The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The News with David Folkenflik

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

David Folkenflik was described by Geraldo Rivera of Fox News as "a really weak-kneed, backstabbing, sweaty-palmed reporter." Others have been kinder. The Columbia Journalism Review, for example, once gave him a "laurel" for reporting that immediately led the U.S. military to institute safety measures for journalists in Baghdad. Based in New York City, Folkenflik serves as NPR's media correspondent.

Oh, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast of The Comedy Cellar. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm here without Dan Natterman this week. But have no fear, we have Perrielle Ashenbrand is here, who is going to introduce our guest. Go ahead, Perrielle. Hi, our guest today is David Folkenflick. This might be one of the best bios ever, was described by Geraldo Rivera of Fox News as, quote, a really weak-kneed, backstabbing, sweaty-palmed reporter. Others have been kinder. The Columbia Journalism Review gave him a, quote, unquote, laurel for reporting that immediately led to the U.S. military to institute safety measures for journalists in Baghdad. He's based in New York City, and he serves as NPR's media correspondent. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Welcome, Dave. Appreciate it. Did he authorize that introduction? It's his bio on NPR's website. Oh, okay, okay. What was the beef with Geraldo? I mean, did you really think I would go rogue and read that from Wikipedia or something? Is that how little credit you actually give me?

Don't answer. I think that would be a reasonable interpretation from the question. So go ahead. I'm just curious. What was the beef with Geraldo Rivera before we get into all this stuff? And let's offer a little footnote. As of this past seven days or so, no longer of Fox News.

I know, I know. He quit. Right. They've taken their leave of each other, and no doubt of each other's senses. So he was the first chief war correspondent for Fox News back after the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. And I did a story which showed that he was

hundreds of miles away from the site where American bombs had killed American soldiers and Afghan allies in what's called a friendly fire incident. He prayed, he went down to his knees, he talked about it, he showed himself on video praying. Very moving thing. He showed it He went down to his knees. He talked about it. He showed himself on video praying. Very moving thing. He showed it again 12 hours later. And meanwhile, within moments of this terrible event occurring and being reported, folks, even back then in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, where the last redoubt, that's how he put it. Of the dastardly one. Of the dastardly, right.

There you go. Very good. They knew that it was actually in Kandahar, which was Kandahar province, which is about 300 miles. You know, if you think of Afghanistan as being a little bit like Texas, it's kind of in that lower wedge. And there was no way, did some reporting,

confirmed that there was no way he could have gotten there and back and still been in those mountains to do his reports. And so he was... You exposed him. I certainly showed that piece of very personal, first-person reporting, injecting himself into this tragedy to be utterly untrue.

And he felt that I was saying he fabricated it, which I thought was an interesting conclusion to reach. And, you know, went on sort of his own holy war to try to take me out as a result. But it was all rhetorical and a lot of it for show. There's a long series of these reporters getting caught out there doing stuff like this. The funniest ones are like the weather reporter and pretends to be in the storm. And then somebody walks through the puddle. That is a pretty glorious piece of video right that's one of the best things ever but uh brian williams didn't he uh uh didn't he get in trouble but he he made something up uh

williams talked about uh an incident happening in afghanistan as though he had come under fire when he was uh and in, it was that a team ahead of him, a military crew that I think was in the same troop that he was accompanying, they had been shot on when they went there. I think that it was one of those things where he told the story correctly initially, and then it became a little bit blurred and a little bit blurred. And finally, he ended up telling it in this compressed way. Are you saying he didn't know he was lying? I'm saying he absolutely told a version of Vince that wasn't true,

and I think that he talked about it on the air, which was really the fatal flaw. It wasn't just he was recounting an anecdote off the cuff. This was on the air in a script, and it was a problem. I mean, it was really a problem. People at NBC, I think Tom Brokaw took a great exception to it, but others as well. And it's very tempting.

I think it's a very easy temptation to fall into. It's to put yourself, because broadcast is often an incredibly personalized way of telling stories about what's happening. It's a way to make it immediate. It's a way to say, look, I can vouch for this with my own eyes. And it's also obviously a way of glorifying yourself. And I think all of that became very seductive

as he surrounded himself with veterans of the Iraq War. I mean, it glorifies yourself. It makes you a better raconteur. Is that the right word? Yes, very nice. She says yes, but she doesn't know. She's a big Francophile over here. That's fine.

That's why they got Al Capone on, right? Being raconteur. And you embellish a detail and you notice the heightened attention you get. And over time, it accretes. You know what accretes mean? It's brutal. He's trying to lot of heightened attention. You get it over time. It accretes. You know what accretes means? Brutal.

He's trying to ingratiate himself to me because he knows I'm mad at him. Because she has a master's degree in something to do with the English language. Or actually the English language. English language. So who else? Who else on top of you? Who else did this kind of stuff? There was a guy named Jack Kelly, who was the chief foreign correspondent for USA Today,

who right around the same time as the Iraq War, a year or two later, actually right around the time of the invasion of Iraq, give or take, was found to have fabricated probably a couple dozen stories for USA Today. Wow. And there were things like he talked about

how he was present in, I think, Jerusalem near a bombing that took place at a pizzeria, and he saw a person's head roll by and his eyes close. Now, even in the moment, editors should have been saying, wait, wait, you saw what now? You know, it was pretty spectacular. The Washington Post revealed it. Actually, Howard Kurt what now? You know, it was pretty spectacular. The Washington Post revealed it.

Actually, Howard Kurtz now of Fox News first exposed this. I was able to find some other instances. And additionally, and finally, the newspaper ultimately engaged in a very thorough checking of his reporting and found that he had done this. Like, some of it was he made up quotes and he put them in one story I found, God, I haven't thought about this in almost two decades, but he put quotes in the mouth of, I think a top United Nations official. And I reached the spokesman for this international agency

who at this point was in the Solomon Islands and no longer in Switzerland. And he was like, no, those were things closely linked to what I said at a bar with him six hours earlier. But it wasn't what this guy said, striding out, refusing to comment, but said, you know, something angrily at him. You know, so, you know, did he invent the entire story in that instance? No. Was there an actual bombing on the streets of Jerusalem that Jack Kelly was reporting on? Yes. But, you know, reporters need to be... We're already human. We're already fallible.

We already are mortal. We make mistakes. We need to be doing our best to get it as honest as we can because we're not going to get it perfect all the time anyway. Well, I got to tell you, and what should I say first? Well, one has to assume that reporting from the 30s, or at some point back in time when you go back and read old newspaper accounts, which then become the basis of history books and blah, blah, blah, they're highly unreliable for the reasons you're saying,

because there was no way to expose that stuff then. There was no way to get the word out that somebody lied about you to a mass audience. The temptations were unbelievable, and yet it persists to this day. In my own experience with the press, I've been involved in a certain number of stories and was just appalled and shocked at the distortion in the way they changed my quotes, refused to run my quotes. Michael Barbaro edited my statements on the Times Daily podcast. Just things that you wouldn't believe unless you were actually in the thick of it. Just a total kind of...

Can I ask, just because I'm not aware of this particular episode, was it, and there's a reason I ask this, but was it that he took your comments and made it seem as though you were saying something opposed to what you were actually saying, or was it that he didn't include all of the context or that some of the statements were not in perfect sequence? Well, as I recall, this is a number of years ago already and I don't

and stupidly I didn't record it myself I guess her the whole Michael Barbaro story but as I recall he created paragraphs that were things that I said but that he lied it he lied it which left out she's had enough to hear with me which which left out points that he found challenging or inconvenient to the narrative that he was trying to paint about me so the it was it was not edited in a way that I think anybody could consider intellectually honest in the sense that if a listener had heard what ran and then heard what it was actually said, they'd be like, oh, that's different. That gives me a different impression than what he said. And I think that's the standard. I understand kind of what you're getting at is that when you have two hours of material and you have to edit it down to a time frame of a podcast, decisions have to be made.

