Transcripts For CNN Reliable Sources 20100516 : vimarsana.co

the media cast her as the front-runner from the start and while the white house was miffed that the news was broken about elena kagan before the announcement, that only added fuel to the lawn f. president obama s team tried to cast kagan as a smart and sensible trail blazer. from the newspapers to the networks, the initial coverage strongly positive. she was the first woman to serve as dean of harvard. elena kagan would bring to the court a brilliant legal mind, but not a confrontational one. if confirmed, she will be the only sitting justice who had not severed first as a judge. some of the greats also lacked judicial experience. as the pundits man their battle stations, conservatives were quick to oppose. liberals were unenthusiastic on the candidate. if confirmed, kagan will be the youngest supreme court justice and the first member of the court without any, any judicial experience in four decades. they must have tons of experience thing is a new idea they ve only decided to apply to her. the difference between her and harriet myers is ivy league. you have to wonder, is she truly qualified. she did oppose military recruiting at harvard because of don t ask don t tell. she is a committed liberal. a lot of progressives think she s not liberal enough. that she doesn t go as far as justice stevens. didn t take long for the chatter to take a personal turn, raising questions about what is fair game when it comes to a supreme court nominee. joining us now, joan biskupic, supreme court reporter for usa today and author. bill press, the syndicated radio talk show host. across town, jan crawford and in san francisco, debra saunders of the san francisco chronicle. jeff toobin, long time friend of elena kagan, says he gives her a hug when he sees her and you talked about taking a class with her at the university of chicago. how much does this help her? i had her for labor law and it was very helpful. she s an engaging professor, very challenging. law school is a lot of hypothetical questions to the students. you respond, she pushes back and so, i expected to see some of that same style when she became solicitor general arguing before the court. sure enough, similar in style. that s revealing because we ll see her, if confirmed, pushing lawyers in exactly is same way that i experienced as a student of hers. it can be relevant. but is it helpful to her that she s not an unknown quantity to people like you? this is a small legal world in washington and joan and i knew john roberts very well. he was on the court two years before nominated to the supreme court, i think it does enrich your reporting and analysis, helps you understand the di namices of the personality. the supreme court is a group of nine. some say historically nine skorp yans in a bottle. their skills and how they are as people can help you understand how effective they might be as justices. joan, you wrote that skepices shouldn t the press be questioning it as well? i think they have. even though she would be the first justice in four decades, historically in the 20th century, many of the justices were former governors, attorney generals. it s good to say people are i think the fact about reporters who have known her, most of us who have law degrees didn t take a class from elena kagan. jan was fortunate she did. but she, like most of us, have covered her as solicitor general and that s how we mostly know her. for the rank and file report covering elena kagan, we re not personal friends of her. we ve been covering her as a subject. you ve got a lot of people covering her at the court every day. debra saunders, does it seem the media elite have enthusiastically embraced elena kagan? yeah, i mean, i feel like i m out of the club because i never run up to her at the airport and hug her, i didn t go to law school with her. i ve never met elena kagan i m out of the loop. so, i think it also makes it a little easier to look at her policies a different way. i look at that military recruiting policy at harvard and i think it s a real problem for her and i think she s going to have trouble explaining it. bill press, the only real ambivalence i see, is from some on your side who say they re not sure elena kagan is liberal enough. first of all, in terms of full disclosure, i m in the loop and i ve never met elena kagan. so i know what that makes me. totally out of it. you re right. liberals like me, i wouldn t say we re opposed, just uneasy about her because don t know. we wanted a flaming liberal on the court. we did not get one. but i think that the question about the media lead is a little superficial. i have a radical theory about why she s getting such good press. because she s a good appointment. she has no paper trail. she s got a gonzo resume and people kind of like her. it s hard for opponents to get their teeth in her. given the rather sparse paper trail, she s written some articles, but we don t have a lot of decisions to pick over as we had with recent nominees. wait, but see this is where i think it s easy to forget. it wasn t that long ago that john roberts was nominated to the supreme court and a lot of this con conversation is exactly what we were saying about john roberts. no big, long opinions to pick through. it was only when we got the papers from the reagan library and now, we re going