It is like covering the white house in washington politics. This is just under one hour. Story, that is the next the host of cnns reliable sources, Brian Stelter. Brian thank you very much. There is a lot to talk about, even in reaction to what Kellyanne Conway with a in just a minute ago. With Carrie Budoff brown, next to her, david kirkpatrick, author of the facebook effect, next to me is cecilia vega of abc, senior White House Correspondent of abc, covering the trump administration, joined abc six years ago. Sicilia, Kellyanne Conway said the press is presumptively negative about the man u cover every day. Are you presumptively negative y . Cecilia i am presumptively skeptical. I think we have to both given this administrations relationship with the truth and how tough it is for us to get at that right now. Io we start our day think i can speak for all of us since im in a Briefing Room every day, in a negative manner, absolutely not, but that is not the tone, from my perspective, isour coverage, but my sense this perception that there is an adversarial relationship, much more comes from the white house than it does from our end of the Briefing Room. An adversarial relationship, or they perceive it to be the case. We are just doing our job. I do not think the complaints they have are any different than what the Obama Administration has had about negativity than the Bush Administration or any administration before that. That is the nature of defeat. Brian you say be same defeats but they are louder about it . Cecilia i think so. What about kellyanne was saying what about Jeff Sessions at the border. That was ignored by a lot of outlets. Im not sure why she said it was not covered. What is your perception about that complaint about lack of policy. I covered the Obama White House in 2007 and 2008, and i can guarantee you that i heard the exact same thing from the Obama White House, that politico in particular did not cover policy for her to i was actually a policy reporter covering health care back then, and i would go to them, and i guess i would basically hear the same thing, and sean spicer said this this morning, that they want us to cover policy and not the palace intrigue. The challenge is that the white onse itself is very focused palace intrigue and who is up and who is down. It is not just the press that is engaged in this. Say, like sicilia said, this is a longstanding complaint. We do cover policy at politico itself. We have 125 editors that cover policy alone. All the agencies and departments, that is a Huge Investment and what is going on in this town, and we do that, we give and play, and i would give palacepoint in that the intrigue stories typically do pretty darn well. People are really interested in it knowing what goes on inside this white house, as they were inside the Obama White House. The difference is that this white house really engages with our reporters to talk about what is going on in the white house, and even when spicer and some tryrs really push back and to internally say dont talk to a reporters. Brian is that a euphemism for backstab each other, leaking. Carrie yeah, they say dont talk to reporters, they say it privately, and yeah, dont leak. Talking about the strategy at 100 days. That is a remarkable level of people leaking and talking to us. I do typically ask to all the sources are. Always fascinated jon karl, my colleague at the white house, and i talk about lot. A is seems like every story, the number of sources reported are getting bigger and bigger. Upe Washington Post leaked to 18 sources. It is a sign of how much people are talking. You talk about policy versus palace intrigue, i would say until syria last week, thoroughly percent is out there, 80 , 70 of the content that gets asked about and discussed in these white house briefings is the press corps asking about who is doing what to whom inside the white house and or can you clarify something that the president tweeted about. Self generateds that we are not talking about policy. Brian one more question about this before we talk about the future of news more broadly. The president s media tactic, or earlier, but i want to ask you about you alls perspective, what has the action been like, carrie, with the event them, has it hurt us with our audiences or not . Carrie it has created a more challenging environment. Brian you are talking about the pages. Our people trusting what your reporting . Carrie i dont have the data on that. I definitely feel the pressure of the divided environment, and i setponse to that is how the tone for a newsroom and how we report in reminding our reporters and editors that the rules, the basic rules of journalism still apply, even in an environment where it does not feel normal, it is still absolutely imperative that we conduct ourselves just as journalists would in any era. You verify information, try to get as many sources as possible, you try to be transparent about how we got the information. I believe doing that and adhering to what the basic rules of journalism are, giving people engagingto respond, with them, that does not change. If we do our jobs, as we always are supposed to do, i think that is our best insurance for the longterm. It is a longterm play. We are in a weird environment right now. It may not be like this and 5, 10 years, but what i can do is make sure my newsroom is living up to the standards of journalism that i learned 20, 25 years ago. I think getting as many sources as possible, that is sort of, eight sources, six sources, you want a preponderance of evidence to feel completely confident about what you are putting out. We are under a lot of scrutiny that requires us to respond and be as airtight as possible. Aian a divided world, also connected world, that is the title of the session, wrapping up in morning. View, i wonder how you facebook and other social media impact on the first 100 days. I can setup you are and say the tweets do not matter, that the tweets only matter when abc, cnn, and others d report them. I can also