But that's where the integrity of the reporter has to come through. And he didn't have it. Sure. And I find him, by and large, to be credible and creditable. But, you know, I've certainly reported on controversies that have surrounded some of his choices as well. But what I was going to say was... I can prove to you that you're wrong about that one, but go ahead. No, no, but what I was going to say was the reason I asked in some part is that I'm a former newspaper guy.

Yeah. And then I've been in broadcasting for over 18 years now, so longer than I did newspapers. But the way in which they represent quotations are different. So, for example, in a newspaper, at least in mainstream legacy news organization, if you, let's say you say seven sentences a row and I decide to do sentences one, two, four and seven, I have to either break up the stuff between two and four and four and seven with a comma he said, you know, close the quote and then start the anew, or have an ellipses in there to indicate there's a cut. On radio, at least as NPR does it, you can't make any internal cuts basically on

the President of the United States and other extremely senior figures. Matters of historical importance. Right, but you can compress what people say without acknowledging you've done that. Like sometimes on 60 Minutes or some shows like that, they'll do a little swipe, like a visual swipe, so you can tell that stuff has been taken away and people can at least account for that in their mind

and thinking, was this taken out of context or not, if something seems jarring out of sequence. We don't do that, but we have these standards that say you have to be absolutely rigidly fair to the context. And if in any reason you make an internal cut that is not clarifying, but shears the context or changes in any way the thrust of the meeting, then that's not a professional or ethical way for us to do it. But not everybody states what their standards are, their approaches are out loud, and so that's a problem.

The New Yorker, for example, and I don't know if this is still the case, but it has these long, gorgeous, uninterrupted paragraphs of people speaking so eloquently, and what they're really doing is taping them and compressing the heck out of it, or at least it used to be the case. And you just wouldn't know that all the you knows are taken out or or that that there's certain kinds of things that were seen as extraneous by the

writers and the editors yeah well i had a recent article in new yorker about us too emma green and she wouldn't even just well both these people both emma green and barbaro after the articles came out and I registered detailed complaints about them, neither of them ever speak to me again or answer me or, well, I guess she just answered like no. But Emma Green wouldn't come on the podcast to discuss the articles she had written about us. The fact-checking with The New Yorker went so bad that i called it to a halt and i demanded that an editor or or reporter call me because this just wasn't accurate and um they said that somebody wouldn't and nobody did and they ran the story anyway so but with uh barbaro this was about the louis ck thing now now you know i i don't want to be unfair i understand

reporting is in some sense an adversarial game. You're trying to catch the subject flat-footed. You don't want to give him a heads-up to what you want to ask him. So I get it. I'm not against an aggressive press. So when Barbaro first came to discuss the Louis thing, he presented it as, oh, no, I just want to catch it. You soft spoken about i said sure you know and then he came in with the with the microphones on from and and he was very aggressive with me he got so bad that um

my wife threw him out like she's screaming and yelling at him he was badgering me and badgering me badgering me and the ring but then we you know we finished the interview and that was that and then um but then this is where i thought it crossed the line even this without the editing then um about three weeks later or four weeks later i got a call from his office michael just uh he's just about ready to run it he just wants to ask you um a quick question about this your new policy about letting people leave if they're unhappy, if somebody like Louis shows up, we call it swim at your own risk policy. I said, sure, tell him you can call me.

So he calls me up and actually never even asks me about that and starts badgering me again for 45 minutes on the phone. You can hear it on the podcast. You should go back and listen to it. I should. And he says stuff like,

well, why are you blaming the victims? And I'm screaming, I'm blaming the victims. You tell me right now one thing that I've said about blaming the victims. How dare you say such things? You're trying to ruin me. It got very, very heated. He never actually asked me the questions

that he claimed he was calling about to ask, and then they ran this whole, he must have had two hours by now, of material down in 20 minutes. He cut out every single case, every single point in time where I was making animated and adamant arguments to him, objecting to the kind of questions he was asking. Now, I get that he can do that, but it's not honest what went on. He asked me a question about would I put Bill Cosby on, and I answered very carefully, because it's a very delicate question,

and he cut out a lot of the question, the answer, and I panicked about the way it is. And I called and said, said listen I want to speak to Michael about maybe adding in one more sentence in that answer because I think this could harm me and it leaves out something very important that I said and Michael will call you tomorrow at 2 o'clock or whatever it is

so at two o'clock i waited for the call the call never came and they've ghosted me ever since then i never got another return email like all into into it because by two o'clock the next day he had gotten such terrible reaction to this interview he did with me towards his behavior and in the thing I and I know this already because of somebody I won't say his name but you know who he is who used to work there who then left there and who I I know with some degree of certainty everything that was going on behind the curtain at that time and it wasn't pretty and uh you know that's what it is and of course i i asked uh if i could get a audio transcript audio or the transcript of my interview and they weren't going to give me that either so so that was that so they but i've had but the the

ultimate story this is your interview but i'll just tell you so it was when um in that in that incident viewers listeners have heard this when um they wanted me to give a statement as to why I made the decision to let Louis C.K. perform here, I said, well, first I said, well, I'll only answer if you promise to run the answer verbatim. And they said, she said, I don't see a problem with that. I should have known better. And then my answer was, well, just a couple weeks ago, Monica Lewinsky was disinvited from an event because Bill Clinton was coming and Mike Tyson is on Broadway. So I don't see any clear standard here, which was any different. And that was my reason. And it really was my reason. And she said, well, if you're going to mention Bill Clinton, we can't run it.

The person at the time said this. Yeah. I said, what do you mean you can't run it? I said, that's my answer. If it was on TV and you put the microphone, you asked me on TV, that's what I would have said. You wouldn't be able to say, well, we're not going to run it if you mention Bill Clinton. So if you go back to the article, you'll see they changed my quote. They massaged it. They took this out. It wasn't what I said. It wasn't contradictory to what I said. But again, this is going back to how you imagine 1930s news,

but it wasn't what I said. They reported as what I said. It's not directly contradictory to what I said, but it's not me. It's not the way I would have said something when my children read it and they think, oh, that's what daddy said. It's not what daddy said. Daddy had a stronger answer than that. But the Times wouldn't run it because it said Bill Clinton. Now, would the Times have made the same thing if I said something about Donald Trump? Of course not. Of course not. They would know we're not going to run that if you're going to thing if I said something about Donald Trump? Of course not. Of course not.

