You need specialized equipment and its best left to the professionals. So i think theres lots of good media criticism. I think most criticism is trash and most media criticism is indicative of the problem im trying to talk about in this book, which is that its a refuge for partisans. Dont want to talk about what our side did. So lets talk about the coverage of what our side did. So this is not this is not my happy place, but i had a weird experience professionally and i think were all sort of having a weird experience professionally or as citizens, which this stuff is, you know, the changes that have gone our industry in the past 20 years, you know, its been a lot. Theres been a lot going on. And i think were in a time where people are really hungry for for us for the learning curve to steepen and for that for us to get better, faster there you talk about not to at great in the book what happened to you at fox news when you were let go after being part of the team that called arizona for joe biden in 20 earlier than other networks did. But you do say it was part of the motivation for you writing, the book. So explain what happened there and how that fits into the the problem that you were identifying. So i went into the 2020 election cycle. I didnt understand the way that the world had changed. I have been part of calling races that made republicans unhappy before. Trust me, when called ohio for barack obama in 2012, i was not giving any love notes from the romney campaign, right . Nobody was like, oh, thank thanks. Thanks for that. I had sort of assumed that we were persisting in that the consensus that grew out of really the 1990s. Right the world changed dramatically. The media world changed dramatically in the 1990, with both the rise of cable, particularly led fox, but also, of course, internet and all that. So i thought we were sort of still in the same space. What i failed apprehend was that after so many years where viewers, readers listeners, whomever could be so effectively cosseted, could be effectively flatter and protect it. Right. So in a in a highly segment id media marketplace, there is a lot of incentive for outlets to treat these viewers like little faberge eggs. Right. You dont want to tell them things they want to hear. You dont want to impinge on the sort of climate controlled reality that addicted news consumers able to maintain for themselves. If you want to. In america today, you can in the morning and from from that moment until you go to bed, you could you could process information that reinforced your worldview, that said that you were good and they were bad, that you were smart and they were dumb and that you were virtue and patriotic and they werent just wrong. But they were trying to destroy the country. If i show up in feed, all of a sudden and say, hey, the guy who you believe is the the only thing standing between the United States and oblivion is going to be replaced by. A puppet of the communist party of china. If i tell you that, if thats what you hear, youre to be upset. And thats what made me understand, you know, we the for a a media model that that is profitable and also responsible. Were were in need. Right and i think the events of the past six years, the rise of trump coverage during the pandemic coverage of january six, january six itself, all of that points to we have a problem that is it is it is a problem of abundance. Right . It is a problem related to too much. But i think we are were in serious need as journalists and as citizens to do patriotic duty, which is if you love this country. You have to have a that honors the freedoms that we enjoy here. Thats a fine, broad assessment of the industry and also an encapsulation of. Your book. But what happened to you . You got you got canned for doing your what happened over there at fox news. Fox news does not owe me a job. Fox news can have anybody they on their news because its their news and i am very grateful for the time that i had at fox. I love in the building im recording this is the same Fox News Washington Bureau and i spent a very happy month. Most of a mostly happy decade in this building with my dear colleagues, people like the great bill sammon, my boss, Chris Wallace, bret, a great group of journalists and the Washington Bureau was wonderful place to be because. You know, we were substantially alone to do our thing. And it was great to be part of the decision desk and all that. Fox had ive heard a bunch about why i fired. I can tell you i definitely was. But thats because i know that nobody owes me a job, number one. And number two, this is not a i know this business. Ive been working in this business since i was 17 years old. It is remarkable to me that i have been able to persist lo these many years. Right, since started as a full time professional journalist. In 1997, 1998. In all those years, i have managed to make living and support man children right to do to be a dad and to be a working journalist for all of those years. To me, it feels like ive gotten away with the greatest caper. Right. That that people would pay me for what i write and my analysis is totally awesome. So im not complaining. You talk about kind of an accelerating sense of people of news outlets, kind of cosseting their consumers and telling them what they want to hear. Can you explain briefly as still talking about cable, the cable news of it, which i think we probably all over Pay Attention to, because its kind of where the most active consumers of certain types of political news gather, even though its, you know, at its height, three and a half, 4 Million Viewers on the most popular show. But can you talk about what used to be something of a division between, a news desk at a cnn or fox and even a separation between the dayside, as they call it, programming with the evening opinion mongers. Is there there used to be a division that that