make the case that facebook and twitter allow him to go around the media. How do you see a . Idt . Is thethe bigger point landscape created around facebook and twitter changes everything. This very wellprograms morning started very right not only with a Pulitzer Prize winner but some of you who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting using social media to include his sources i mean, including his audience as his source, and to crie kind of create an elective process. The phenomenal difference of a collective world and my thing is. Hat the participant has aged everything he wants to his fate, and everybody will participate whether you like it or not. Every person in this room has one of these come and when they are on it, they are not just receiving, they are also broadcasting. That changes the landscape. I think trumps tweets matter a lot. The thing that was said in a Journalists Panel about how trumps tweets cannot be responded to, you cannot follow up like you could in a press conference, that is a legitimate complaint in a sense, but on the other hand, if you look at what happened with farenthold, when he used trumps handle in a tweet about his philanthropy, and then trump called him immediately that is you can actually direct a comment to the president in a way that you never could before, and i might argue that is a counterbalancing factor. Regarding Facebook Forces twitter, and you and i have talked about this a little bit it is easy ink washington in particular, and given that we have a president who is so twittercentric to forget that the primary way most people get their information is through facebook, and oddly not just in the united states, increasingly and premuch definitively now on a global level, the primary source of information for people is facebook and all but, like, three or four countries, right . Changet is a big, big that is going to continue to change the landscape, and there a lot more we can say to follow that up. Brian you are saying facebook is the internet and facebook is the news to a degree we may not appreciate. David it is a place where people receive the news, and because it is a twoway medium, it creates a context that is fundamentally new i am a baby boomer. In my lifetime, it is fundamentally new to have the basic ability to react in a position where you formally were just a passive recipient. Reporting that he tweets worry, hot mess, do you you think he double thinks before he tweets . Doubt. without a it goes back to how we started this conversation. The pressure is on all of us now more than ever to not screw up, to get everything right, and twitter as a medium for me is no different than going on the air on world news or nightline or gma, you cannot screw up on twitter, you cannot screw up on air, i cannot screw up on my reporting online. There is no differentiation anymore between the outlet that any of us are on. I wanted to go back to what you were talking about right now, in terms of how the social media. Mpacts us in realtime. Just yesterday in the press briefing when im sure all of us are aware in here, sean spicer made a comment about the holocaust and syria that has rightfully so he made it, it kind of landed in the press briefing. None of us sort of knew what to do with it. It took about five minutes or so. I am looking on my phone, and suddenly, we are seeing on twitter, we are seeing from our news desk that this thing is blowing up, and so we came back around and said, hey, sean, do you want to respond to this . Press in real time at the briefing that that comment was gaining traction, and we gave him the opportunity to respond, and he ended up doing an apology tour all night, it did not do well to him. 0 for him. This white house is struggling with how to deal with this, and it affects our reporting on a second by second basis. That is a fascinating example. We have heard quite a few times this morning that the , by Ari Fleischer in particular. Fox news is the number one cable channel, right . Breitbart. We cannot as i become us as we have without breitbart being included. We are in it was new landscape were there is a broader range of voices in the media generally, and it is because of the internet that has made that possible in general, fox notwithstanding. So that anecdote goes to show the tail is wagging the dog at little bit, as i said. The world is much bigger than the press, and i think the internet has brought in the range of voices dramatically and included literally everybody. Just one final point. There is a professor at harvard who did a study of the media landscape on the internet, and actually, the landscape of the right is bigger than the landscape in the center and on the left. One of the other scary things in the analysis he did was that basically there was almost no communication across the divide, just doing a mathematical analysis, which is very disturbing. Brian is that the biggest story of all . The biggest story is those two alternative realities. Is there anything facebook or other companies can do to heal that because that is a profound wound . A gaping wound. Theyrehat is what asking themselves. Anybody who has read and if you have not read, you should read, Mark Zuckerberg six ordinary 58word essay about a month ago, five weeks ago, where , i think and rightly, egg knowledge that this was a problem brian before we go there, we remind us about november . David i was interviewing him, and he said it is a crazy idea that fake news affected the election, which he has now essentially retracted. Brian so you have seen him him all in the span of a few months . David he involved. I have a lot of respect for Mark Zuckerberg, which is why i wrote a book about him. The guy is extorted married her and there are a lot of extremely conscientious people at facebook or asking themselves what does it mean that we are the fundamental landscape of information dissemination, and what is our responsibility . I think it is healthy that their asking that question, but it is scary for society