to be getting her papers from the clinton lie brab. some of these justices didn t have a whole lot of judicial experience and opinions and john roberts was one of them. so what do you do to try to piece together a portrait of the nominee and how she might behive? just picking up from bill s point. look at her writings, talk to people who know her. try to get a sense of her views. we re going to be getting these documents from the clinton l libra library, including e-mails, which by the way, e-mails in 1995, no one was that cautious. this white house has been through that stuff and i don t expect us to get any smoking guns there. like we got from same alito, those turns up a lot. i think a lot of this discussion is very similar to what we heard about roberts. the right was a little leery of roberts as first. he had those liberal friends. said he wasn t a member of the federalist society. it s just the flip side. when sonia sotomayor was nominated last year, she got involved in the controversy about the whiz latina remark. here, we don t have that. kagan is quote, way too boring for media and that we in a press have a bias toward controversy and it s not being fulfilled here. he has a point. here in this case, we have a lot of things. it s the hard stuff. it takes a lot of effort to read through essays she s done and to look at her transcripts. this is only week one. we don t know what s out there and i don t expect there to be any real bombshell about elena kagan. she s a very cautious individual. i don t think that she probably ever did anything that could be a deal breaker here. i think she s off the front pages already. sunday usually the big wrap-up of the news. do you think they re making enough of kagan saying that have become a farce and now, she s changed her mind about how much she wants to answer? duh. of course now she s going to have a different viewpoint. you said something 15 years ago now you have to fill the same thought, just doesn t work that well. but there are things to look at about this pick and what it says about the president. do we want to have nine justices from harvard and yale? how about somebody from a california law school? i would like to see something different. i think we can at least take this opportunity to have a discussion. the fact he s picking somebody who hasn t been a judge, that gives him freedom to pick somebody who might be creative. are we going to get that from somebody who produced the other eight justices? bill, i ve been saving this question for you. there is one interview elena kagan has granted. let s take a look at that. and then public service has been an opportunity to take my legal skills and training and work on some of the really important public policy issues of our time. that is a white house video. she was quote, interviewed by a white house staffer. what do you make of that technique when they re not going to let her near a working journalist? i think it s total control of her media appearance and does not satisfy the need for a real in-depth interview, but i don t recall any other supreme court nominees giving one-on-one interviews. because it hasn t happened. but this goes beyond we re really kind of controlling it. i have to say one quick thing about this idea of the boring part of it. i think what that she is boring. i think dan abrams is right. and as a result of that, people think that because she played solve ball, she is automatically a lesbian. the new york times got permission from hunter college high school to interview her brother and watch him teach a course there and then the white house vetoed it. so white house carefully controlling information. when we come back, to your point, bill, probing the personal. why are some digging into her life. and why didn t the first lady s obesity report get much coverage? es. chevy malibu stands behind theirs for up to 100,000 miles. which makes it pretty clear whose standing out front. a consumers digest best buy two years running. chevy malibu. compare it to anyone and may the best car win. during the spring event, qualified lessees, now get a 27-month, low mileage lease on this malibu ls for around $199 a month. call for details. see your local chevy dealer. the rumors about whether elena kagan is gay, which she says are not true, which the white house says are not true, has gotten more coverage than i expected. it s been all over the blogsspear. it came up the other night on the o reilly factor. i think they should have said we re appointing her because of her judicial ability. not on based on what her sexual orientation is. but then a reporter can raise their hand and say, mr. president, the likelihood is the supreme court will have to decide gay marriage on a federal level, so it is important here. please tell us whether your nominee is gay or not. it s a legitimate question. is it a legitimate question, she may well rule on gay rights case and other cases of that kind. no, i think this is completely irrelevant cht this part of her personal life is not relevant. the white house has said she s not gay and until she says something different. you know, joan and i have covered the court for a long time and we don t spend a lot of time digging around on those years of speculation on whether david suter was gay. for unmarried women then it seems strange to me that this is becoming a huge topic. what s