Transcripts For CNN Reliable Sources 20100704 : vimarsana.co

an easy ride. cbs s laura logan told me that was arrogant and sided with general mcchrystal. this morning we ll examine the fine line between cultivating sources and protecting them. supreme court nominee elena kagan was grilled this week in senate confirmation hearings, and what s that? you didn t catch the hearings? could that be because cable news largely blew them off? we ll ask the web s top court watcher about that. dave weigel resigned as a washington post blogger after leaked e-mails showed him talking trash. pretty ugly trash. about conservatives. did he deserve to lose his job? we ll ask him. plus buzz bissinger is a pulitzer prize winning author. so why the blank is he dropping f-bombs on twitter? i m howard kurtz, and this is reliable sources. at the outset, 25 years ago, it looks like what it was, a radio show put on the tv. the host sat there with an oversized mike and chatted with guests and took calls from viewers. but larry king live blossomed into a phenomenon that changed the nature of cable television. in recent years the press has turned negative as declining ratings prompted critics to question whether the program was a relic. but whatever you think of larry, you ve got to say this. from coaxing ross perot into a white house bid to chatting up monica lewinsky to sparring with beauty queen carrie prejean, the man s had one heck of a run. this is the premier edition of larry king live. i m saying to all these nice people that have written me, and the letters fill cases, if you re dead serious start committees. in florida, georgia i want to see some sweat. i understand we re going to go to a live picture in los angeles. police radio are saying that simpson the passenger in the car, has a gun at his head. an offer you can t refuse. darling, good-bye. the attraction was first. it was not who it was. it was it. it was what it was. it was that chemistry. and was the fact that he was president part of that chemistry? i don t know. you re being ib appropriate. okay. okay? inappropriate king live continues. this week the 76-year-old broadcaster announced he s giving up the host chair sometime this fall. i m incredibly proud that we recently made the guinness book of world records for having the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot on the same network. with that chapter closing, i m looking forward to the future. what my next chapter will bring. but for now, for here, it s time to hang up the nightly suspenders. was it time for him to go, or did king stay on too long? joining us now to examine his career, his legacy, and how cnn will replace him, here in washington tammy haddad, president of haddad media and the former executive producer and one of the creators of larry king live. david zurawik, television and media critic for the baltimore sun. and in los angeles, lisa bloom, founder of the bloom law firm and a cbs legal analyst. tammy haddad, you were larry s first executive producer. how did he make the transition from nice guy, non-threatening host, to nice guy, non-threatening interviewer of presidents and white house candidates? well, i don t view him as that non-threatening. just because his attitude and demeanor wasn t threatening, it didn t mean he didn t get the story out and he didn t talk to people and get something out of them that wasn t out there before. you know, it s all how you look at it. let s go back to what was going on at the time. cable news was young. the idea that people would come on shows other than on sunday mornings to talk about real issues, it just didn t exist. i mean, people weren t coming on tv in prime time, congressmen, senators. what larry did is he made that all palatable because he was a friend and he was everyman. and people forget now how revolutionary that seemed at the time. okay. hollywood, california, hello. lisa bloom. the show had a weird alchemy. just on the anniversary week he talks to president obama one night and lady gaga another night. yeah, howie, you re being inappropriate. okay? you re being inappropriate. that was probably my favorite moment of all time. look, i ve been a guest on larry king s show many times. i ve guest hosted for him and i ve talked to him here in the makeup room at cnn l.a. many times in the last year. i maerng he s just genuinely a nice guy. he s kind of the nebbishy jewish guy from brooklyn who never got pretentious, never got full of himself unlike so many others on cable news. and i think that was his strength. he intentionally asked short simple questions because the show was about his guests, its want about him. and don t forget, he s not just a star here in the united states but internationally. larry king live is on all over the world. i ve watched him in shanghai. i ve watched him in nicaragua, in morocco. i mean, he s a gigantic presence all over the world. no question about that. as the television historian here, david zurawik, how important was larry king to the whole talk show culture, and did that culture ultimately pass him by? well, you know, first of all, i don t think it passed him by. let me take that part of it. in terms of presence, just on-air presence, which is rough when you re that age, the carrie prejean rough when you re this age. it is for me too. but the way he handled that inappropriate stuff, i thought he handled it was one of his finest moments. i thought he handled it with such class and such command. i really liked him give us the larger picture. well, she says his comments were inappropriate no, no, talk about his place in history. but in terms of history, howie, you have to go