Here is cnns Brian Stelter. Welcome to another virtual wide talk los angeles event. We welcome Brian Stelter to the series and welcome back jeb apatow. All those videos are in our youtube channel. Tonight we discussed brians book hoax donald trump, fox news had a dangerous distortion of truth. Welcome again to both of you. I will let you take it from here, judd. Host thank you. Im so excited. I read the book. Guest have you actually read the book . Guest on michael theres other people that interviewed you, ive read the book and not only that, but i highlighted it. [laughter] ive made notes. This phenomenon doesnt really happen in movies where they dont watch the movie but it happens with books. Debate. People talk about books without reading them. I had a chance to look at it. I just want to be a better journalist than everybody else. I feel like i can do better than rachel matthau. That is my goal is to go deeper than she did. We have more time. Congratulations on the book. I thought it was really great and helped organize a lot of ideas about whats happening at fox news that we wonder about which is how did this happen, how destructive is it and is ever going to get better or is it just a part of our world at this point it is never going to change. I will start out with a question of how you got into journalism which is i got the sense from the book you were a journalism nerd in the same way i was a comedy nerd. I went off an out and interviewd canadians when i was 15, 16. I would hunt down john candy, Jerry Seinfeld because i was obsessed with learning about it and you did a version of the same thing. Host theres only two jobsites wanted in my whole life. When i was 5yearsold i wanted to be a trash man. When he showed up once a week it was a big event. I was so amazed. And ever since then i wanted to be a journalist. I know trolls out there will say that the two johns are the same. I remember calling into the local tv station reporting the amount of snow on the ground and then hearing them say my name on the tv, brian and damascus says theres 10 inches of snow. I thought it was crazy that they didnt know that i was a kid. It could have been faked and even back then. But always addicted to tv and interested in journalism. Of course theres a lot of Television News thats not journalism and theres a lot tht that is and i think i learned from a young age. Host you started writing about the news. Describe what your blog was. This was the tv news version. Like my inspiration was this was my attempt to be over fox and nbc and cnn. This was postiraq war, before katrina, in the bush years when things started to go right and left and a lot of the stories i was telling was about to begin and struggling to know what to do in this news war. Back then compared it to what it is now it was a lot more grounded in the realitybased. It wasnt all politics all the time the way the world is right now. A lot of what the book is about is the evolution of how fox news changed. I kept thinking about the Movie Network when i was reading the book because it talks about corporations buying the networks and basically buying the news and suddenly they were servicing the needs of the giant Global Corporations and there was a famous scene where he listed all of the giant corporations in the world and it was truly terrifying and that seems to be what happened which is these companies own the news and on some level it seems to affect their choice of about 22 present on the news and not in subtle forms. What i found interesting was the slow creep at fox news which you discuss, which is theres 9 11 independent moves a little more to the right, the iraq war, then it moves more to the right. And then with president obama it moves right and its almost like this organic adjustment to the desires of their owner and the audience to suddenly just present this point of view and not to be a challenge in the audience in any way anymore. Every turn they take his return to the right and that was definitely true in the mid20s era was and when obama took office. You think about the rise of the tea party. There was a black president and female speaker of the house and all of a sudden theres rightwing groups saying dont take my money. Fox was promoting that in 2009. That is when they turned to the right but they pale in comparison to what happened starting in 2015 when trump entered the race and fox got on the trump train. That was the ultimate turn. And your point about the owners versus the audience, it is so complicated and i dont know exactly what the right answer to that is. It is partly on the owners and the audience, but i think over time what we have seen at fox is what we have seen in the gop and across the media its become extreme. The rhetoric has gotten more extreme over time. But 15 years ago sean hannity was on fox. He wasnt talking in an extreme way until the obama years and then especially trump years. It reminds me of entertainment in a lot of ways because with movies and television, they chase concepts they think will bring them the most money so in the 70s you might have a this and then theres horrifying crime and csi and law and order and the shows will reflect the desire of the audience. We see that where theres a lot of shows like kids being murdered because of the algorithm for some reason people must want to see crime shows about women and children being victims of violence and suddenly theres an enormous amount of these shows were in the movies studios realize maybe we can make a billion dollars and now they dont want to make small dramatizations anymore because youre not going to make a billion dollars off of a small drama and it seems to be in with fox news they decided the money is returned to the right. And if anyone at fox who is in charge of journalistic standards since two everybody this is wrong. We have created a situation that is making people unsafe. They are not taking the pandemic seriously nationalism, white supremacy. We need to make an adjustment here but on some level maybe they would lose money if they went on the air and said he is lying about masks for instance or vaccine safety, so they dont have it for a financial reason. You are describing something true but i dont know