division seems to be disappearing over time. What can you like for people who are not familiar with the business, can you spell that out a little bit . So the the way it worked, i started at fox and i think this was the concept across cable news was that you have the News Division and youve got the Opinion Division and that there are two separate things in the same way that the pages of a newspaper and the section. So maybe you can detect a slant in the coverage of this outlet versus that outlet. But its supposed to be basically usda meet usda minimum standards for journalism. Now, its always been a little different for msnbc because they have nbc news and the nbc news. Nbc news doesnt arrange itself around msnbc, or at least it hasnt in my experience, its goal. Its focused the 6 00 news, right . Theyre thinking about holt. Theyre not thinking about feeding the beast of cable news. And that. So its always worked a little differently for nbc thats been to their advantage in terms of the resources they have. But it also has been a sort of a reagent on some of opinion mongering, leaking in or watching cnn. Now go through a dramatic remaking of itself because cnn had tried to own the of just the news and for a long time could track in the ratings when there was national or interNational News, cnn would boom because everybody who doesnt normally watch news, 24 hour news would turn it on a reliable source. But then as soon as the crisis or whatever would be, cnns ratings would plummet. So in the trump era, they really in on real, really obsessive trump coverage, right . It got thick over it got really over there and they all the way in. Well, now they have a new president in chris licht and they have new ownership. And the objective is to get back balance, right . To get back to aspirational. So theyre trying to unwind a commercial decision that they made i quote in the book the moonves the former head of viacom and cbs who said of donald trump, you know, may be bad for the country, but its great for viacomcbs. So keep going donald. Ha ha, ha. I think lot of networks and i think fox is included, that trump was a ratings bonanza and people were so terrified either or terrified he the the either it was a limbic response from American Consumers of either delight or real fear and anger and those forces created incentives for these networks to go really heavy on trump from the beginning and we see sort of the wreckage the after you know after the party. Its sort of time to clean up. You quote on a couple of occasions, some of journalistic essay writing of George Orwell from the 1930s and 1940s, which was period of time when people had kind of lost faith in liberalism ocracy in things like truth seeking for its own sake. And as against a backdrop of insipid fascism. There are a lot of people in the media who see the rise of trump as being incipient fascist or authoritarian and they think that what the media needs to do is to abandon what they call both sides ism. Right. And to call out as margaret sullivan, whos the former public editor of the New York Times and washingtonpost. Com on this several years in her final column in august in the washington, she said that its journalists to tell their readers that electing donald trump is a threat to democracy itself since they at least some of your foreboding about the authoritarian winds. Do you think theyre wrong in their approach about how to respond in the media . Well, i will let. Margaret sullivan in on a little something. The readership of the Washington Post agrees with her on the readership. Shes art. Shes already got them right. Shes she is already the the the loyal subscribers. The Washington Post probably skew and i dont know this is not research the book but lets guess and say that its at least 70 democratic. Right. You its hometown paper for a democratic i dont know what do we call washington a big city . I would say a medium a medium city, but the Washington Post readership is skews liberal and democratic. The histrionic. I think the post is a good example of this when there was a i forget im i apologize cant remember the name of the media scholar journalism scholar who said that the post was optimizing for anger or better after failing cash in on this trump bonanza. So thats when the post goes to democracy, dies in darkness, and thats when the clickbait ness of these headlines for online consumption go crazy. I chronicle the book how on the day of the fall of kabul right, which to that point was the biggest Foreign Policy story in a long, long time, right on that day, the number one story at the Washington Post was a sneering slap together from press releases and archives story about Roman Catholic cardinal who was in the hospital with coronavirus and he had been against the vaccines, which is a ha ha ha of trashy story. And that is what look, the journalists who believe that we have the power to tell people what think should remember that it is more likely that our audience will tell us what to think than we to them right . We dont have the power. Look, republicans spend a lot a lot of time complaining about the media. Oh, my gosh. And we often hear because we like it part of us. Right. It may be condemnatory, at least it says we have power. At least says we have this enormous power to these things. We dont. And what many journalists sacrificed in the era of trump i hearken back a great speech Chris Wallace gave. I forget, welldeserved honor. He was what award for excellent journalism he was receiving. But he he gave a stern talking to to a group of very how do we say now legacy or elite Media Outlets gave them a stern talking to about the fact that what have to do our work is objectivity our remove and we know that we wont be objective and we know that fairness is aspirational and a its something were not really going to obtain but it is our remove from the game that