all the way back i think to walter winchell and when print started to move him to radio. that s where larry reached back to. that s where really that sort of three-dot column was his style. i think it was even his persona. so he makes print into radio. he makes radio into tv. he does tv into cable tv. that is an amazing range for him to do. now, did he do as well coming into this new age of media? maybe not. but that s a long, long run. we ll come back to that. but i still feel that the idea that, you know, now a president vice president goes on the daily show nobody bats an eye. it was controversial in 1992 for bill clinton to go plau the saxophone on ar zenio hall and all that. larry king s going to continue to do specials here on cnn, tammy haddad. he told me he s not leaving because of the ratingsings, which have dropped severely over the last year. not leaving because of the problems with his wife, they ve separated. but it s hard to imagine he d be walking away if he were number one in that time slot. well, i think that s right. and i think that cnn has not created an atmosphere now that appeals or is favorable to his kind of interviewing style. and they re looking more at hard news. john klein has been on this show and talked about what he s looking for for cnn. and i ll tell you something else. i think that larry has a place, he s going to do a lot of great interviews for cnn and other people, and other people are going to come after him because what people forget is anyone can do this one time, anyone can talk to lisa, but what they can t do is every single day make news, talk to people, engage them, and bring people into the process. it s a different kind of thing. lisa knows this because she hosted a daily talk show, or interview show on court tv for years. but now he not only has to compete, lisa bloom, against fox s show and hannity but msnbc s rachel maddow. the competition has gotten a lot tougher. well, i think larry has competed with them by not competing. it s not a news show. it s a talk show. he s had celebrities, lady gaga. you know, and presidents. it s a different kind of show. it s a minimalist show. and i don t think the problem is the competition. i think perhaps he s just losing the audience for that kind of a show. it s not flashy. it s minimalist. he actually lets his guests talk. you know his motto, which i ve always tried to take to heart myself when interviewing people-s i never learned anything when i was talking. i mean, can you imagine even keith olbermann or bill o reilly having a motto like that? but howie, we should bring up one other point, because larry s show, like any show, doesn t occur in a vacuum. it s the show before what the numbers are getting, it s the show before that. it s just like when i was at msnbc with hardball. if the audience before us declined, if that show declined 50%, it s going to hurt you. so he s not operating alone. so you re saying cnn s other problems in prime time also undermine to some extent larry king s ratings. david zurawik, we re in a hyperpartisan era now, and do people s expectations of what they want from tv change from 1985? 1985 cnn was it, there was no other cable news network. do people now like more aggressive, more controversial interviews? you know, howie, i don t know i think they do. but i don t know if it s only the partisan nature of what s changed. it s our sense of attention. the whole culture. our sense of celebrity. once upon even in 80 you could interview a broadway star three weeks after he opened and it would still be news. now it s so fast that two hours after the opening it s been twittered to death, you know, and there s nothing left. that s changed. the other thing i think we have to look at with king s ratings and tammy s absolutely right, and tammy also knows this as well as anybody, i think cnn and maybe the people producing that show have to look at the last year, last couple of years of were they off the news and as on it as they had to be? you know, i think back to something like nightline with ted koppel where every night they were right off whatever was happening in the news. they needed to get that show a little better in its bookings, i think. and nightline is doing well. we had larry king talking to mick jagger on one of the tammy-k this format, which i think of as an old-fashioned variety show, a little bit of this, little bit of that, can it survive without larry king? well, i think it s going to be very tough. i ve read the names of candidates. do you want to reveal who is going to go in there today? i don t have any inside information, but look, a lot of people have says that piers morgan, a lot of people know he s a judge on america s got talent. how about howie kurtz? are you nominating me? that s what i m saying. howie kurtsz. i second my own motion. that s right. i m from brooklyn, and that should be the first requirement. that s right. specific people. piers morgan, who most americans know from that show, has a long history of interviewing in the uk. he actually had the historic interview of this last election of the new british prime minister. he interviewed sarah and gordon brown, then prime minister, who lost and had an interview that not unlike larry king with ross perot really took you inside the political process. and so i would guess that cnn looked at that, looked at the interview and said wait a minute, he s likeable like larry, he s someone that s be comfortable at night by the way, i think you re all wrong about switching the guests around at 9:00. the key to larry king live su would look at 9:00 to see what it was. i agree politics worked better for