i wish we had him 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 and i did look into this and he said heres the u. S. Constitution. Thats the interesting part to me. The trunk administration has tried to picture us as the opposition party, as people that somehow seem to want to run the government or run campaigns, thats not what we do. What we do is remember first of all that politicians deliver a message. Thats what they are supposed to do. Our job is to check out the message and find out if its true or false and what the impact will be on the government. Thats kind of the assignment that the founders gave us and its also a crucial part of democracy. Listen, you cant have our form of government unless citizens have access to independently gather information that they can compare to the governments version of events. Then they decide what to do about it and if we do that, we performed a crucial role. Im not sure how you can have democracy as we know it without that. Its as important as the right tovote. Host and yet the president of the United States doesnt agree and are pushing on this a little bit. How much of a threat is it if the president doesnt seem to expect the basic protection for freedom of the press and the constitution . Guest all this namecalling that were going through right now, ive been called every kind of name one could be called all the way back to the Nixon Administration and nattering, hey bob, recently during the last campaign i was referred to as a female hygiene product. I get it all and look, i dont pay much attention to that part of all this. What i do Pay Attention to and am very concerned about is when people try to destroy the credibility of the free press, theyre going right at the foundation of our democracy and i dont think thats a good thing, whether its the president or anyone else in a position of power. Most president s dont like the press. And you can understand why. Butthose are under this microscope. This is what were supposed to be doing and to somehow suggest that weshouldnt , i mean, do they want only a government where the only information comes from the government . I bet even donald trump doesnt want that, if youstop and think about it. But in the meantime, we have what we have. Look, there are libertarians around the world often start off by attacking the press and you see that happening today rhetorically, theres not much difference between comes to about the press and the words that we heard from say president erdogan or vladimir putin. So far we havent seen actions i should say that followthrough those tweets so 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 . People can no longer tell whats the facts and what is merely your subjective blog on the news. I think it does make a difference and i think people do understand but i think we have to be, the person we have to keep doing is doing what were doing and that is trying to sort out the true from the false. Thats an overwhelming job now, its a bigger responsibility than weve ever had because were dealing with so much more information. We now have access to more information than any people in the history of the world. But were running a little short on curators right now. Were getting so much informationthat we cant process it. With the coming of the web, now, its harder and harder to separate this stuff out. My boss at cnn said you know, we used the higher all these people to go out and find the news. Now we have to have an equally large amount of people sorting through the information we already have 25 which is true, which is not true, which is relevant. No we got this overwhelming overload of information, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And i would argue and you talk about this in the book, that i think with the coming of the way is its great and is as profound an impact on the culture and the coming of the Printing Press did on the people of europe in the day. We all talk about what a great thing the Printing Press was an obviously it was , literacy was increased, we saw the reformation, the counterreformation but we sometimes dont think about the results of 30 years of religious wars for europe started to reach the sort of equilibrium. I dont think were quite there yet. I think were kind of about the first trimester of this revolution that were seeing in technology. It doesnt feel like equilibrium, i have to say. Tell me, you started out this amazing journalistic career in the 1950s. Just how different do you believe the media and political atmosphere was, obviously very centralized media world but as a reporter, how different was it . Everything is turned upside down, nothing is that it was back in those days. I got my first job when i was 20 years old. It was my sophomore year at tcu and i went to work for this little Radio Station in fort worth that was doing, they had technological, what would happen is we had these panel trucks loaded up in Police Radios. And we would listen to the Police Radios and whenever we had what we called a 3rs, or robbery, we raced to the scene in these panel trucks and with a twoway radio, get on the scene reports. We didnt have any even recording, recording devices in those days. We were still in the corridor and the early stages of tape that we could play back the tape of the scene. But we would just interview people live on the scene. And then you know, later on. Before we had the telegram and the reason i went to work there is because the Police Reporter whose name was phil macklin was promoted to city editor and recover a lot of wrecks together so he knew me and he recommended me to take his place. And i became the night Police Reporter at the startelegram but the order orderly way that we gathered the news in thosedays and the way it was reported , most towns have three television stations and a pretty good newspaper. And whether or not you agreed with the editorial policies of that newspaper, we were generally when something was on the front page of the paper or was broadcast on the network news, you assumed that it was true. That theyd gone to some effort to check it out and they didnt put things that were not true. So we based our opinion on the data that we were getting from those three television stations and local newspaper. Whats changed now and whats turned everything around is now youve got 700 channels on television and even more than that onthe web. We are not necessarily all getting the same data. Werenot all getting the same fact. You listen to this source over there and someone else listens to this one over here, you can bring different facts so people are basing their opinions on different facts, not on the common data that we used to and that is the number one change thats come about and only now are we coming to realize how profound changes. Used to be the saying that youre entitled to your own opinion but not your own set of facts and i think thats been reversed but talk about the politics. Obviously you mentioned negativism, Richard Nixons enemies list in the past. You started reporting in the 1950s during the era of mccarthy. Weve all seen president ial campaigns in which the media were pointed out in their plans and you are called names and everybody else so how is this different from the point of view of the politicians and the political sense . Theres nothing new here but its more intense because there is more of it. And also because of the lightning speed that news travels. In my early days in fort worth, covering the politics down there, about 10 days out from any election whatever it was florida, there was always a Whisper Campaign that one of the candidates had a girlfriend on the east. I dont know about all the girlfriends seem to live on the east side and they would check these things out and most of the time they didnt amount to anything. Almost always thinking about anything. If they did, we reported it but with the coming of the land there is no such thing as the Whisper Campaign in politics