gives us the whatever power we do have and it could it can be true that donald trump represented a unique threat to the First Amendment and free press in the United States that be true and at the same time it can be true that the press badly, badly botched its response to it because instead of elevating and going back to First Principles and basics, many got down in the mud with him to wrestle. And that was a big mistake. The response back a lot of people in the media criticism established print if we can call it that for brian stelter, whos a reliable source, this program was so canceled by cnn in in august. Is we are living through an asymmetry right now between the two major parties between the people who support them and one side is uniquely hostile to truth. You know the republican guys are out there electing people who flat disagree your call of the arizona even today and theyre campaigning on it and winning in arizona among other places and so because of that the normal kind of both sides republican this democrat says that is actually a way to allow people who are wrong who are illiberal in the classical sense, who are wrong about the truth and who have authoritarian aims, giving them kind of equal weight to the side of truth. Whats your response to that . An approach. David leonhardt, who is a good writer, whose work on economics i have brought a lot from over the years, writes a newsletter for the New York Times and a while back he wrote one. It was after the Dobbs Decision overturning roe v wade, and he said this Supreme Court is out of hand. This Supreme Court is superseding the appropriate of congress and this Supreme Court that it added up. And i had to laugh because it was like, oh, now, you know, conservatives felt or previous 50 years, a lot of whats going on around the things that you describe is, again, its true that authoritarian bent inside Republican Party is scary, intense, right. The the yearning for a strongman for authoritarian among many a disconcertingly large number of republicans is something that should concerning to everybody. Right. So that piece and its true but i think part of the problem tom is that in the media world, the existence of this thing. I dont think that most conservatives and here im talking not just these authoritarian yearnings but of real conservatives. Right. People of the of the mainstream seem traditional. Calvin Coolidge Reagan variety of conservatism in america. Those people dont think that those people thought that the left was authoritarian. Those people thought that the left and still thinks that the left, that progressivism authoritarian and that progressivism crushing to the hopes and dreams of humanity and that it is the rise. A socialist, authoritarian state. They believe that people the left seeing sort of the Dystopian Nightmare that they had been of for a long time. Take, for example, this, who would have had on their bingo card left venerates cheney family right who would have said who would have said boy you liberals are really going to dig the cheneys you would say, no, they want to put the cheneys in prison . What you talking about . But because of the donald trump represents what many liberals or many progressives, 20 or 15 years ago thought was underneath bushism or neoconservatism or whatever else. So i think we have some category errors are going on in peoples thinking, how this stuff works. You have a quote near end of the book saying the percentage News Coverage that is either explicitly or implicitly political is unhelpful, in large part because creates a false impression. The polity itself is a worthwhile passion. Take it from a man who devoted his professional life to politics elections. It is not so. Did you the lead and is this a hostage slash suicide note . I know. I think political coverage is awesome. I think its. But im to be the weatherman. Im not supposed to be the lead of the news except for when its election time. Right. Im supposed to be the thing like. Well, chris, lets in with chris and see what goofy stuff is going on in the world of politics. Thats good. What the polls say. What is all stuff . Thats fine. What happened . Over the past 20 years is, in my experience, is that politics a shortcut to intensity strong emotional connection. Polity x is is the shortest way, especially in national media, right . Partisanship of the kind this this intense toxic negative partisanship that were experience in america is partly a function that theres not enough National News that really affects all americans to about all day. Right. There just isnt. If you in and think about how of the National News narrative is about really kind of dragging or not picking right so it if you are a conservative and you live in alabama or lets say florida, if youre a conservative or a republican and live in florida, you are being told about drag queen story hours taking place in Washington State as far away from you as possible that has no consequence on your Childs School or anything. But it can be a big, big story. Conversely, if you live in washington, you can hear endlessly. Ron desantis is dont say what they called the dont gay bill in florida it will have no effect on your life. It doesnt affect your kids or their education but you can hear about it and be outraged it if you want if you choose and news providers who are trying to provide too much national. Look i think a big big of all of this is local is should come first. Right local should come first. We should think about news in consent circles around us and. There just isnt that much National News that a person needs to consume in a day. And Politics News is one of the only places where National News know that they can reliably go where it will have meaning and relevance across country. So and also, by the way its cheap its real to do the saying tv news is talk is cheap its real expensive to send crews