They would know we're not going to run that if you're going to cast any aspersions about Donald Trump. Casting aspersions is my own spin on it. They didn't say that. Sure, sure. They said then we'd have to give so much background to the story that we can't, you know. Look, there are moments in a story where if somebody's illusion or defense is going to, you know, complicate things, I can understand that. Obviously, Bill Clinton is somebody that most Americans know the story on instinctively and a brief illusion. Not knowing the details of all that you're talking about, I do remember, you know, the issue at stake that you were being interviewed about at the time. And it would strike me that that would be a moment because of the sensitivity

of what was being talked about and the accusations and claims being made on various sides. And the moment it was being done in, you know, that that would be a moment at which one would take particular care to be fair to all sides. You know, one of the things that I like about the way NPR approaches things is we want to, as best we can, represent people in their own voices. And so that people on all kinds of different sides of issues feel that they are not only understood but heard. And it would seem to me in that moment, again, this is news to me

because I didn't follow the controversy over the coverage in quite that way at the time, and perhaps shame on me for it. But if the Times is, in that moment moment talking about questions of how freedom of speech plays out and satire plays out and the ability to offend in making social comedy and social commentary plays out in a moment of a new appreciation, a new interpretation of where boundaries should be because of long neglected or overlooked problems that are sort of erupted to the surface. It would seem to me that would be a moment where one would want to be painstaking to make sure that all sides were reflected in their own words, their thoughts in context and all those things, because it's a, what can I say? no side has a complete

monopoly on being right in these matters because people are coming at this not always but often out of intentions that that are real and and and motives that are real but at the same time that means that no matter who they assume is acting right acting wrong they gotta listen everybody's gotta listen i think that much has to happen. I agree. And I would go even further than you because there is something that I believe, which is that when you're reporting the news, you report the news. If there's a person who is newsworthy, who did something and you say, why did you do this? It's not for you to complain I did it because I

heard voices in my head. Whatever the reason is, you're reporting what he said. You're not endorsing it. If he says something that's embarrassing to some public figure, well, that's the news. You're not in business to protect the public figure. God forbid. You're actually in business basically for the opposite.

But at minimum, public figure, God forbid, you're actually in business basically for the opposite, right? But at minimum, you have to grin and bear it because he's telling you why he did what it is you're reporting on. And I don't even see any latitude there, but you could say, in brackets, who's been accused of rape by Paula Jones. But to go further, this was at a time when many people in the Democratic Party were reconsidering why it is exactly that they believed Bill Clinton and why didn't they believe Paula Jones and all women. This is during the all women should be believed period, which Louis got caught up in. We're past that now. We don't think that all women should be believed anymore. Well,

we don't anymore. Look at Tara Reid. We think, we're back to saying we shouldn't dismiss women, God forbid, but we are actually able to look at countervailing facts and consider that perhaps

there are sides to the story. I'd say we're back to that. Thank God. Which is not to say that too often'd say we're back to that, thank God. Which is not to say that too often in our history, blah, blah, blah, women were dismissed and not believed. And we all, I think, all right-thinking people kind of get this whole story, right? The pendulum went here, the pendulum went there, and hopefully it's in a better place now.

But it was just ridiculous. All of which is to say, I don't trust the news. All right, so... And now we have a title for the show. Now, the reason you came up on my radar was because of articles that you wrote about Tucker Carlson and his firing, Don Lemon and his firing. And I find that stuff fascinating. And, of course, apparently I had words because I wanted you on three months ago when it was, you know, a hot story. Don't blame her.

Oh, no, I blame her. It won't matter what you say. It's all me. So, but maybe this is still interesting. To be honest, she warned me about the fancy words, and I had real trepidation at that point. Maybe this is still interesting because, so I used to be a Fox News lover back in the days of Bill O'Reilly Charles Krauthammer Brit Hume

you know the Beltway Boys, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracki and George Will as a whole sure, remember them all and I said Bill O'Reilly already and Bill O'Reilly, and I'm going to put his show there even though people will roll their eyes.

This, to me, was all first-rate, interesting television to a person like me who was open-minded and enjoyed provocative ideas. Bill O'Reilly was a blowhard, but he had serious people on he was debating. When Dick Morris fed him a whole line of crap for months that Mitt Romney was going to win on November 5th or whatever, you never saw Dick Morris again. Bill O'Reilly's like, you know, you got me into that? I'm done with you because you were wrong. And at this time, there was that documentary Outfoxed, which is making the case that Fox News was over the line and just awful.

And I remember saying, these people don't watch Fox News. Yeah, you can cherry pick, but Fox News is interesting to me. Fox News now is a piece of garbage. Really? I mean, it is nothing compared to what it was. George Will won't be caught dead on it. Jonah Goldberg won't be caught dead on it. Charles Krauthammer, I'm sure, is rolling over, despite being a quadriplegic, is rolling over in his grave. And I can't imagine any of these intelligent, earnest, conservative intellectuals with integrity wanting to be associated with this network anymore. So my first question to you is, and I assume you agree with me to some extent, what changed? Is it simply because Roger Ailes died? I think that there are two things going on. One of that changed the nature of Fox significantly. I don't know that I'd say

fundamentally, but I would say significantly. And one is the, uh, is the, the ouster of Roger Ailes, who like a year later, Bill O'Reilly was accused by many multiple women in Ailes' case, subordinates of sexual harassment. And, you know, he had created essentially a, what shall I say? You know, a model T like assembly line of, uh, to enable him just to harass woman after woman who came through. However, he had a sense of where he wanted the network to be at any given time, and he had the stature and the aura and intensity to enforce it. And, you know, you are of an age, you know, you think of what happened after the Cold War kind of stopped and the Soviet Union ceased being.

And, you know, Yugoslavia cracks up, basically. And there's all kinds of chaos and war and whatever. Well, you know, Tito was an autocrat and a brutal tyrant, but he kept things under control. And that's how you got to think of Roger Ailes at Fox. Ailes was a tyrant. Ailes did a lot of things that were reprehensible off the air and made some choices on the air that I think were reprehensible and allowed things to go a certain level. But he had the ability to say no. He fired Glenn Beck

when Glenn thought that he was bigger than the network. And also Glenn Beck was saying crazy things. And Glenn's embarrassing. Well, embarrassment is sort of a judgment call. It was a problem for them. He was indulging in some of the stuff that steps right up the line of the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that were going on there. He was saying other things that were just unhinged. I think Tucker's way worse. Well, I'm just saying this is the Ailes era. Yeah.

Right, and Ailes ultimately was like, Glenn Beck thought he could get away with it because he was bigger. And Ailes said, you know what, you're bigger because of the platform I afford you. You can sell all these books because I've made you into this huge star that you weren't when you were on Headline News.

And you weren't just because you were a commentator for ABC and had a radio show. I've made you that so I can take that away. And he did. And Beck is still making a ton of money, but his influence is no longer what it used to be. I think it's fair to say. Absolutely. So Ailes gets fired in 2016, dies in 2017. And Rupert Murdoch, the guy who created all of this stuff decides to kind of slide into the CEO role.

And then ultimately he's given, although we don't know this, he's given the title executive chairman. And he names Suzanne Scott, a longtime sort of Fox lifer who had come up through the ranks. He names her to be chief executive. She was a programming executive. There are many people who feel loyalty to her or like her or feel that she's smart. She doesn't command the respect, the stature.

She's unknown outside of Fox basically, except for the fact that she's now holds this title within Fox and they don't fear her. Tucker Carlson basically made very clear, you know, his PR was not going to be handled by her top PR executives. He didn't want anything to do with them in Roger Ailes's world. He would have said,

you're damn right. You're going to, you know, she doesn didn't want anything to do with them. In Roger Ailes' world, he would have said, you're damn right you're going to, no, she doesn't have that ability to do it. So he ends up being handled by, in some ways, Raj Shah, a former Trump administration official who had gone and joined Fox's parent company, Fox Corp. That's just a weird workaround that Tucker can do because what? He's kind of bigger or feels that he's bigger

than the network and they let him get away with it until way too late from their standpoint. So I think that Roger Ailes departure is a big thing. I also think that Trump kind of pulled Fox's viewership away from Fox where they had to sprint to catch up a lot of the time and it made them become more extreme and it made them less predictable and it made them reactive in ways that Murdoch didn't like, but was the compromise he struck with himself for two reasons. One, they had mega ratings. You know, they, one of their top executive, former top executives, Bill Shine told me

back when I was doing a profile on Glenn Beck, he said, look, we function very well as the voice of opposition. We got our legs when Clinton was in office and on Glenn Beck. He said, look, we function very well as the voice of opposition. We got our legs when Clinton was in office and we had impeachment crisis. That was great for us. In the age of Obama, we'll do great. And you know what? They did great. They ran Benghazi as hard as could possibly be done.