them and they moved maybe to softer. i don t know got to jump in. we re short on time. lisa bloom, we re talking about the cnn brand. what do you make of the decision to hire the former governor of new york, the resigned governor of new york, eliot spitzer, for the 8:00 p.m. eastern show? i don t like it, howie. i think it s a slap in the face to women, frankly. this is a man who made a career as a prosecutor going after prostitution rings and then was caught in a call girl scandal himself. i think that s the height of hypocrisy. with all the terrific journalists out there, with all the fantastic hosts they could have chosen, i don t think that was a good choice. and i think a lot of women i ve talked to specifically find this really offensive. also, we don t forget about having his wife standing next to him with that stepford wife gaze when he resigned all right. i think he s got some planing to do. ndzurawik s going to get the last word. if they hire one of these reality show guys, piers morgan, ryan seacrest, what does that to your perception as you said last week on the spitzer question, it doesn t feel like cnn to me. and it really worries me. this is a crucial time for cnn. it s reinventing prime time. and that may sound like a small thing, but it s really reinventing its image. and if they get it wrong with this 9:00 show it s going to be big trouble. and something tells me if they get it wrong you re going to be back to tell us about it and you re not going to be pulling any punches. lisa bloom, tammy haddad, david zurawik. thank you very much. when we come back, hearings, what hearings? elena kagan faces the senate and television is supremely bored. we sure do we help millions of people save. look we re number one in motorcycle insurance, a leader in boat and rv, and oh, wait, let me guess. you re the number-one truck insurer. wow, first guess! nailed it. oh, you re psychic! what am i thinking of right now? tacos? yes! helping you save money no matter what you drive. now, that s progressive. call or click today. the biggest hint that the elena kagan confirmation hearings weren t big news came from the one sound bite that television played again and again. it had nothing to do with military recruiting or abortion or civil rights. here, take a look. i ll just ask you where you re at on christmas. you know, like all jews, i was probably at a chinese restaurant. great answer. but the cable news networks quickly grew bored with the supreme court confirmation. by the first afternoon of questioning we were hearing more from chris matthews, bret baer, and john king and candy crowley and their assorted pundits than from kagan, who merely provide aid visual backdrop. by the second date cable channels had almost totally checked out. joining us to talk about the coverage tom goldstein, a washington lawyer and the founder and publisher of scotusblog.com. how is it a lifetime appointment to the nation s highest court barely grew cable coverage this week? interesting supreme court confirmation hearings seems to be going down rather than up even though importance of the supreme court seems to be growing. the idea is people like process, they can wrap their hands around process, and when democrats control the senate and there s no chance of her being blocked then she s not irmy controversial, people go i guess i ll go on to something else. i was embarrassed there was less coverage on cable on this confirmation hearing than balloon boy and in fact less coverage than all the speculation over who president obama would pick before he picked elena kagan. are legal arguments just not well suited to television? well, actually, i think they are. the senators i actually think did a good job this time trying to put front and center a lot of the big questions the supreme court confronts, how her vote could be important to them. so if people did tune in, i actually for the first time in a long time think they could have learned something. well, but if they did tune in to msnbc or cnn or fox news they mostly would have seen pundits talking about the testimony instead of showing the testimony. on the other hand, pbs, which you work with, and c-span actually carried the back and forth. there seems to contrary to what you just said, there seems to be a media consensus that this was a vapid and hollow charade, to use elena kagan s words from 15 years ago, about the supreme court confirmation process. did you find important signs of her judicial philosophy? well, i wouldn t say that it was a vapid charade. neither would i say it was the greatest constitutional law class ever that was the most accessible. i do think we learned some things about her. i do think you came away with the sense she s on the center left. and also even if you didn t learn about her you could have learned about the the law. i thought the republicans actually did a great job. senator sessions, for example. senator kyl. senator graham. in talking about why they thought a conservative approach to the law was right. and the country deserves to hear about that. the reason we didn t learn more, of course, is like every nominee these days she was being cautious, i can t discuss, this this could be a possible case. but she did provide some answers. some. why this disconnect between you re a lawyer, you re probably more interested in this stuff than the average person. the disconnekekconnect between substance of the topics that they covered, which includes some pretty important top knicks th r topics in this country and the giant collective yawn from the media establishment which wants i guess fireworks? it wants fireworks. that s the