if it is on the mind of the staffers that are doing it. A lot of what happened to fox has no control at this point and as one person said to me so i dont think, and this is based on my interviews with sources, i dont think they individually think of themselves as this company be less profitable if we Fact Check Trump but if what you are saying is true that they do turn on the people at fox and challenged the president s lies and lines, the audience turns away its a remarkable form, for example to 5 p. M. Eastern talkshow on fox news hugely high rated. Then there is a broadcast with more than a Million Viewers that turned the channel when the newscast comes on. I have problems with the newscast. A lot of people think that its right leaning but the viewers dont want to watch it as much as the propaganda and that is true throughout the schedule on fox. When the pandemic started, a lot of the voices of opinion on fox were saying things like this is like the flu, and 70,000 people die and many years from the flu and we are not even going to get close to that, so this is a joy and overreaction and democratic hoax to be concerned at this level in the shutdown cities. Now that we are closing in on 200,000 people dying, clearly the numbers are going to go way beyond that. Theres no one on the opinion side of fox says we were really wrong. We need to take this way more seriously. You never get that and i know thats hard to imagine people in a board room saying we cant challenge all these people it will lose money but i think those conversations to happen. I think they have to make a conscious choice after some point to not say to people the information coming out of this network we now know because the people doing the questioning about us take it less seriously and wear masks less often and they dont social distance and that means more people watching fox are guiding them are watching other news services, so as a result of our lack of interest in educating people about the dangers of this, people are dying and it is a conscious choice to not make that an important part of what they present on the network. The history of this obviously i rewrote in the beginning of the book because of what was happening in the spring and the summer. When they use the word hope hoax they said the democrats are making up a hoax. Even the use of the word was still dangerous because it suggested you didnt havissuggeo take this very seriously. It gave permission to kind of tune out the warnings about the virus. At the end of february and beginning of march. So because of the dangerous rhetoric and i made the timeline before they saying on tv, what was trump saying at the white house and it winds up on unfortunately perfectly. Both fox and trump started to change their tune on the same day, the same day in march maybe not a coincidence. But it was too late. It was spreading across the country and so many people have let their guard down because of the rhetoric was on tv. I do want to say though i am not only blaming fox and trump. Its worth being fair some governors made mistakes and mayors but he is the ultimate leader of the country and is out there downplaying the threat. Its kind of like he left the back door open, or the front door open. He closed that door at the front was wide open and that is mostly how the virus entered the u. S. An adjustment has been made because of the timof the becausf disputing the Republican Convention so on and she spoke last night to barely a large crowd. I didnt see almost anyone wearing a mask. Certainly the president wasnt wearing a mask in the middle of the crowd. Im sure he will say we tested everybody. But the signal to the country is that its okay. Everything you see these people not wearing a mask you are telling people maybe you dont have to wear a mask. And i guess the issue is that that will get noticed on other networks. And on fox you will not have a person go if you cut through that crowd they were all wearing masks, puppets of people to wear a mask. It would be a powerful message. Or even if everyone walked up to the podium wearing a mask and they took off to make the speech. I think the idea that nobody at fox news will even point that out is an ownership decision, it is the Rupert Murdoch decision to not create an environment where you are allowed to say that or youll be punished. What i found interesting in the book is the idea that if they work their id say you are one of those contracted tendons, if one day you go against something trump said, that is inaccurate or you disagree, that your bookings started disappearing. Suddenly hannity doesnt have you on, Tucker Carlson doesnt have you on and it creates a conditioning that you challenge the president , you may lose your job and your presence will diminish and then maybe you will loose your half a million a year to be giving your opinion about things. I thought that explained very well because i dont think the audience understand that. The disincentive to speak the truth to power. The incentive structures are what matter the most. My structure that cnn is to be as accurate as possible, because if i am not, i will be held accountable. There is a department and i have boxes that would call me out. Ive tried my best. Ive made a couple of mistakes during my time at cnn. Ive been in the doghouse. There is a moment i will have a tough conversation with my boss and that is the way that it should be. It just doesnt work that way. There isnt a Standard Practice in that department. There isnt the same kind of journalistic. So instead this infrastructure is the opposite. Its too lean into the propaganda, leaned into the nonsense as that is what the audience wants and that is the Management Team wants. Part of the problem though is the lack of leadership. People dont really know what murdoch wants from them so they just keep doing what they are doing but clearly to your point, if they wanted things to be different on the air, things would be different on the air. That is the reality of how this world works and clearly they are okay with whats going on in the network. 2 billion in profits. 