anymore. If somebody find out Something Like that, they put it on a blog and suddenly its out there. Andtaking it down, its had more of an impact i think on politics that has on us. Because the politics, or the person running for office, he or she has to decide to ignore this and ultimately in the way, do i comment on it and give it wider distribution . And even we see now if people deny things that are made up out of whole cloth, they still hang on. There still, theres still a percentage of people in this country who think barack obama is not an american citizen. And how much Fact Checking will it take to finally knock that down . This format the pizza place in washington where there was supposed to be. ,peter. Operated by Hillary Clinton in the basement. Totally without foundation. A person who came and fired a weapon in there, looking, he was going to shoot the doorknob off to go in the basement and rescue these children. He found out the first thing was there is no basement there. All of that he was arrested taking away and is in the court system now. But there are still a number of people who still believe that. The man who owns that pizza parlor till have to have private security area he still getting death threats. Thats whats changed. The speed that this stuff happens. As mark twain or Winston Churchill said, a line can go around the world while the truth is stillputting its pants on. That is more true today than ever and thats what were dealing with. I seem to think when you pointed out about factoring and thinking back on the 2016 campaign, as i have sort of trying to reflect on what went on here, wasnt that journalists didnt do, i think a pretty good job of very aggressive, assertive reporting about the trump future president , including unprecedented amounts of Fact Checking of his public statements and you know, the fact that were already on the record, where many of them very alarming and to me, that was what was challenging for us as journalists, that this might be a moment where we have more transparency and more information about public figures than ever before and less accountability. It doesnt seem to matter. There were a Certain Group of people and people who have done studies , psychological studies about whats come to be called fake news and the impact of conspiracy theories and why do some people believe them and why is it so difficult to take them down, one of the things that happened is that you counter this, like we did during the obama administration, the birth certificate thing by saying heres the birth certificate, heres the newspaper article that appeared in the paper the day he was born. But theres a certain number of people that they see that, theres what is called a backfire effect and that becomes part of it. They say no, thats not true, thats just made up. And once its there and they believe these things, like that an american never went to the moon, it was all made up. You can always convince people with facts. Thats the part thats hard for us. How do we do this, and in most cases we will never be able to completely take down some of thesestories that are made up out of whole cloth. The golden age of conspiracy theory. So lets dial back for a second. This is an interesting project that gave rise to the book. When you decided to step aside from face the nation, you actually became a podcast or which i think is a great story. Im a podcast are now two and my guess is like you i was list not listening to 1 million podcast five years ago. So you have this podcast and its actually now given rise to the transformation of the media, tell me how that came about after mark. Guest i knew so little about podcasts. And then somebody came to me and said thats different, i thought it was ipod. Andrew who is the chief of communication at csi ask, the center for Strategic International studies in washington which is a washington think tank, we were having coffee one day with jack cameron who runs the csi ask and we got talking about bluebirds and all this stuff going on doctor henry said, i think this has reached the point that its a National Security issue and he said i take part of our National Security depends on people having a credible press that they can believe what they read and what is reported. And so we started kicking this around and decided to start doing these podcasts and andrew and i, we called about the news and we thankfully what we did, we just tried to talk to everybody injured was we could find. Our first one was with marty baron at the Washington Post and i interviewed david rhodes at cvs who is my boss. And then we would talk to david smith who was over at what is it, buzzfeed. Buzzfeed been, they call it. And then one thing led to another and somewhere along the way but he said maybe we ought to put out a study like think tanks do and i said you know, if were going to do that, i just assume write a book. If im going to go to this trouble, i want somebody to read it. I dont want to be the executive footnotes version that you publish in the first chapter of a csi study which is quite valuable. So billy came from that. And but we, we must of interviewed 45, Something Like that people in journalism and i mean from places, some of which ive never heard of in it turns out they are very influential. The good news about podcasts and all of this, is the good news about the internet is the internet makes all of these kinds of things possible area thats great news, bad news is that they can all find each other now. The nuts and all find each other now be one its their social network to. Guest in the old days when i came intojournalism people used talk about , maybe we should license your list, there should be licenses. Host President Trump just said it the other day. Guest we said no, our licenses the First Amendment and anybody that has a viral link and the Printing Press is a publisher and nobody can tell him not to be. You dont need and you dont need the Printing Press anymore. Everybody that publishes is now a publisher but the point that i try to make in the book is that everything you see on internet has away in the way organizations like you and i work. We do it the oldfashioned way and we dont report unless we take some effort to find it which is true. Thats not the case in many of the things that show up on theweb. And especially now we are into social media. Its just a different deal. But people are still getting this information. How do you find contracting interviews to be different than face the nation . X well, the time. We run them, we tried to chime them to about the time a person would work out mostly for 40 minutes so that means the most popular length but we dont have any step, we dont have a 10 or nine or eight bureaucracy and its much more informal. And i really like that you can do like were doing today. We can talk about a lot of different things, some details on face the nation, a lot of the interviewers eight minutes long and thats pretty long. On the evening news the soundbites are around 30 or 40 seconds. Its really important about whats said so i think its just the time that you have and they are a little more informed. Which i think is good. Im kind of a, im kind of an advocate of how would you tell your mamaabout this . Im not too much for using a lot of parenthetical phrases and all that. Versus first, second and not do it backwards. So probably not that fits into my weight of the interview. You think thats going to prompt a crisis in tv journalism . We talk about prices in the newspaper journalism but it strikes me that podcasting and the ability to go and pursue your interests, is a pretty direct challenge to other broadcast institutions. Im not sure i would call it a challenge but i think its a great new innovation. News on demand. In other words, i kind of got a chance to read the newspaper in the morning before i go to work. I read it when i get to the office. I always read it at home but theres some days when i havent rea