really fascinating, sort of reminds me of some of the stuff you saw during the sarah palin, when the blogs starting this, was trig really her baby. we re seeing this now on the blogs raising these questions and that s where i think presents a real problem for the traditional forms of media. i got run into this even before kagan was nominated when the white house put in play a story, a blogger had written she was gay. cbs put it on its website and the white house went bonkers on this. they could have said we re not even going to dignify this with a comment. that countered what the blogger had said, but now, the white house has come back even firmer saying we asked her about this when she was up for the solicitor job and then they ve also said they ve tried to put it to rest saying she s not. so that should be the end of that. i do think though that because these legal issues are perking up, those are issues that will be before the court, but for her personally, it should end when the white house says, here s the answ answer. one thing i hope we can agree on is when the wall street journal ran that photo of her playing softball, it just struck me as monumentally silly. i have to say or whether or not she s gay or lesbian, i don t know and i don t care. there are a lot of unmarried men in the congress of the united states. if we re going to look into her personal life, then we have to look into theirs. on the softball, this was put up by lynn sweet. she s playing something called 16-inch softball which in chicago, is as popular as deep dish pizza. so the idea that had anything to do with her being a lesbian is totally ridiculous. now, you have some of kagan s friends, eliot spitzer, telling politico on the record that she s dated men in the past. if her friends are going to go on the record, is there any reason not to report on it? i think we have to report on it. every fiber of my being yells out, it s not of my business. but in the age of the internet, this is floating around. in california, we have in a federal court, the same-sex marriage case and it s not in a federal court. the man looking at it is guy. chronicle did report about it. he s out. it was an open secret. the lawyers on both sides knew it. at some point in time, judge walker s going to make a decision. we don t want the public to know there was a fix. people can say he was closeted and said that same-sex marriage the ban was constitutional. we have an obligation. if everybody s talking about it and people know about this, it s not our job to keep this from the public. and while i think this is something that has to be asked and addressed, if she says it s none of her business, fine, but it s not our job to keep what people want to know. i just have to say, there s a fallacy here that if she were lesbian, she would automatically rule in support of same-sex marriage. i know a lot of gays and lesbians who do not support same-sex marriage. it would be nice if there were a zone of privacy. i m not sure that is feasible when talking about a lifetime appointment to the supreme court. joan, bill, debra, jan, thank you for joining us. last week on this program, we talked about barack obama giving a speech in which he went at the media culture. that prompted a piece, the lead of which says well, i was a little shocked by that and i can tell you he probably has a better job. a personal chef, a helicopter. i don t get that. koling up, michelle mania. do journalists focus too much on the first lady s style and fashion at the expense of our white house work? plus, facebook fears. is the site allowing too much information about us to go public? and the huffington post, what it s contributors still don t get paid. ay, yay, yay, yay ay, yay, yay, yay baby, baby, baby, baby. uh-oh but it can t have. can t have about half a i assure you it does. i can only taste. only taste the crunchy clusters, honey, and brown sugar. no madam, i don t have esp. 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[ high male ] fizz, fizz. the media fascination with michelle obama, not exactly breaking news from her gardens, her fashion choices, dates with her husband. almost everything she does seems to draw air time. even when making remarks in honor of mother s day. there s no way i could ever fully measure all that my own mommy has done for me. first lady trotted out three cabinet members to unveil a 124-page white house report on the problem of overweight children. we all know the dangers on childhood obesity. we know the steps we need to take to reverse the trend. so, the media s appetite must have been bottomless, right? actually, not so much. which raises some fascinating questions and in the new york, lola, a pop culture commentator. this report covered everything from time gave it one paragraph. i think in some ways, it s hard to get excited about a report. i mean, it was 124 pages. it was a michelle report. i think what happens is that you know, she has finally settled on what s going on her big project. it s childhood obesity. it s been a series of incremental stories. lola, this is arguably the most substantive thing she s done as first lady. the media is more interested in talking about what michelle is wearing, her workout routines and don t really care about her as a substantive character. this is a highly intelligent woman. that s a pretty broad indictment. they don