Exxon mobil and American Power is the study of the oil giant and its role in world affairs. I am pleased to have steve coll back at this table, welcome. Steve thank you. Charlie i can imagine they said this, it is an exciting time, i cannot remember a more exciting time. To be looking at what is happening in the world, to be a journalist. Steve it is exciting to be at a journalism school, all these young reporters going out into this environment, trying to figure out how to do their job professionally. It is a time i think, when the attacks on the press has strengthened the press, made it clear what our role is, and also raised the bar on our performance, we have to earn it. In this environment of trying to delegitimize the press or divide the press. It is an exciting time to be in his profession. Charlie should we as journalists have learned something from the campaign . Steve yes. In theere lots of misses runup to the election by journalism. We have lots of journalists in this country. That is part of the story our , media is fragmented. But there was an overreliance on prediction and data science. We have lost a lot of professional reporting in the heartland of the country where a lot of the election was decided. It is to be 20 years ago that there were very healthy newspaper newsrooms and all of these cities and they were feeding through Wire Services and Syndication Services into the networks, the two coasts. I do not think we would have been quite so surprised in new york, california. Charlie if we had access to what they were saying . Steve a lot of reporting in ohio, michigan, wisconsin, that was done by major news organizations was parachute reporting, it was not coming out of the states, newsrooms, with the same kind of pulsing power that it used to have. I also think, at journalism school, we wrestled with the role of a data in this world and the way journalism now requires computational skills and data science skills. That is all true, but there is an overreliance on data science prediction in this election. Reliance onan under knocking on doors and going into key districts. I remember the Washington Post when, 15, 20 years ago, there is was a ritual in the general election, guys which is 12 swing districts and they would go out and stand in front lawns and knocking peoples doors and say, what is on your mind, what issues are driving you . It would not predict the result, but when you read their 3000 omnibus reports on all these , they would take advantage of their experience going back to these places. You had a sense of where was going. At least it was an authentic role of journalism. It was not trying to give you a mathematical number of the likelihood of an outcome. It was going into these communities and letting voters be heard. I think we missed doing some of that this time around. Charlie the person i can remember, which even though they may have felt it, candidates said that the press was the enemy. Steve one candidate is now the president of the United States. Always hadu have among politicians the feeling they did not get a fair shake. Steve yes. Charlie here you had someone who took on the press in the campaign as the enemy. Steve that was part of a strategy of populism. And delegitimization of critics that has extended to the judiciary, the federal bureaucracy. When you have the president of the United States in its first day of office telephoning someone at the Parks Service to complain about a photograph he did not like of his inauguration crowds you know youre in a new world of conduct. I think overall, my sense is that the press is used to being attacked. If youre a reporter and you have not been yelled at by your subjects a few times, you are not doing your job. [laughter] i do not think the press has been shaken by those kinds of assaults. I worry about the delegitimization of our constitutional design by all this incendiary speech that seeks to personalize or delegitimize the functions of judges and professional reporters and people at the National Park service, who are serving the taxpayers. I worry about a strategy of trying to change the contours of how our system is supposed to work. As to the press being called out, we are used to that. We should shoulder it and get on with our job. Charlie thats what i say. When people ask me that i say we , should just do our job. Not worry about anything else, do our job. But when you look now at the idea of fake news and not an acceptance of what facts are, that seems to portend something different. Steve this term fake news has now hijacked to mean news i do , not like. It started out to describe something more specific and more worrisome, which was the manufacturing of deliberately false information, sometimes for commercial purposes in offshore businesses. Then distributing that across social media platforms and making money off of the advertising available. Because it clicked. Some of this manufactured news, which was not done for ideological reasons, in some cases it was done to make money, it did focus on trump because people clicked on those stories. Then you have another category disinformations or heavily ideological news, very difficult to determine. It is an eye of the beholder question as to when something is so distorted, deliberately constructed to mislead, that it crosses from just being a hard opinion into being an active disinformation campaign. There is quite a lot of flow across social media of partially invented stories that mislead for ideological or political purposes. The social media platforms are the story here, i think. Not because they are solely responsible for this problem, but they represent a profound change in the way news is just distributed in our democracy. Newspapers used to control their Distribution System down to the driveway where the paper boy tossed the paper. Networks had a Clear Pathway from their newsrooms to their audiences. Now the people who create news have lost control of its distribution, because the most important way it is distributed