for all of my respect for the company, that a commercial enterprises in the position of having to make many of the decisions that they are going to have to make about how they prioritize public dialogue, and it is truly a global issue. Just to throw in one data point, there was a great story in the guardian about a week and a half ago about how this fake news problem is in almost every country in germany alone, there are 500 people working for facebook in berlin just combating fake news in german. Brian they are required to buy certain laws, right . David in taiwan, the taiwanese government is worried about what facebook is doing. Im not sure a company should do it, but that is the position we are in. Brian we invited them to be here today, and facebook declined. You are articulated a pretty rapidly evolving position. Ast summer, we do not have responsibility, and now they are starting to think they do have a responsibility. David isi i said, they are very responsible people, and Mark Zuckerberg brian david, they let me post lies, innuendo, and spam whatever i want on facebook. They did not have to do that. It is not that easy to police all 2 billion people in realtime you have to keep that in mind. The platforms should be put on us because we are making them that by using the. Whose fault is anything . Facebook takes the role very seriously. I do not think they have the answers yet for many of the problems. Brian carrie, does an outlet like politico think about writing stories for folks who are in an alternate reality, where pizzagate is real or the pope did endorse donald trump . Carrie did he not endorse and . Him . [laughter] brian too soon. The need toeel report on the facts, and on pizzagate, or if its donald trump claiming he created 600,000 jobs on his watch, writing the story, providing the context on that, that is what we intend to do. We try to set that as our sole mission, but when we are presented with glaring factual inaccuracies, i think we have an obligation to make that clear in the course of our writing and reporting on something. Cecilia it is interesting to watch the evolution of this over the course of the campaign into now, 89tever we are on or something come up Donald Trumps candidacy and presidency, and how we as a media have struggled to correct the record. Brian have we struggled . Do you think it has been cecilia i think it has been. Lets take between on wiretapping, for example brian do we have to . [laughter] cecilia do we have to . At what point, do we say in our story, digital, broadcast, or otherwise, this is not true . Outright this is not true. I think we are at that point where we are doing that. I think it took is a well to get there because there was a sense of is that our job as a media to be Fact Checking every single can we possibly fact check every single thing that we are reporting on . I dont know that we can, but i do think we are doing it much more than we were. Brian it goes from Fact Checking to, like, narrative checking, when he says he created 600,000 jobs, what is he really saying . Carrie for he is going to repeal the law yeah. Brian you could make the case this white house has been pretty conventional. We have heard that word couple of times. Has not been doing live, daily, Facebook Live shows with the president , has not been creating a new form of media through social networks in a way that has been all but disruptive. Would you describe that idea that we have seen some experimentation, but the world has not been flipped on its head in the past 12 weeks . Carrie i agree with that. I think the air are a lot of tools that the white house can be using that the Obama Administration used, reaching out to folks through different platforms, using the white house videos andatus to do their own sort of newsfocused projects. I have not seen that yet trade we are only three months then, it is early going, but we saw i think a more nimble media team under the Obama White House just in terms of using all the possible tools at their disposal. See the typical twitter the fact that sean spicer does do media briefings every day, i think that is a good thing. I support that. But that was something he threatens not to do at the beginning, and he is doing it, i think, because i thought at the time, he threatens not to do that, you get in there, and you realize the power of being able to command an audience for 45 minutes, an hour, and he does he is changing the way that he does he reads off a lot of prepared remarks at the beginning of his briefing to get they aresage, and using that. When the president decided to bomb syria last week, the value of the prestel was real. It was 10 30, 11 a lot and i 11 00e had a prestel at night, and he had a press pool to broadcast what he does. Brian was there anything to learn about night of live coverage, shoddy audio when he did speak, but the cameras were ready . Cecilia which not was this . Brian the night of the syria strikes. Cecilia in terms of technology . Nothing that comes to mind. Brian i was disappointed, the Audio Quality was sort of cecilia certainly brian there were issues with the rushed nature of it. Cecilia i dont know i guess i will give them a little bit of slack on that one, right, it is the first time anything like this is happened, he was at maralago. Yeah, they have got to get the technology together. That is not the biggest offense in the world. I think just in terms of coverage, this white houses policy, when it comes to military action, we will tell you about it after the fact, essentially. I think that will be a struggle Going Forward in terms of our reporting. News, writfuture of large come at the white house and beyond, david, what , andctions do you share what we see happen between now and, say, 2020, when we are all talking about reelections . , aid i think anybody politician with a head on her shoulders, should be emulating donald trump as much as they can is forces twitter and social media presence. It has served him well. It is a major differentiator from anybody w