They played the race card. There's all this other, whatever, fine. They did great under Trump, ratings wise. It didn't feel good inside. They didn't like it. But for the individuals who decided to be on board, it was incredibly profitable. So Murdoch got that. And he also got the fact that for the first time, he got what he already had in all these other countries where he operated in, particularly the two other great English-speaking nations where he had such a strong presence in his native Australia, in the UK, where he had been before he came really here, he had a bat phone in the prime minister's office in each of those countries here. He finally had a bat phone in the white house where somebody would be on the

phone to him all the time. And Trump and he talked all the time. He got a lot of good, you know, interventions on things that he cared about from the Trump administration and from Trump himself. And so that was the deal that Murdoch struck. But as a result, it meant that he was along for the ride. And Trump is erratic. Trump isn't consistent. He's not predictable.

On some things, his rhetoric is exceptionally extreme. And if you don't distance yourself from that, you're going to go all in on that stuff. And suddenly your own hosts are saying things that are wrong. I mean, I assume that's the kind of stuff that, that didn't do it for you as a viewer. Well, let me come back to what you just said.

I, I, I hear you doing something, which I, I hear all the time, which I don't agree with. And I, you,

you might, you might disagree that you're doing what, with what I'm, what I'm about to say. Hit me, bring it. Or you, or you, or you might say what I'm about to say. Hit me. Bring it. Or you might say, I never thought of that. By analogy, for instance,

when conservative Supreme Court justices come down with decisions, there is always some Machiavellian analysis that explains why they did what they did, because of this, because of Trump, because of who appointed them, whatever it is. Almost never do you read from someone who disagrees with them, well, this person has a different worldview. This opinion is true to their view. It has integrity. It's what many smart law professors believe, and I just disagree. The Federalist

Society has an intellectually rigorous argument that they make, and they'll always try to attribute it to something. Even now, there was a story about how one of Clarence Thomas' law clerks

got a Venmo reimbursement for some party, and that clerk also worked on the affirmative. Like, the innuendo to someone who doesn't really know much about this stuff was somehow that maybe this money led to Clarence Thomas voting against affirmative action, as if there was any chance in hell that Clarence Thomas would have ever voted. It was so absurd. I'm not saying, I don't know whether taking the Venmo money past ethics muster.

You're saying this is where he lives anyway. Obviously. Obviously. You think if Venmo and the other way would have gotten him to vote to uphold affirmative action? It's absurd. But everything has to be viewed in terms of that way. Similarly with Fox News. I'm saying that I think Fox News had integrity at a certain time.

And I think this came from Roger Ailes. I also would add to this that in Jim Cramer's autobiography, he spoke very highly of Roger Ailes, and he said, Roger Ailes loves a good, honest debate. When he was at CNBC. Yeah, yeah. This is who he was. Yeah. And everything that I saw at Fox at that time represented to me a guy who was trying to, certainly trying to make sure that these arguments and these points of view were heard in a way that they weren't or otherwise. But the debate was always on the up and up. And then it, so I would say that whatever, I don't care whether it was a good person

a bad person this is kind of an ad hominem it's kind of an overlay it doesn't matter to what we're talking about let's just stipulate he was a creep a lot of great people have been creeps we have Martin Luther King egging on a rape this was a story not too long ago or some sort of sexual assault

I'm not familiar with that you don't know this story? we can revisit it. We're like four tabs deep here. Yeah, yeah. So I have to add that. People say, they'll say,

you're soft on this or soft on that. I'm saying it's not really relevant. The point is that there's plenty of evidence that this guy ran a network which definitely made its business to present stories that were interesting

to conservative-minded people. But at that time, every point of view, every good refutation of these arguments was on that show. Bill O'Reilly had David Korn on every week. The whole cast of liberal characters who were regulars on the O'Reilly factor, and he let them speak. And sometimes they got the better of him. That's no longer the case. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingram, these people, they bring on people who either they're never going to let speak, or like, you know, total empty suits, or they really more often just bring on people who agree with them, that's right, Tucker, you're right, just amplify

what Tucker has already said. O'Reilly's class thing was, where am I wrong? Tucker doesn't say, where am I wrong? His first't say, where am I wrong? His first guess is always tell him that he was right. And there's no limits. Bioweapons labs in Ukraine, false flags of January 6th. I mean, you can go on and on and on with this. Now he's on Twitter. We know now that the Department of Defense is studying alien spacecrafts for weapons programs.

I mean, this is no crazier than RFK Jr. This is as crazy as it gets. And I'm just saying there's no way that Roger Ailes would have had crazy stuff like that without integrity on his network. I don't think it had to do with all that other stuff. And Glenn Beck is the perfect example. In making a fortune from Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck was Looney Tunes, and this was humiliating to him.

Glenn Beck was trafficking in stuff that was a problem and was humiliating for Roger because Roger's just like... Roger, I mean, part of why what Roger did off the air matters because it's because I believe from my reporting, not from surmising, that it informed what he did and did off the air matters because it's because I believe from my reporting, not from surmising,

that it informed what he did and allowed on the air. But that said, what Beck did was beyond. What Beck did really did... Not beyond what Tucker was doing. No, I'm talking about for that era. Yeah, yeah. Beyond. And what Tucker is doing now is essentially saying,

my audience is migrating from the more conservative and extreme reaches of Fox News that we knew to QAnon or to past Breitbart, you know, past The Daily Wire. You know, it's not just that they're real conservative. It's not just that they'll oppose anybody who's a Democrat. But I'm showing him the headline about Martin Luther King. This was big news a few years ago. It's quite a headline. Oh, it was a very big thing.

So he was, you know, what Carlson is doing is trying to anticipate where the audience is, and the audience rewarded him for it. But it means that they're not, you know, I interviewed a woman who was a former Democratic liberal voice on Fox on the record. Who was that? Julie Roginski. Oh, yeah. I was on a show with her.

She's terrific. So she used to be a Fox regular for years, and she was talking about Jesse Waters. I was profiling him. Let's talk about him. Go ahead. What day is today? Wednesday. So it ran Monday morning. It ran a couple days ago. She said, look,

I didn't agree with anything out of O'Reilly or Hannity, or for that matter, she acknowledged later, Carlson's mouth, but they were at least doing what Fox considered to be analysis of serious news. And that's what used to be analysis of serious news, you know, and that's what used to be, you know, Carlson clearly engaged in what most people who report and most people who look at the stuff

consider to be bat shittery. I mean, it's just off the charts. It also got people killed with this vaccine denial. And the vaccine denial stuff was very tough at a time when, and this is why they off the charts. And also got people killed with this vaccine denial. And the vaccine denial stuff was very tough at a time when, and this is why the off the record, or excuse me, off the air, on the air stuff matters at a time where Fox corporately was insisting on

protocols, was insisting on proof on masking, was insisting on people showing whether or not they, he's not responsible for that. It doesn't matter. What I'm saying is Fox is allowing things to go forward on the air. And in some ways, good for them in a free speech way.