t really care about her as a sub city tooif player. when it comes to really talking about the issues and what she is passionate about, gets virtually ignored. i would take issue with that. i think some in the media actually do care a great deal about what she s been doing. certainly, the washington post has spent a lot of time, money and space covering her more substantive events ranging from childhood obesity to her trip to mexico city, even when she accompanied the president to russia, ghana and italy last year. there s a whole other range of media that s been covering her. no other first lady had websites dedicated solely to her clothing. when you look at it in that regard, you have the sense there s this overwhelming interest in a lot of these light and frothy aspects of her personality. i did see one television debate about child obesity, where the guest talked about mrs. obama once having served as a member of the corporation that made less than healthy food. incredibly telling and so rich that michelle obama, who i call big mama, is wagging her fingers at the food industry when she herself profited at least there s a debate about it. is this sort of representative of a nanny state to make all these recommendations about how food should be sold, marketed and identified. i think it s important to have that conversation, but it s also important to debate the merritts of what she s saying and not vilify her as this nanny figure and take the big macs out of your kids hands. she s suggesting kids exercise more, eat more fruits and vegetables. what is wrong with that? laura bush came out with a book last week and talked about how she personally, unlike her husband, that was the story for about an hour. people ask why does michelle obama get more coverage than laura bush. i think for several reasons. one, because she is unique. if only because she is the first african-american first lady, but also because i think that she is, she has stepped out and taken on project that does involve to some degree, policy. it tries to bridge the west wing with sort of the public at large. i think those things make for a lot more interesting stories and then there s also certainly the aspect of her personality that does embrace the fashion industry, which i think a lot of it has become this kind of superficial coverage, but that s also a pretty significant story. because you have a national industry that has somewhat invested in the first lady. a billion dollar industry that managed to sort of make it through this recession without a bailout and she has championened that industry. michelle obama s been the stimulus package for the fashion industry, definitely. and lola, do you think it s fair to say that reporters like michelle obama, perhaps identify with her and that s why we get a lot of fairly soft coverage? i think people like michelle obama. i think that female reporters identify with her, but i don t think that necessarily shapes the sort of coverage we have of michelle obama. like robin said, she s an interesting, unique figure and that s why people are interested in writing about her on television. that would suggest that journalists feelings don t come into play at all. i know people weren t wild about nancy reagan. i don t think your state of journalists can be objective. i think we try to be, but naturally, people are going to gravitate towards michelle obama because there is a story. there is a hook there. i don t necessarily think she has the same baggage nancy reagan did. i would also just add to that, when nancy reagan got a lot of that negative coverage, it was because she was doing things that were out of the ordinary and things that one could make a reasonable argument were troubling. i mean, she was borrowing clothes and not returning them and so far as we know, michelle obama has not done that. i m sure that she ll get some pretty negative coverage if we hear she s taking freebies from design houses and storing them away from her post white house years. lola liked that answer. when the president and first lady travel, the press fixes on michelle and carla bruni. what were they wearing. that seems to make up a lot of coverage. i just keep imagining that somewhere, people are hoping that carla bruni and michelle obama will get into this big fashion walk-off together and like try to battle each other on the cat walk. it s sort of ridiculous. they re both glamorous women and great to look at and we do enjoy seeing them and watching them wear their fashions, but there has to be a little more substance there and i think both those women are really spectacular, intelligent women and we should be talk about what they re saying as well. i would also argue in some ways, the east wing has allowed some of this to happen because in that first year, there really was a vacuum in the sense that things that she was saying and doing were sort of the standard issue first lady things. there were some rumbling about that in the press. there was because it was, here s this woman who is clearly you know, sort of experiencened and capable and smart and can be doing so many more things and she hadn t really found her footing. so, in that vacuum, the most superficial things that don t require comment from the first lady came to the floor. on her mexico city trip, i think her handlers made a huge mistake of not having press with her