problem. and cable news has so many great values but it really does thrive on the prospect of an explosion and there really wasn t a prospect of an explosion here. just start with there are 12 democrats and only 7 republicans on the senate judiciary committee. they were just completely outgunned in that respect. and also, to be honest, the senators aren t great about focusing on a line of questioning. if your expectations are really high, they re going to be dashed. but i came away this time thinking for the first time in a while that it was a valuable part of the process. tell me one important thing you learned about elena kagan s approach to the law that was either ignored or minimized by the media. well, for example, she did talk about abortion in a way that i think got completely glossed over, and it s a huge issue for a lot of americans. elena kagan said something very specific. she said she believes the law requires when there s an abortion restriction to be an exception for the health or life of the mother. that s not something she had ever talked about going in or had ever written about. and there are dozens of examples like, that where you can come away understanding more about her. and she was questioned about a memo she wrote in the clinton white house about partial birth abortion. absolutely. that would be the stuff of major headlines. that s certainly what the conservatives would have wanted. this is a little bit of a game where conservatives are trying to get their base, get their constituencies to be worried, concerned leading into the midterm elections, and democrats and the administration are saying there s not much to see here. so it s a battle for framing the debate. i ve got half a minute. would the hearings have been different in terms of the media coverage had there been some sort of smoking gun phrase like wise latina, sonia sotomayor that elena kagan uttered yes, there could have been the perry mason moment where we d seen her attacked or questioned on those issues. and there was never a setup like that. it was always clear from day one she was going to be confirmed, really only the democrats were going to vote for her given the political environment and given there wasn t much mystery. the media loves suspense. tom goldstein of scotusblog. coming up in the second half of reliable sources, are embedded reporters in bed with top military officials? we ll go behind the heated debate kicked off by that rolling stone article with former pentagon correspondents fred francis and jamie mcintyre. blogger david wooing ll lost his job at the washington post after his trash talk about conservatives was leaked. we ll ask him what he was thinking. plus, vanity fair s buzz bissinger on why he s savaging his critics and lots of other folks on twitter. male announcer: be kind to your eyes with transitions lenses. transitions adapt to changing light so you see a whole day comfortably and conveniently while protecting your eyes from the sun. ask your eyecare professional which transitions lenses are right for you. female announcer: thanks to the eyeglass guide, it s never been easier to find the right pair of eyeglasses. check out eyeglassguide.com today, brought to you by transitions. like, why are my numbers too low? are you looking for answers? the accu-chek aviva system now has new tools to help you discover what your numbers mean and how the things you do are connected to your blood sugar patterns. 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[ male announcer ] discover the accu-chek aviva system and save with a prescription discount card. start your discovery today. it s the same question whether you re covering city hall, the state house, the white house, or a war halfway around the world. can a beat reporter be aggressive when having to deal with the same sources week after week, or do you invariably come to identify with them, even protect them? the question was underscored on last week s program when i talked to michael hastings about his rolling stone article, the one that got general stanley mcchrystal fired, and got a very different view from cbs s lara logan. this is actually an interesting journalistic point. there s a reason why when general mcchrystal took the job everyone writes a glowing profile of him, because then that assures access he later on. and he talked about his manners pretending to build an illusion of trust. he s laid out there what his game is. that is exactly the kind of damaging type of attitude that makes it difficult for reporters who are genuine about what they do. i think that s insulting and arrogant myself. so how does a journalist strike the right balance, especially in a war zone? joining us now, jamie mcintyre, former senior pentagon correspondent for cnn who now blogs on military and media issues at lineofdeparture.com. and in kansas city fred francis, former nbc pentagon and national security correspondent, who now helps teach military officials, among others, how to deal with the media. jamie mcintyre, you write that there s a dirty little secret among beat reporters who routinely travel with top military officials, an unwritten code. what is it? generally speaking the standard position for most reporters in most situations is everything s on the record including what we re saying now unless we specify otherwise. that kind of flips when you re traveling in the actual inner circle of senior officials, where the general rule of thumb is most of this stuff that goes on and particularly after hours in social situations is off the record unless you specify you that want to put it on the record. and that s what i think surprised a