through facebook and other social media platforms. Those companies see themselves as a neutral. They do not see themselves as editors or gatekeepers. A platform for free exchange. It is difficult for them to accept responsibility for policing a Public Square of sorts that they have a created, which is quite profitable for them. I do not think we have gotten very far in resolving the challenge that this election has presented to us. I feel pretty sure that it is going to get worse next time around. Charlie in the next election . Steve yes. People have learned how to do this. The power of social media platforms as a distribution arm for news will not go away between now and 2020. I think that companies, facebook is trying to figure out what it can do, what it should do. It is at least stepping forward to engage these questions. I am not sure theyre going to be in a position to prevent this kind of campaigning in the future, or that it is in their business interest to do so. This is not just something in the rearview mirror, this is something that will shape our democracy. Charlie how can you define the use of twitter by this president has done . Steve the media of course and politicsof media in has changed when technology has changed. Remember when president reagan came to town, he was a master of television, he and mike beaver modeled this presidency of going over the heads of the working press by stage managing the president s speech and appearances and his power and so forth. Everyone remarked on how successfully he had done on enron around the press using television. President trump has done the same thing using twitter, he has managed to break out of constraints that president s either choose to impose on their communication, because they want more elegance and a more restrained tone. Charlie he has done it to his own detriment. Many would argue, including people within his own close advisers, who, because it takes them off message and creates a whole distraction. That does not allow for what may have been after that speech, a positive message. Steve i think every political consultant in the country would agree with that. I am struck it is disconcerting , that the power of that platform, the way he uses it to reach into your pocket, you wake up in the morning, you flick your phone on there , is the president of the United States saying, look what he is done again it is that populist strategy of being able to speak directly to the people in the name of the people without gatekeepers, without advisers, without consultants. That has been his conceit throughout. He is a professional entertainer. He knows how to control a stage and a live set, he knows how to use confrontation to create drama. That may be no way to run a country, but it is his instinct about how to communicate. I am not sure he will be able to relinquish it, judging by the pattern so far. There seems to be certain hours of the day where he must react. [laughter] charlie are there discussions among deans of Journalism Schools and editors of papers about, where are we and what do we do, other than the basic thing, we do our job . Steve we had a convening at the school a few weeks ago with editors from the mainstream press. We had an editor from breitbart covering the trump presidency. I think in the end, everyone circles around to what you said, which is that we do not need to lose confidence in our role under the first amendment. We know through experience and our professional lives what to do. We know what the questions are. This is a remarkable constitutional scenario, just on the admissions made in the congress yesterday, where the fbi director says that members of the president s Campaign Team are under active investigation because of concerns about their contacts with russia. Collusion, we know according to 17, 18 intelligence agencies, that Russian Intelligence Services carried out a deliberate effort to disrupt the 2016 election. Charlie the argument is made they have evidence it was intended to benefit one candidate more than the other . Steve step back in american history. Tell me where in the first 100 days of a new presidency youve had a situation where the fbi is investigating people close to the president for colluding with a Foreign Government that is taking hostile action against the United States to affect the outcome of its election. It is been a while since weve had the constitutional scenario like this, nevermind the travel ban, the courts trying to intervene in the president S Immigration policy, the president calling them socalled judges. We cannot normalize the situation. This is a real series of departures in our postwar experience. Charlie then there is secretary of state, rex tillerson. You wrote the book about exxon mobil, he is not going to the nato conference, i assume because he is going to be in florida where the president of china is visiting the president of the United States. How do you balance that . Where should he be . He just returned from a trip to the far east. I think you could argue that they may be better off down there, the crucial relationship, than at nato. Sounds like they messed up the scheduling about that. Im not worried about that. Take note however, that the secretary of state, he does not have any undersecretaries nominated, no assistant secretaries nominated. He has endorsed a 30 reduction in the budget of the state department. He basically does not have a team. He does not have a relationship with the white house. It is normal for secretaries of state without a tight relationship with the president s aides and his Campaign Team. You remember when secretary clinton came in having run a very Bitter Campaign against president obama. It took her team a while and obamas team a while to communicate, make nice with one another. She succeeded because she understood how to use the bully pulpit of the state department to make herself felt. Secretary of state is the second most important spokesperson of the government after the president. It is your