in haiti. that was an enormous story and could have been even more enormous had there been actual press this there on the ground. does it embarrass you at all when you say that the profession isn t interested in the first lady as a substantive figure? no. i m embarrassed for some who d rather talk about her j. crew cardigans. all right. we re going to wrap it up, guys. thank you very much for kicking it around with us this morning. before we go to break, barbara walters had a heart valve replaced this week. the surgery went well and she is recovering as expected. that is very good news. she is 80 years old and yet, i bet we ll see her back on the air very soon ft. and a wired magazine wire charged that the website is going rogue. with chase sapphire you always get an expert advisor immediately. man: chase sapphire, this is brian. hi, brian. we re on vacation and would love to change hotels. you call. we answer. 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[ male announcer ] get a free 3g/4g card from sprint. it s more than a wireless network. it s a wireless revolution. deaf, hard-of-hearing and people with speech disabilities, access www. sprintrelay.com compare a well equipped lexus es, to a well-equipped buick lacrosse. get inside each. and see what you find. if perfection is what you pursue, this just might change your course. meet the new class of world class. the twenty-ten lacrosse, from buick. may the best car win. facebook is a place to hang out with your friends, sharing gossip updates and photos. but lately, the website has come under criticism for allowing marketers access to more and more profile information posted by its members. chuck schumer has asked for an investigation and mark zuckerberg convened a staff meeting to talk about concerns. ryan single joins me from san francisco. you say facebook recently ren e reneged on its privacy promise. explain. in december, facebook decided there was a whole category of your information that used to be private that you could no longer keep private, so it had to be public. that included your name, picture, list of friends and causes you decided to support on facebook. and those things are now considered publicly available information by facebook and they re starting to take that information and push it to sites like yelp and pandora and dots.com. just sort of inverting the way, what people expected out of facebook. they joined facebook thinking they were going to share information with their friends. they want them to share it with the world. we tried to get a facebook spokesman to join us. didn t work out. but here s a statement from the company i think facebook has tried to defend itself saying their chains to what public and private. they say they re just reflecting changing privacy norms. they re trying to keep up other services like twitter, but it s a little self-serving. they re forging these privacy norms for us and less than reflecting them. facebook is incredibly useful. you don t get 400 million users unless you re doing something right. is question is, are they respecting their users or taking advantage of they ve given us this thing we love and can t really leave. but can t you opt out of allowing much of your information to remain public? there are there s a set of privacy concerns, privacy settings you can get into in facebook. you kind of need a master s degree to figure it out. there s this category of information they re pushing to other companies that they have just sort of, they re now saying you can t actually make it private. you can hide it, but not make it private. facebook says 10 million new users have joined since the privacy changes and it s just elite tech writers concerned with this sort of thing. i think i m hearing from a lot of people, people don t really want to leave facebook. they just want more control. facebook has gotten to b so big and kind of turned from a place where you share information to where they want this to be your online identity. they want to be at the center of the web. i think some of the privacy concerns and there s been security concerns as well, are really ways for people to talk about how they feel uncomfort bable with the power that power that facebook has. they have that power because we give it our information. on this point about what mark zuckerberg calls changing notions of privacy, isn t it true that younger people sort of live their lives online and their expectations of privacy are different than they were 10 or 15 years ago. i think it s undeniable that we have a very different sort of as a culture, we have changed what we re comfortable doing online. but i think kids are a little smarter about privacy than we give them credit for. have a lot of people who use pseudonyms on facebook because they know their information could be used against them later if trying to get into a college or an internship, they don t want the person that s going to hire them seeing pictures of them drinking beer. we are a little more exhibitionist, but people are still really kind of smart and in control. they re very aware of what their public personas are. thanks for joining us from san francisco. sorry for the big delay we had in getting his sound. super senate tuesday is coming up and that s a big subject this sunday morning. where? 