lot of people about michael hastings article, was that he seemed to be able to waive all those ground rules. well, he insists there were no off the record ground rules. let me go to fred francis. have you in your reporting days, when you were at the pentagon, when you were in war zones, did you let things go unreported because of any kind of understanding you had with the brass? sure. and it s an unwritten understanding. it s an unspoken understanding. if you re a beat reporter, you need to have things go unwritten, unreported because you want access. you want access for your audience. it informs your reporting in the long term. if a general officer, there s a gaffe or he says something that is impolitic you let that go as a beat reporter because you re there for years and years. you know, you re not a lapdog. you re not an attack dog. you re a watchdog. and that s what makes you an effective journalist. so yes, you know, jamie s right, you do let some things go. but it s for the greater good. in letting things go, and i ll come back to jamie, michael hastings, for example, says that people like you, your colleagues who now do this full-time, are protecting these guys. well, you know, there s first of all, what i tell a lot of these people is there s this idea that if it s off the record you re never going to ever report it. that s just not true. and the senior commanders and these officials, they know that. they know there s things that they can t even say off the record because if it s good enough it s going to get reported. i mean, i can think of 100 examples of egregious things that can happen in an off the record situation that i would be bound as a reporter to report. but in those cases i go back to my source, i say look, i can t ignore this, i m going to have to report it or i m going to have to confirm it somewhere else. and there might be a price to pay for that. that person i disagree. i disagree with jamie there. i know what he s talking about. you know, sometimes if a general officer or a senior official says something that s so outrageous, so egregious that you have to go back and say i know that was off the record but i m going to report it anyway and i ll pay the price down the road, i disagree with jamie. once you say it s off the record, it is off the record. that s the rule. unwritten, written. it s off the record. and that s what makes you a valuable reporter. and it s not just at the pentagon. it s at the justice department. it s at the senate. and it s certainly at the white house. and it s certainly at the washington post, howie. and you know that. jamie? well, you know, again, i could come up with a scenario let s say you re in an off the record situation and you witness a war crime. that s illegal. that s different. that s a breaking of the law. okay, fred, so it s just there s the illegal exception. i would point out that making contemptuous remarks about the commander in chief is illegal in the u.s. military. it s a violation of under the uniform code of military justice it s illegal. but we re talking about breaking a law. listen let me jump in because i want to move this slightly. and let me also just say speaking for myself when someone tells me something off the record i absolutely positively can t use it, but i can go talk to ten other people and try to get somebody to say it on the record or in the background or in some form i can get it in the newspaper. jamie mcintyre, you took on lara logan on her blog about her appearance on this program and you you said that she had grievously wounded the press corps with misaimed friendly fire. you went on to say that logan had reinforced the stereotype of embed reporters who are in bed with senior military officials. but i don t see that much difference between you re telling me there s an unwritten code and her saying there s an unspoken agreement not to report everything you see in a war zone. well, she s right about that. and in my blog i said she was right about a number of things in that interview. but the most damaging thing she said was when she made the comment disparaging michael hastings by referring to the fact that he hadn t served his country the way the military did. i didn t agree with that either. the problem with that comment is and i appreciate the sentiment of appreciating the sacrifice of people in the military. anybody who covers the military gets that. but it feeds this perception, that comment fed this perception that we re more interested in protecting the members of the military than pursuing aggressive journalism. and in that sense it was a very damaging comment to make. nor do you have to have served in the military to be absolutely not. a fair and effective journalist in a war situation. it was just a really bad argument to advance. and it just fed that negative perception. go ahead, fred. howie, at my company, 15 seconds, we teach our clients, many of them general officers, never, ever go off the record unless you re with a reporter that you have a long-standing relationship with. never, ever do an interview with a reporter you that don t know that reporter s background, dot research. and never do an interview that s longer than 20, 30 minutes. if you let me root around in your head a couple of hours, a couple of days you re not going to remember what you told me. especially if there s drink what i m saying, howard, is general mcchrystal, this was entirely his fault regardless of hastings and i disagree with a lot of the things michael hastings said or did. nobody s letting mcchrystal off the hook. who knows what he was thinking in allowing all of that kind of access night and