I'm not particularly moved by that argument. But I think it's worth pointing out, why does it matter to me that they would not allow themselves to do, even those very people to do, at Fox Headquarters New York? Why does it matter? Well, I think it's analogous to the reason that... I'm going to interrupt you

and tell you that I don't think you would even hold to that, because if I give you the counterfactual that Fox is anti-vax, not asking anybody out there. And Tucker Carlson was going on there every day and saying people should be vaccinated. People should be vaccinated. You wouldn't say bull about Fox Corp. And the reason why I'm allowing the contrary, if I might, the reason why I think there's a difference and you can disagree, is that although there are some problems with the way in which our public health establishment has approached the pandemic, and I don't want to get all the way in that. Have you seen the latest? Stop.

I'm just saying. Although there are some problems, the science does show that the vaccines work. They don't necessarily work in all the ways that people said, but we are much better off as a nation and as a society for our having developed those vaccines. That is a miracle. Absolutely. And in such short time. So I'm saying that there is an empirical grounded, it's not just, well, if you did the inverse,

it's the same. There is a value judgment to, it's not that there's debate as in saying, listen, in society, there are parts of society, some of which have to do with race and class and other things and identity that have not attained the same education levels or the same economic levels. Some people want affirmative action. Other people want there to be nothing because they believe in Adam Smith. A third say that we should do things on a class basis and help first generation kids go to college so that Harvard's not advantaging, you know,

Black Legacy, you know, the children of Black alumni. You know, like, there are all kinds of different arguments. Those are things where it seems to me that those are policy disputes. In terms of the vaccine, it's an example in which we can say, well, the science, although, again, you can say, and I believe, there are problems in which,

in the ways in which public health establishment talked to the public and made some conclusions and talked more concretely about things that were more ambiguous. Science again and again shows that we're blessed to have had the vaccines that empirically they made a huge difference in saving tons of lives. And so there's a difference in putting out information that cuts against that even if your policies Contradict it then not I don't think the inverse thing, but let me just get the original point if I could Yeah, the original point about drawing conclusions is that when we talk about things like Tucker Carlson at the moment? The lawsuit that just happened and that was settled for almost 800 million dollars by Fox far and away the largest Such thing that of which I'm aware. Oh, yeah in First Amendment law happened, and that was settled for almost $800 million by Fox, far and away the largest such thing of which I'm aware in First Amendment law as a settlement or payment, matters because we

know in their own words, I reported at the time that people at Fox knew that their colleagues were putting things on the air that were not true about election fraud and other things. But you don't have to rely on me because we've gotten all these real-time snapshots of what people were saying to each other. You know, these excited utterances that people were texting and emailing. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, their 8, 9, and 10 o'clock hosts

knew that the claims were false. They knew that people coming forward... Why are you going to force me to defend these people? I know, I know. I couldn't disagree with you more. Am I saying that you read the emails and you felt they weren't saying that? Uh, I don't, I don't want to sidetrack you off. Let's get to your point. My point is only that, um, Fox's leadership felt compelled to keep letting them do that because their audience wouldn't accept it if they didn't. And so they lost control in a way that I don't think Roger Ailes would have done.

But they lost control in part because the Trump years, very different than if Romney had won or George W. Bush or other things. Let me tell you why I think that's very wrong. Tell me. First of all, Tucker is the exception here because Tucker actually had it up to here with Sidney Powell and went on a rant against her that she hadn't backed anything up. So Tucker, although he is the fall guy here somehow, he was not representative of the Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs. Yes and no. He was actually of those. And the lawyers for Dominion suing Fox said this in open court. He was the least worst of the four people that were the hosts that they were

suing along with Fox, Bart Romo, Dobbs. Well, you know, you have to get into a thing like, how do you, how do you judge this? Because one day he said something, but there's no question that I'm just saying after, but after the, after January 6th, he brings on Mike Lindell and he doesn't do what he had done so admirably. But Mike Lindell didn't like Mike Lindell didn't, doesn't do what he had done so admirably in late November. Mike Lindell didn't have any...

Mike Lindell's not Dominion. I don't know what you're saying there. Mike Lindell had no... I don't remember what Mike Lindell said. I should go back and review it. What Mike Lindell said was he trafficked in all these lies again, and Tucker had him on and allowed him to do it, even after Dominion had said we're being defamed. The devil is in the details, and I don't have all the details.

When I first wanted to get you on the show, I was up on the details. However, I think what I'm about to say is correct, which is that Tucker was very strongly on record as thinking that this claim about the election fraud was bullshit. Not election fraud, that the election machines had no integrity was bullshit. Tucker was all in on other aspects of the election being stolen, but that's not what the case is about. The case was about Dominion's voting machines, and on the Dominion voting machines, Tucker, I think, was not anywhere near. Let me put it another way.

If the worst offender on Fox had been Tucker, there would be no lawsuit here. There would be no lawsuit. It was Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo who are really all in. And as Murdoch said, Hannity a bit. Maybe Hannity a bit. Maybe Hannity a bit. But this is the thing. The reason I do strongly disagree with you, and I especially disagree with reporters,

I try to snap them out of this. They don't know. When you have the, they think they know. They're writing to each other, this is bullshit. And I'll give you a flip side in a second. But when you have uh the president's lawyer saying making factual allegations just like when you have Johnny Cochran saying OJ was killed by by Colombian warlords in a Colombian necktie you put him on there Nicole uh yeah that yeah that

that wasn't OJ it was Nicole sorry that it was That it was not OJ Simpson, that it was Nicole was killed by, yeah. You can think it's bullshit. You can be sure that Johnny Cochran is full of shit. But it's a national story, and he's the lawyer, and he goes on there and he says this stuff. And he can say it every day if he wants. And unless you report, I've looked into this and it's true, that's just the way it goes. But let me give you why it's so dangerous.

We had another story where the reporters were all sure it was bullshit and they didn't report it. That was the Hunter Biden story. In an election time, even though they should have known because we knew it was real, but in an election time, this laptop came out. Now, I don't want to get sidetracked into whether a reasonable voter should care about the laptop. You can make that argument, but that's not for us to decide. Voters think it was relevant to their vote. In an election time, you had people at MSNBC and all over refusing to cover the story, which was being claimed by the other side because they believed it wasn't true.

That damaged their journalism. It doesn't matter what you think. If you know it's not true, then you put it out there and then you present the evidence that proves it's not true. But if a national figure is contesting an election and is presenting his, and this is what he's saying, you got to cover that. And, and I don't see an,

and if, and if, and if there's a laptop out there, which has an FBI evidence number on it, you have to cover it. You can cover that 52 intelligence officers think it's bullshit. You also have to ask, bring the FBI on and say, why is there an evidence number on this?

They never did that. They tanked the story. They buried the story. I don't think, I think this idea that they knew it was bullshit is a very dangerous standard. Reporters don't know. The only person who could know is the Dominion software writer. That's the only person who could know that there was no problem with these voting machines. So let me, let me. They're covering a lawsuit.

They're covering a contested election. It's news. And unless one of those anchors went on there and represented that they had factual evidence that it was true, either recklessly or knowing that it wasn't true, I don't see this lawsuit. I certainly don't see it to $800 million. You're not going to cover the president's lawyer's claims? I don't get it. I never got that case.