opportunity, job, to get out there and talk about americas place in the world, about foreign policy. One of the tricks that the last five secretaries of state have modeled is how you use that speech, that bully pulpit to , gain influence inside the cabinet, white house. You make yourself a force by her your opportunity to speak almost distinctively on behalf of the United States. Think about the last five secretaries we have had. John kerry, a professional politician, almost president of the United States. Hillary clinton, candidate for president , a battlescarred senator. Condoleezza rice, formidable public figure who had vast experience at the white house before she took over secretary of state. Most powell, one of the influential of his generation. Madeleine albright, first woman to hold the seat and who rose to the opportunity to speak about big ideas all around the world. It doesnt really matter about which party or what the ideological profile the administration is, that is a model of how you do the job effectively, overall. The irony of secretary tillerson is that when he does talk, you can see he is still learning what the difference is between running a giant corporation and speaking on behalf of the United States and foreign policy. He is comfortable in conversation. He knows a lot of these issues. He is perfectly capable of taking the heat, of dealing with freewheeling russians. I chased him around like johnny reporter because he would not sit down across table. I would go to his public speeches and stand in the audience and raise my hand. I watched him. The typical format is he would read a prepared speech, but he would take questions from the audience. They were not generally professional journalists who were as knowledgeable as he was about northeast asia. Which is what would happen if he had the diplomatic press upon his plane. But they were smart people, sometimes questions will be challenging, but he can handle this stuff. He was the chief executive of the company for 10 years. Of course he can handle it. Charlie any company. Steve he travels around the world, he knows the leadership. And that byuld definition give him the tools to be a good secretary of state . Job has think the several components. One involves negotiating and private. Super well qualified do that, of course. That gritty usually includes leaders or foreign ministers. Charlie most negotiation is in private. Steve in american diplomacy . Semiprivate. Charlie i do not think john kerry was telling us what was going on in iran. Steve yes, but he was out talking to foreign press, foreign legislatures all the , time that he was talking privately with russians and syrians. You have to play at all those levels. We are an open society, a democracy. You need to be accountable to your own public. All of our allies are also democracies. Their decisionmaking about whether or not they will go into, for example, more confrontational risky posture about north korea, that decision will be a function of domestic politics in japan, south korea, australia, the european union. Where is that politics shaped . By opposition parties and the press in those countries. If you think you are going to change a construct of Regional Policy in asia without speaking aloud to all those parliaments and publics that are your allies, i think you are not going to get there. There are a few kinds of negotiations like preparing for a secret opening with cuba or nixon to china or closed doors, lets try to get the middle east solved kind of negotiation you can do entirely like a deal negotiation. But most diplomacy does double dimensions of the same time. It must involve public communication. Charlie and you need a full team to do it. Steve it would be natural for someone coming in as an outsider. Even someone with a rich corporate experience to complement himself with a deputy that knows the system, knows Diplomatic Service how the ,embassies are administered how , the National Security council works. He had someone, elliott abrams, who he selected for that position with exactly that kind of character. He was turned down by the trump white house, apparently because they thought he was not loyal. Seems dangers of being influenced greatly by factions within the white house. Steve its a small group of people who seem to be in every photograph. The degree of the leaking from this presidency is certainly on the top end of any washington transition that ive experienced. Usually this does not happen quite so fast. It suggests that there are a lot of conflicting individuals and groupings within the white house. Maybe also, you look back at the president s Business History and you see one where there are a lot of transactions. A lot of people in it for themselves. This is not a family Candy Company that he ran. He seems to cultivate a little bit of combat amongst his advisers. One way to play that conflict is through the press. Charlie do i hear you saying in the end that he was not a good choice . Steve tillerson . I do not know. I feel he has not demonstrated yet whether he can rise to the occasion. He said in an interview he took one interview one person. Charlie why did he take her . Steve i do not know. She did a decent job in the interview and pressed him on the press access question. She does not know northeast asia as well as the diplomatic press corps. She works for a digital website whose chief executive was a former Communications Specialist for the Republican Party. There is a general privileging of partisan media in the white house, so be it. But she did a professional job. He said toe thing her when she asked him about press access i have only been on , the job six weeks, be patient. Fair enough but this cannot go , on for six months. I do not think it is effective, either within the state department, the cabinet, or as a strategy of carrying out diplomacy. Herlie he also told her, understood that as secretary of state he is accountable to the american public. He added he was determined to do things his way because