day. but here s the question. the argument, fred-s michael hastings is a freelancer. he s not a member of the club. he comes along, and if he didn t violate off the record restrictions, which he says he didn t, he blew the whistle on general mcchrystal in a way none of the beat reporters would. and i agree that s what he did, and i agree that he did the right thing. if they re going to allow somebody from the outside, especially somebody with his background and from a publication like the rolling stone, to hang around a military headquarters for that long, you know, they deserve what they get. and the other thing it s just not very smart. the other thing that fred ought to be telling his clients is whether they re on the record or off the record they should not be saying things that they don t want to see show up somewhere because off the record is not a blanket protection against any kinds of misdeeds or wrongdoing. it s simply not. but what about this whole question, jamie, of access? by not reporting things that you think are unnecessarily gratuitous, people joking around, offcolor banter, all of that, what do you get out of it? how does it help your reporting other than you get a leak on something half an hour before it s going to be announced? well, the most insulting thing that michael hastings said was that reporters like me and fred in his past, that we write favorable stories in order to ensure access. we don t write favorable stories. we write stories that we consider to be accurate, that have context, that are balanced, that are going to be seen as fair. and as lara logan i think rightly pointed out on your program, she s done a lot of hard-hitting stories. that hasn t blunted her access. what the military s not looking for a free ride. they re looking for a fair shake. and if you can show them that even he tho you ve been very critical of them you ve been fair you can keep getting that access. we ll have to wrap it up. fred francis, jamie mcintyre, thanks very much for joining us p. up next should a washington post blogger have lofts his job over leaked e-mails? and does privately attacking conservatives mean you can t be fair in your reporting? dave weigel in the hot seat in a moment. david weigel had been a washington post blogger for all of three months assigned to cover conservatives when his career came to an abrupt end. weigel resigned last week after someone got a private e-mail called journal list leaked some of his messages. it called for matt drudge to set himself on fire, wished for rush limbaugh to fail while he was hospitalized with chest pains, said that conservatives are using the media to angrily, violently divide america and protect white privilege. but many blamed the post for letting weigel go along with two websites that ran the leaked e-mails, fishbowl d.c. and tucker carlson s daily color. keith olbermann gave them all a worst persons award. somebody at the post and most of the people critical of david weigel today seem to be under the impression that to cover conservatives you have to be one and you cannot be critical of them even in a private setting. nonsense. weigel was a blogger. he made no bones about it. so what actually happened, and what does it mean for blogging within the confines of traditional newspapers? joining us now is david weigel. what was your gut reaction when you found these messages, these e-mails you that thought were off the record had been leaked? well, horror because i didn t know what else somebody had. and how else they would leak it. the thing is there were a lot of e-mails sent over the course of about a year and a month i was on this list. those e-mails were a part of conversations i was having. something i d said about martha coakley that was actually an answer to somebody who was dismissive about whether her statements on baseball should affect her political career. she argued that was sexist. i said no, she s a lousy candidate. out of context that looked like i was saying democrats should learn and defend their health care bill and not back down from martha coakley s defeat. it was all this out of context stuff why exactly did you think that sharing e-mails with 400 journalists would absolutely remain confidential? because they were journalists. it was all off the record. the rules for the list was you had to be a journalist, you had or think tank worker. you couldn t be with the government. you had to be either non-ideological or liberal to be on it. because there was that fear of things getting out. and everyone, when they signed up, agreed we re going to keep this off the record. i keep things off the record all the time every day. i have a conversation with somebody, they want to take something back, i let them take it back. i mean, this is the way our industry works is not by insulting people like i did. i don t defend that at all. but it does work by assuming things you say are confidential be confidential. you don t defend it. in fact, you ve apologized for many of these messages. i have. as you said, you wrote a piece saying you were stupid and mean. yeah. how do you explain the viciousness of some of these messages? it s you just said it. and i said it, you said it again. i was vicious and mean. i mean, i wanted to be a reporter you don t seem like a vicious guy. well no, in private i was a little bit more cocky, a lot more cocky about the people i was covering because honestly, i had a very quick rise. i was reporting and breaking stories and doing the usual, doing long magazine pieces, but because of the era i got into journalism in, 2004, 2005, 2006 there were rewards in the blogosphere for being really