But I guess I'm wrong because they settled for $800 million. Yeah, and partly got a little guy's claim. But I think they should have gone to trial. And by the way, there are some First Amendment attorneys who agree with me. Yeah, listen, I talked to a lot of First Amendment lawyers, some of whom were very concerned about the implications of this lawsuit and that if Fox had lost in

open court, that it could have opened the door to further defamation extortion. Even the settlement. Imagine this settlement now. Now, we'd like to think that the Times and the MSNBC will have learned a lesson from this Hunter Biden thing, because it's really, it looks ridiculous. I mean, Biden was on the debate saying it's a hoax, and they never even checked into it.

He knew. Can I? Can I? All right. Now, instead of learning the lesson, well, next time something like this happens, we're not going to jump to a conclusion like that. Now they're like, well, listen, next time something like this happens, if we have emails between us saying that we think this is bullshit, we better not cover it because it could turn out to actually be bullshit. And then they're going to throw these emails in our face. But my point is, who cares if the reporters thought it was bullshit? Did they know

it was bullshit? How did they know it was bullshit? Did they have access to the voting machines? Did they have access to the software? They don't know that it's bullshit. I thought it was bullshit. Don't get me wrong. I'm making an objective case here. And it's

very easy to confuse the objective case with your opinion about things. I to confuse the objective case with, you know, your opinion about things. I never thought these election machines were rigged. But mostly I didn't think that because when all these accusations were made, then I heard the other side. What if the accusations had never been covered? What if it just, what if it just focused, just spread around Twitter? I mean, you have to be able to talk about this stuff. I don't get any of it.

I go, sorry. Well, there's a lot of terrain to cover there. Yeah. Right? So let's go in kind of, I guess, reverse order. What do you want to deal with first, Dominion or Hunter? You're making a larger issue, but what do you want to deal with first? I'm here for you.

What I'm really interested in is that how... Ombudsman of the world. How does the Dominion standard not then force MSNBC to double down on their mistake in the Hunter case? That's what I'm saying. If the idea that, listen, from MSNBC's point of

view, they have a perfect mirror image case. We all think it's bullshit. We have 52 intelligence people here telling us it's bullshit. That's basically, I think, even scale to what we say Fox had. They had, you know, they thought it was bullshit and they had X number of experts telling them it was bullshit. Neither side, as a matter of fact, MSNBC had better access to evidence that it was real because

we did know, there were very few people covering it, that the FBI had checked in this laptop a year prior. But let's just presume they were the same. So you understand my point here. Now MSNBC is going to double down next time. What we're telling them is that no, you did exactly the right thing by not covering

that laptop because if you didn't believe it and you had some experts telling you it was bullshit, you shouldn't have covered it. But you got it wrong. I think that there are some lessons from the Hunter Biden thing. And I think there are some lessons from the Dominion thing. I don't think they're perfect analogs, but you may disagree. And that's OK.

Tell me where they're not allowed to. Tell me where they're not perfect. Well, I mean, look, as a matter of full disclosure, I wrote about the Biden thing at the time. One of the things that I and people, some people liked it. Some people hammered me. Some people, who knows? The Hunter Biden thing was initially and for months owned by the New York Post as a story. I think that's fair to say for better and for worse.

That laptop had been shopped to the Wall Street Journal, also owned by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. The reporters there did their reporting and didn't feel they could verify it. They stepped back. That laptop was then offered to Fox News on its news side. Its reporters tried to verify and authenticate what was in there. They thought that there were some signs that were complicated, Its reporters tried to verify and authenticate what was in there. They couldn't.

They thought that there were some signs that were complicated, not going to experts who used to be whatever, but literally looking at they were given mirrored image of the thing, I believe, as I understand it, that they could look at. They were given it by a guy. Fox eventually did cover it. Let me get there. Yeah. They felt they couldn't authenticate it. So, again, the reporters for Fox News, perfectly happy to go after Biden. Mm hmm. Decide. You know, on a race that hinged on swing states that in and of themselves could go by pretty close margins.

So this thing is in play. Trump could win reelection for sure sure they decide they can't do it um i believe there was a third site that that that did that as well but i can't remember no these are but what you're saying is accurate they i'll bring up the headline now from fox news site fuck no no just let me get there the new york post breaks the story right so the lead byline on it belongs to a woman smart person but this was i'm gonna bring up the... Go ahead. Go ahead. It's fine, but let me get there. I'm going to let you. I'm saying this because I don't want you to think I'm being disrespectful. Fair.

Go ahead. After the New York Post breaks the story, Fox is liberated to cover it, in quotes, both as a controversy on its news stories and as an assertion of seeming fact on many of its opinion shows that is different than Fox actually breaking the story. Fox is almost delighted for somebody else to break it. They own the controversy. It turns out it's their cousin, their corporate sibling, New York Post, which is owned by Murdoch's News Corp as opposed to Fox Corp. But it is inside the family, but they don't have ownership of it if it goes sideways. The complications of it is that was a thing developed and promised weeks ahead of time by Steve Bannon, who has trafficked in some complicated and often unreliable information,

and given out, I believe, by Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Giuliani, who emerged as one of the least reliable figures of the Trump years, and whose Fox News' own research desk in early 2020 say, we cannot rely on him as a news source anymore. He is unreliable as an official verdict of the Fox News. Not me. Let me just get there. The Fox News research desk. Get there.

Oh, this is what people say to me. For the love of God, make your point. So fair enough. So what we had was a story that was written by a person who was Sean Hannity's former associate producer who had not written a lot of pieces, certainly nothing of this profile about a laptop that the Wall Street Journal and Fox News had independently felt they couldn't authenticate. Right. So they're taking it to a place where this is just true. The New York Post has different publishing standards. Even at the Post, the guy who had been assigned the lead writer. I don't want to cut you off. And what you're describing is the phenomenon, how it plays out, describing is accurate at the moment in time that it was accurate. Right. Subsequently, listen, subsequently, but absolutely. And long before the election, that changed. So I'm going to show you.

So this is Fox from October of October 21st. What day was the election? November. Early November. Laptop connected to Hunter Biden linked to FBI money laundering probe. So at this point, and you see the picture at this point in October. Fox came up with the document which had the laptop checked in at the FBI. And at that point, the notion that this was a Russian plant and all that became ridiculous. there's no excuse for someone at the New York Times, these news agencies have connections with the FBI,

to then call up the FBI and say, what is this document? What do you know about the laptop? At this point, we know that Biden was lying after this when he said it's a hoax. It wasn't a hoax. People who watched Fox knew that it wasn't a hoax. It wasn't a hoax. People who watched Fox knew that it wasn't a hoax. And at that point, MSNBC continued to not cover it because they thought it was bullshit.

It was shocking to me. The bubbles are so deep within journalism. They probably didn't even know that this was. Oh, no, I don't think that's true at all. I'd also say, like, I talked to people. Well, how do you answer this? I'm trying to. Yeah. I talked to people at NPR and at The how do you answer this? I'm trying to. Yeah.