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[ high male ] fizz, fizz. some of the candidates in this week s senate primaries are out on the talk circuit this morning and that means they had to talk to candy crowley. thanks. indeed. one of the best races out there, howie, is in pennsylvania. arlen specter in the senate for 30 years. he s being challenged by a didn t i named joe sestak who s been in congress for four years. what s the race about? the race is about washington. who s inside and who s outside. listen to this. well, i think it s a race that actually where everybody knows washington is broken and everybody knows if you re going to send back to washington, d.c., a career politician that actually would switch his party as he said to keep his job, then we re not going to fix the mess that we got into by sending him back. for years i tried to moderate the republican party. and when the stimulus came up and president obama asked me for his for my support and it looked like we were sliding into a 1929 depression, i sided with president obama. it wasn t my job to be saved, it was the jobs of thousands of pennsylvanians and americans. any predictions about whether his job will be saved in this democratic primary? what s interesting here is that they are fairly close when it comes to the issues. and what people are looking at is perhaps sort of a petri dish of what s going to happen. as far as predictions, i asked sestak if he would support it s been a very bitter race. i asked sestak if he would support specter if specter won, wouldn t answer. he said it s not going to happen. i asked specter and he said of course i would. he didn t answer your questions and i did. so right down to the crunch they are they don t like each other very much. any predictions from specter s senate colleagues? well, as a matter of fact, senator schumer said he thinks specter will pull this one out. senator schumer of the party of arlen specter. but on this show utah senator bob bennett said he thought specter would lose. we re also now, of course, in the pregame innings for the elena kagan nomination. it seems that this is starting to get a lot of coverage. she d be the third woman on the supreme court. how is that playing out on the air waves? there s a lot of talk about it. one of the things that s interesting to me is when you talk to either those on capitol hill or to reporters, there s not a lot of there hasn t been a lot of real buzz about this particular supreme court nominee. nothing has caught fire. because they haven t found any dirt on her. you re exactly right. nonetheless, a lot of people out there talking about it. she would not let them come to the area that does the recruiting on the campus. they had to meet with some student veterans. and this is not acceptable. it was a big error. you know, if we had if we said that any lawyer who had ever filed a brief to the supreme court, that they couldn t serve on the supreme court because the case lost, half the members who are on the supreme court today would not be on the supreme court. she stated a position, she challenged a law. the law was upheld. and she said we will follow the law at harvard. i mean i don t know what else you could ask for. there will be a lot of that and then she ll probably be confirmed. i bet we ll be hearing about it next sunday as well. candy crowley, thanks. still to come, some people scoffed at arianna but is a thriving huffington post good for the news business. do u gonna be there? are u sure u gonna call back? when am calling up and all that? can t u hear i m sick? i m lovesick can t u hear it explode? all down, all down pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp it seemed like a perfectly charming idea five years ago. arianna huffington would get all of her celebrity friends to blog for her. but these days the huffington post could pass the new york times. lowry david, bill maher, diane deet on. these would draw eyeballs to huffington s new website. she put me on the phone with warren beatty. most of the celebs didn t write much, but journalists, politicians and scholars did for free, which turns out to be a great business model. with serious money behind it the huffington post now draws 13 million visitors a month, not far behind the times 16 million and ahead of l.a. times usa today and other media publications. just as huffington went from a wife to a candidate for california governor to a liberal decree scrusader her website evolved into a real online newspaper but it s not the serious blog posts that draw the attention. it s the stories that they grab from other news organizations that actually pay reporters to gather information. she sends some traffic their way but feasts on their contest. repackaged with flashy headlines and photos. here s a headline from the other day mccain accuses liberal media of distorting arizona race. click on it and you get this short piece, which is a summary of a story reported by, as you ll see if you click one more time, politico s glenn thrush. they are mostly boosting barack obama who made a point of calling on one of its reporters at the white house. nico pit knee is here from the huffington post. and bashing the likes of republicans and glenn beck. they have added sections on entertainment, media, food and local additions in new york, l.a., chicago and denver. and then there s the tabloid stuff, not safe for work links to women with wardrobe malfun