out there and getting in fights and showing off. usually people do this and at the end of the day knock off and are fine with each other. some of the people who were offended in these e-mails i ve talked to them personally and they say we know you did this, you did this in private too. but some people have been criticizing the washington post over your departure, where i work. and why did you decide to offer your resignation? i didn t want to hurt the post. i think it s fine to the kind of journalism i do, i m very proud of it. i m not proud of what i said in private, but i m proud of the opinions i have. but the post needs to be able to convince everyone it talks to that it is an institution that is impartial and that is you know, its reporters come to their stories with no biases. and on this i think a lot of my sources have forgiven me, but it was frankly going to be trouble for other people, i think, if i was on staff. if i was just if i was allowed to keep writing what i was writing, people who want to make an issue of the post every single day would have had something to point to. and i weren t you hired in part for your opinions? you weren t hired as a straight beat reporter. you wrote a column online. and you had a point of view. that s true. but i mean, i don t think it s fair for everyone else at an organization i work for to defend what i was doing. no one owes anyone a job. i m going to find another job in journalism, and i ll be fine. no one at the post who goes there and grinds out non-partisan copy doesn t get to go on tv and make have opinions should have to answer for what i was doing. you ve already become a contributor to this week on msnbc. so it looks like you won t be on food stamps. but some people had the idea that because the post had some liberal bloggers like ezra klein, who started that journal list, that you were the conservative brought in to write about conservatives. was that a misconception? yeah. that wasn t what i ever pretended to be. i like the conservative movement a lot. i feel like the left is a collection of interest groups, the right is a collection of crusaders and people who believe in ideology and don t believe in getting things from the government. there s people on the right who will irritate me, but inside the right there are people irritated by comrades. and they there are a lot of conservatives who are annoyed one day from another, say, matt drudge like i was. matt drudge was responsible for me getting lots of hate mail. you re allowed to have opinions about the people you cover generally. to the broader question of whether i pretended to be a conservative, no, i ve always been a kind of idiosyncratic more libertarian than not reporter, and i was more interested in getting stories from conservative than being i ve got half a minute. is there room at mainstream newspapers for bloggers with plenty of opinions who also report, or is that an uncomfortable fit? i think there s room for it. but i think it s going to be the source of a lot of attacks from, you know, partisan, anti-media groups who just want to score points against mainstream media organizations. so people have to be ready for that. you have to be ready to defend your opinions. i don t think you should have to defend the opinions you have in private because people are every day people are in this town exchanging private opinions. they would not broadcast them. they say things at dinner parties with lots of people around that they would not want around. you shouldn t have to explain that away, but you should be allowed to say i m a blogger with these opinions and i m breaking news, my readers know what they re getting when they read this website. i think that s perfectly defensible. just for me at a different publication. dave weigel, thanks very much for coming in. thank you. after the break, you can t say that on television, but apparently it s fair game on twitter. a pulitzer briprize-winning aut on how some well-placed f-bombs helped boost his social networking status. vanity fair s buzz bissinger in a moment. thanks. so is our bike insurance. all the coverage you need at a great price. hold on, cowboy. cool. i m not done for less than a dollar a month, you also get 24/7 roadside assistance. right on. yeah, vroom-vroom! sounds like you ran a 500. more like a 900 v-twin. excuse me. well, you re excused. the right insurance for your ride. now, that s progressive. call or click today. he s a pulitzer prize-winning author, a major league sportswriter, and has a gig with vanity fair. so why is buzz bissinger so angry? the reason i know he s really steamed is that i ve been following him on twitter, where he s been dropping f-bombs every few words and sending nasty messages, short but nasty, to his detractors. is there a method to this madness? buzz bissinger joins me now from philadelphia. so first of all, you have a pretty nice life. what are you so teed off about? you know what? i ve always been angry. i ve always been outspoken. my father was very outspoken. anger runs in the bissinger family. and you know, i found twitter is just a great place to vent it, to get it out quickly, to get it off my chest. i say what i feel. you know, none of it is contrived. and i ve fallen in love with it, although some people call me a twitiot. you weren t very active on twitter and then a couple of guys took shots at you for a book you wrote on lebron james. and you didn t like that. no. i have to confess i was drufrpg at the time, and i looked at my e-mail, because you always look at your e-mail because you re a journalist and you re hoping you ve won a million dollars and that didn t