2 billion in profit a year and leave prints money in the basement as a joke. The best story about this, the top legal analyst on fox news is one of the most interesting characters there because hes known him for decades. They are old friend that he is a lawyer and understands trump was guilty of crimes. He understood obstruction of justice have been proven. He called it out on the air and for that he was a sean by trump, he talked about him repeatedly. He lost some primetime spots and wasnt getting booked on his shows. One said they would only go timothy talked about no on trumped stories. They talked about trump, people would get too angry and upset and it wouldnt go well. It has come out according to the book he has almost a constant communication with sean hannity and at this point is difficult to know if certain ideas are coming from fox and friends or like sean hannity or the president , hes watching the network and theres a sense that theyre both manipulating each other is also in a way that i dont think the audience understands, the most troubling example of it, you talk about Tucker Carlson talking about how the United States should not attack iran last year and that may have been an important reason why we did not attack iran. Can you talk a little bit about that story. This is when iran struck an american drone and there were questions about how trump would respond, trump himself claimed that the u. S. Missiles were locked and loaded, he had an expression to that fact same retaliation was about to begin when he called it off. What we now know about that, he called Tucker Carlson beforeha beforehand, im not saying tucker was the only person, he was not but he had been on the air, he was advocating against john bolton, carlton was against the strike in iran and what happened that day trump needed to hear it again, it was not enough to watch on the dvr or watch it on tv, he needed to hear from tucker again, he called him up and hes trying to have a position about trump, he is not going to call the white house but at the white house calls him, he will answer, thats only way he differentiates from hannity, hes more proactive, he takes the calls and they come in. The president calls carlton and he says what to do, he says it be crazy to bomb iran in carlton later told friends i think trump needed a reminder of what he believes, reminder of who he is, is not one of the voters elect elected, i have a guy at fox telling me i guess im glad tucker is running the country and not sean hannity, its a ludicrous thing to say in a little grain of truth in that and thought he was at trump any given time and the other person who influenced trump that day was a general the fox military name general jack king, he was on the air talk about that time in the 80s when america accidentally shot down an iranian plane killing scores of innocent people, trump may not have heard that story before because when he heard it live on fox it really impacted him. Im taking to myself, were in a situation where the president doesnt know basic history but he is at least hearing some on tv and the only thing worse is if he is never heard on tv at all. But the number of examples of the president getting the information from fox couldve filled an entire second book, i had to cut some of the examples because theres literally thousands of times when hes been influenced. You would think the people who work at fox would be terrified that this relationship is involved like that, if i was locked when burn off and i was aware that my host had direct lines to the president which he said he does not have that relationship with the president that it would be a position that you want to have like an owner of a network giving out information from a pandemic for my soul would want a feel like a save lives and like i communicated properly and how it can be right winging and want to do regulator and lower taxes, when to really getting to the place where youre covering for a president who doesnt seem mentally equipped to handle pandemic in your creating space with Bad Information which are supporting which leads to people dying it really requires a level of greed or disassociation to not be horrified that Tucker Carlton is apparently in the book and went maralago to talk to trump because he was concerned trump was not taking the pandemic seriously. The white house aid asked him to go, this is remarkable, in the white house he did not get it or understand the gravity of the situation in carlton was the exception to the rule it comes to the pandemic in january and february, he was raising alarms on his show, he was probably raising alarms because he has antichina view and in the area against china but he was raising alarms so he was asked by the white house aid in carlton without his home on the golf and asked to drive maralago, go see trump and toxins into the president , thats what carlton did, he walked straight into the middle of a birthday party, fox news reunion but carlton was get someone on one time with trump and even that did not work, right away because a couple days later trump is still out there engaging in ridiculous rhetoric and downplay the threat of the virus. It wasnt until the end of marce middle of march when fox news and trump started to change their tone and even that only have limited impact, for example the fox and friends pull you have to have a doctor on the air every day so were not can have much medical misinformation. I do want to give them a little bit of credit, they did make some changes that improve the tone the tone, within two weeks we have a host on fox with them saying we need to figure out how to reopen america, the cure could not be worse in our later trump says on twitter cannot be worse than the problem, remember this was back when trump said we should real person by easter and the pew should be reopened by easter in his crazy and impossible but our entire country wasted four days on that idea. And i write in the book no one can ever know for sure how many people died and who otherwise would not have died for irresponsible News Coverage or not president ial rhetoric, we will never know, i know staffers at the network are embarrassed, they say what we were doing was hazardous to our butte interviewers in a Senior Executive said it was outlandi outlandish, there are people who see it and they recognize w