I talked to people at NPR and at the New York Times and other places, the Wall Street Journal, who were at that point going and trying to report on it and trying to validate it, trying to get their own copies. In the case of Wall Street Journal, they had one. The Journal got up to speed and did some very good reporting on it. Others did as well. The Times, you know, MSNBC, certainly it's not in their wheelhouse. And, you know, they should be reporting on things that are inconvenient and cut against rooting interests. I believe that. I'm in favor of a panoply of point of view outlets. But let's zoom out. The point is that in the end, all the major news organizations

got a story tremendously wrong, obviously in some way because their hearts were in one direction, the same way Fox's heart was in the other direction. But, I mean, look, the New York Post got some of its stuff wrong too in those original stories. They claimed that they had proven that Joe Biden had taken a meeting with a guy that so far to date has not been proven. That was a headline on one of their main pieces. No, they showed a picture of him

with this guy. No, but I'm just saying, go back and look at the New York Post stuff. The Post stuff was probably more accurate than those that didn't do anything with it or initially dismissed it. My problem with what happened initially was that first, social media

tried to smother any sharing of the stuff from the New York Post, which I thought was wrong, problematic at the time and wrong very immediately after. And secondly, those group of experts, many of whom were media commentators, sort of they phrased what they said very carefully about it bearing all the hallmarks of a Russian thing. But they allowed that to become interpreted as this is definitely a Russian fabrication, and it wasn't. I find the whole Hunter Biden—first of all, I don't think Joe Biden is making any unpatriotic decisions selling out the United States of America. I want to stipulate that at the top.

I really don't believe that. However, everybody involved in this whole story should be ashamed of themselves. If you just change the name to Donald Trump Jr. on any of this, the appointments, it's comical that people actually will, with a straight face, say, no, we'd cover it exactly the same way. It's so

absurd. It's so patently absurd to think that this level of circumstantial evidence, let's just as one aside, it's quite interesting. These whistleblowers, the first time I've seen whistleblowers not believed, you know, wholeheartedly, just on principle. And there is always good reason to believe whistleblowers,

because what do they have to gain? They have everything to risk. They're testifying under oath. They, according to this story, and we know this is basically true, they knew that Hunter Biden had millions of dollars or a million dollars of money that he made at Burisma that he didn't declare in his taxes. And they let the statute of limitations lapse. Now, I've spoken to two prosecutors, one I was on vacation with recently and one who works at CNN, former prosecutor. They say,

do they let the statute of limitations? And they both said to me, no, the first rule in the prosecution office is you never let the statute of limitations lapse. That one bit of circumstantial evidence, if you knew nothing else to any seasoned reporter... Whom you just told not to draw inferences. I never said not to draw inferences. ...would say to themselves, there's a story here. Right. And it would create to a person who's lived

a very high, rebuttable presumption that this was slow walked for corrupt reasons because why wouldn't they just bring that case and continue to – you bring that case so that statute of limitations had told, and that should have been enough to activate the skeptical minds of old school reporters. But we don't have old school reporters anymore. Let me just offer something. You're not going to get me to argue against the idea that a powerful public officials, immediate family members who act in a way that, who derive income from problematic sources. You know, I'm not going to argue they shouldn't be reported. I think they absolutely should be reported on. Republican, Democrat, whatever. Not only Hunter Biden, I think the president's brother, James,

like there are other figures whose actions deserve tough scrutiny, as did, you know, the president's children, Don and Eric and Ivanka and his son-in-law. And Tiffany, who I find to be the hot one, but go ahead. Easy there. You know, his son-in-law, Jared, who's reaping money, you know, contracts, I believe, in the low billions, you know, in the Middle East. He's not reaping billions. He has funds. He's striking deals. But regardless of that, like, all of it deserves scrutiny.

I think it truly does. Of course. I think it deserves scrutiny. I think the stuff with the Supreme Court, Democrat, Republican appointees deserve scrutiny. I think that lawmakers deserve scrutiny. Like, I think it's – I agree with you on that. that yeah i think that you know cable news talks about of all stripes yeah talks about news uh more than it usually reports on news to the point that we forget that most reporting is done away from the public eye and that a lot of person power is spent doing reporting imperfectly uh in ways that

we don't see because some of it doesn't make it to print or to air, right? And I think that, what can I say? I think that a lot of the material on that laptop has been validated. All of it? I don't know that all of it has been, but I know that a lot of it has been. No, there's nobody, there's no claim anymore that the laptop is Russian disinformation. Hunter is suing the, come on now,

this is, you're in. I didn't say it was Russian disinformation. You're into the realm of the absurd here, and I'm going to tell you why. Bring it. Any email. Let me put it this way. As a reporter, you want to do your best to lay out what you know to be clearly the case and what you don't know to be the case.

The Washington Post, for example, did an excellent job of trying to delineate and go through and say this has been clearly confirmed. This is on there, but we haven't been able to confirm it. I want to tell you why you're in the room. The reason why that matters is because people like Giuliani who were involved in owning it and providing it have been shown to be not trustworthy in representations they have made in court again and again. And that matters. Okay. If somebody finds Periel's laptop and they find an email there where Periel writes to me describing what great sex we had. Oh, boy. And my wife hears about this email. I'm going to be with her on that one. And my wife hears about this email.

I'm going to be with her on that one. And my wife hears about this email. And I said to my wife, well, that hasn't been confirmed. That email is accurate. She'd be like, it's written to you. Like, you can tell me it's not accurate. The point being that everything on a laptop goes to important people. Biden's chief of staff, Biden's business partner, Biden's brother.

Not one of them has come out and said, no, that's not my email. Obviously, it's their email. And this is part of what's angering me way back when. Not a single Rob Walker, not one single person implicated. These are conversations. These are not diary entries where you could say, well, Hunter Biden says they're not true. And, you know, how do we know it's only these are to other people. Not a single one of these other people has ever said that was not my email.

Tony Bobulinski presented audio recordings of the conversations he had with other people where they'd say, you know, and emails they'd say, don't say Joe's name don't put Joe's name in writing he only wants it the big guy or whatever it was well, the big guy's been confirmed now, but at the time there's one where Tony Bobulinski is told

don't mention Joe's name in writing only verbally and this just goes, I think to Rob Walker, who's one of those guys called Don't Mention Joe's Name in Writing, Only Verbally. And this goes, I think, to Rob Walker, who's one of those guys. Rob Walker has never come out and said, no, that text message is a forgery. Obviously, these are all 100% true. It's astonishing to me that anybody could even entertain that they're not true. It's astonishing to me that anybody could even entertain that they're not true. Why are the people who are the victims of this forgery not saying, come over here now, look at my email

account. I never wrote that email. I think the funny thing is, I think we agree on more than we disagree on this. Am I saying something not 100% accurate here? You're saying something that is not the way in which a news executive would approach things. A news executive would, yes, they would. They would go to, this is how they would say, you're talking about me wrong. They would say, go to Rob Walker right now. Say, we have an email here that's purportedly to you. Is that your email or not? And then, and get him on the record. And if he says no comment, well, that speaks for itself, doesn't it?

But you've just told me... Have they done that? You've just told me earlier in our conversation several days ago that reporters are wrong to derive inferences about motivations. And they're wrong to derive inferences that they think they know somebody's saying something

they believe not to be true. You just told me that about- I don't think I said that, but- You did, about the Dominion stuff. I don't think that's quite what I meant, but go ahead, go ahead. Then forgive me then, I don't mean to misinterpret. But go ahead, but I'll make,

let's, for the sake of argument, go ahead. What I'm saying is just that I think a lot, most of this stuff has been validated and verified. That's, I mean, I don't think that we have to fight over everything that hasn't been to agree on what we're saying. So all I'm saying is that though, that sometimes it can't be done, and sometimes you don't know.