work. between i went to twitter. i had a pathetic number of followers. then i read this twitter where a guy said as bad as lebron james play was in the fifth game against the celtics it wasn t as bad as the book he wrote with buzz bissinger. and i said wait a sec, that s his performance, i ve got nothing to do with this. and i got pissed off, and i told him to go f-bomb himself. because i think writers have become punching bags. i mean, howie, you see this, i m sure some of the online comments you get to your columns are unbelievable. vindictive, venomous. nothing to do but unlike you i ve kind of decided why should i waste my time on random bozos who think i m a creep? because i can t do that because they re anonymous and at least i feel that i m defending myself and i put it right back in their wheelhouse. some respond. some don t. and i respond in exactly the same way that they respond to me, which is usually, as i say, with venom, vindictiveness, and mockery because i just don t like it. i like the fact that you re a drunken twitiot and that s how this got started. i was a totally drunk twitiot. what has 457d happened to yo number of followers on this well, people picked up on it. let s face, it i had the famous meltdown on costas where i went nuts on a consensus, he s writing a mini blog, which frankly is true, and the media ratings came out, and i was number one in may. i had 500 followers, i count pretty much four or five times a day. since you mentioned the meltdown, we thought we might get you riled up by playing a part of it. thanks a lot. i really appreciate it. seriously, because it s the complete dumbing down of our society. the complete dumbing down. yes, blogs blogs, this column, i have to tell you, i don t spend a lot of time on your blog, but i watched your blog today, and you took an item from the guy from vegas robin leach. you re taking an item in your blog from robin leach s blog about some rumor he heard about tony romo. you have no idea if it s true. but let me read about big daddy balls or whatever, which is in your publication. have you changed your mind about sports blogs since you went there? i really appreciate you replayed that. that s nice of you. i have not changed my opinion of most blogs. i will concede there are very good aggregator blogs that have a lot of information, and i learn from them. but i think most blogs are sort of ridiculous and it s so ironic, they hate newspapers, except all their information is based on newspapers. i will in my defense say when i twitter, a lot of it is opinion, and a lot of it is based on things i know about. i m critical of lebron james, for example, and i wrote a book with him. you stray to all areas. you went off on him. i went off on him because he s a more miserable mope than i am. that guy has never, ever written a positive column in his life. maybe he s wright, so maybe we should go out and shoot our svlgs right now. he s sdwrjust miserable. it bothers me and drives me crazy. i m very impulsively angry. thank you for clarifying that. i have 20 seconds. what does the woman you refer to as wife three think about your twitter rantings and ravings? wife three is convinced that i have completely ruined my career, i have made a mockery of myself. as a writer, and she looks at these things. she s appalled by the language and says, does anybody read this? i said, actually, a lot of people read it, love it, and say i m the mvp of twitter. she shakes her head and walks away. we should invite her on next week. she d be good. thanks for joining us. still to come, rick santely s latest rant. elizabeth vargas s romantic omission, and the national enquirer folks over money and gets results. when you have a different perspective on things you don t end up with just another car. you end up with a saab. i use capzasin quick relief gel. [ male announcer ] starts working on contact and at the nerve level to block pain for hours. capzasin. takes the pain out of arthritis. cnbc s rick santely has a high decibel way of offering advice to the federal government. stop spending, stop spending, stop spending! that s what we want. stop spending! now, it s nice that he doesn t restrain himself, but where exactly should we cut, medicare, social security, those are the big ticket items, schools, the afghan war, tax cuts for your wealthy traders. a great sounding rand. the debate, a bit more complicated. elizabeth vargas focused on a juicy story. michael douglas ex-wife back in court to claim a share of his new movie, wall street ii. a lot of his famous movies were made while he was married to him. does this mean he can t do a spin-off? vargas failed to mention that she dated him during the time of his separation and divorce with deand raw. here is an update, barry levine, executive editor of the national enquirer said the tabloid had rejected a request from the oregon sex therapist accusing al gore of a sex scandal. they have offered her a small sum for detailing her situation. the portland police have reopened the investigation. finally, a few words by patrick gavin on the most frequent guests on this program, people like clarence page, david zurening, and karen tumulty, appearing 25 or 30 times. that s over a decade, an average of over three times a year. first of all, some of the folks on gavin s list like jeff jarvis in new york wouldn t consider themselves part of the beltway elite, and he left off some chests as sharon waxman, debra saunders and joan walsh and others who don t do themselves as d.c. insiders. no one else was putting jonah goldberg on the air when we started booking him. we re proud of the diversity of our lineup. o