For example, I went on the air and did a piece after, well after the original Hunter Biden coverage happened and my original writing about the Hunter Biden story in the Post, which was somewhat skeptical because of the concerns, some of which I've shared with you. I then said, here are some ways to think about it, some of which make me rethink about things at times, some of which doesn't. Similarly, on the question of the lab leak, which i don't want to get in all the the uh debate about but the lab leak the way in which the press handled it i wanted to explain did you read matt taibbi's recent thing about love i mean i've read a lot of matt type no just

in the last in the last 24 hours i've not so they got a hold of a whole new uh tranche of uh of very exciting i just want to make a different point, which is that I revisited and said, look, there are ways in which the press, taking its cues from the public health establishment, I think did a disservice to the public's understanding of how this thing happened, which may or may not mean that it was clearly a lab leak. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that it could be. There's a lot of evidence to suggest it. There's some evidence to suggest it is. And there's some evidence that might cut against that.

I don't think that we have a perfectly clear cut thing because all the intelligence agencies are arguing with each other over this very thing and not simply the health establishment. Well, but that's fine. Listen, first of all, I invite everybody to read the recent HIV thing because, as Perry will tell you, I have been, I mean, I thought Fauci said some things he shouldn't have said. I didn't like when he told people not to buy masks. There's a lot of things I felt torn about Fauci. I thought he came down on the wrong side, but he did for the right reasons, whatever. I was never a basher of Fauci, right? However, after the recent things that came out in the last 24 hours, I'm done defending him. It is unbelievable. If what I read is accurate,

then I would have to say he's villainous from what came out in the last 24 hours. Those are strong words. You know what? I mean yeah. I mean, I have not read it. I find Taibbi to be provocative. I think he's often very interesting and insightful. I think he's sometimes completely off the mark. So I'd have to really... You read it. You read it. I'm curious.

We can communicate by email. It's stunning what came out. Again, if it's taken out of context, Taibbi's pretty straight. But listen, they get too many things wrong. As much... And you don't know me. nobody was more pro-vax than me. Nobody. I was the first business to require every customer and every employee to be vaccinated. Even before I knew it was legal, I did it.

So I, I, I, I second to no one in being pro-vax, but it became clear at some point that people with, uh, um with natural immunity were safe. It became clear at some point that people who are very young didn't need it. And most importantly, it became very clear that although the vaccine at first we thought was like a polio thing, which would eradicate the disease, that it, that, that jackass Alex Berenson actually had it right, that this really was just something that you, almost like a medication. If you took the vaccine, you wouldn't get as sick, but it really didn't do anything to stop the spread, or very little to stop the spread, and it certainly didn't prevent

you from getting it. And these, and at that point, I remember saying, well, this is just ridiculous. Now, why, why are we continuing continue with this with this charade? Who cares if anybody's vaccinated or any all matters? I'm vaccinated. I won't get as sick. It used to be that if you were vaccinated, that meant you didn't have covid. I could I could feel safe. You have covid at some point. Almost a year before they finally let up on this in the media, everybody I knew that had COVID was vaccinated.

And in New York, everybody was vaccinated. Everybody had COVID. And you couldn't, and they never adjusted their stories to real life. And they would, and all the way until recently, they'd say, wear a mask, even a cloth mask. And from time to time,

like CNN would have sort of a cloth mask, it's just theater. You know how many people got sick because they were told to wear cloth masks? The CDC, I think in the name of equity, because cloth masks are free, to the very end was recommending that people wear cloth masks. I think that's very different from some of the Berenson assertions. But yes, I think some of the stuff about the masks, particularly I think that there's a cost. Let me just say this. I think Berenson is a fraud, by the way.

But he was right about this. Yeah, go ahead. Well, he was right. Let me demur on some of that on Berenson. But let's just agree to disagree on him to some degree. But let's focus on... You don't think he's a fraud? No. I said he's a fraud, but he was correct that the vaccines wouldn't stop the spread. That's what he said. And they didn't stop the spread. I said he's a fraud, but he was correct that the vaccines

wouldn't stop the spread. That's what he said. And they didn't stop the spread. I mean, the whole Omicron wave happened while everybody was vaccinated. Sure, but not everybody

was vaccinated, actually. This country moves about a bunch, and it's even, I mean, obviously there was a lockdown. Everybody we know and everybody you know who got Omicron,

which is probably basically everybody you know, had been vaccinated. I was vaccinated and I got it this year for the first time. Everybody who got it. But I also went, you know, two and a half, over two and a half years without getting it. Yeah, but I'm saying that when in New York, in the November and December of 2021,

when it became a ghost town, it was all among vaccinated people. See, this is, this is astonishing to me because you're a guy in good faith. You're super smart. You know, everything there's some reason it's hard for you to just admit.

Yeah. They got that completely wrong and they refused to look at the evidence. They allowed people like Tucker and, and other and Brent Weinstein, these people who are very questionable, to put it mildly, they allowed them to get the upper hand in, what happened was they present 80% garbage,

but 20% of what Tucker was saying, he was the only person who had the nerve to say it because the Times and the rest of them were so all in into this clippish peer pressure thing, as opposed to just saying what's true. We thought the vaccines worked. Now we realize they're not working. Yes, of course, there should be a thing for natural immunity. By the way, Europe is not, kids aren't dying from COVID.

Europe is letting all their kids go to school. Everything now that they're hand-wringing about that they got wrong, this is not new data. They knew it at the time. Listen, I think that from my perspective yeah and having talked to uh not as many public health officials as i do public health journalists because i cover the media but i do talk to some public health officials or you know people who study disease and public health and medicine and all these things.

I wouldn't affirm all of your conclusions on that, but I would say. Well, tell me where I'm wrong. Trying to get there. Yeah. I would say that, you know, the pronouncements of public officials and public health officials have consequences. When you say, I know that you say it's from a good place, but when you say to people, you don't need to wear masks, it's fine, because you're desperately trying to hoard them for public health front liners. I understand, sounds like you understand why you do that,

but that kind of clear deception carries a later cost and toll for me. The thing about the cloth masks, similarly, that it chips away at the trust that people have. I do think from talking to researchers and officials and mostly public health reporters at different outlets who may approach it different ways, I do think their level of knowledge changed on this a lot. You know, like they invented the vaccine on the fly, which is a miracle. Not them, but the researchers at these companies did that in concert often with academic and federal folks. But their state of knowledge of this stuff is on the fly, too.

Okay, but this is a pattern to an argument. That may sound worse than what I mean it to be, but yes, there was a point in time, both with the laptop and with certain COVID things, when the reporting reflected accurately what was known. And then it became political. And then the knowledge shifted. And because it had become political, reporters en masse dug in and refused to relent to update what more and more people said. What are you doing?

We all thought that. But now you sound like an idiot. And this was the same thing with Hunter. Like, I got at first a Hunter laptop. I didn't know whether it was real or not. It was ridiculous. It was hard to believe. But then I read, well, actually, the FBI has this. And then I'm like, wait a second.

And then the Wall Street Journal says we didn't run it because there was no there were no documents that showed Joe Biden's name. But the but the accusation had been that Joe Biden's name had been purposely left off. Do you believe that a news organization that is perhaps known as along with Associated Press, the most down kind of trying to be down the middle and fair. Not on Israel, then not the AP, but go ahead. Let's talk about domestic issues. Let's just leave aside the AP. Talk about the Wall Street Journal.

I think in some ways it tries very hard, very scrupulously to be very fair down the middle of their newsroom. But owned by Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. Right? Owned by Rupert Murdoch. Someone might use that as evidence to say Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. Right? Owned by Rupert Murdoch. Someone might use that as evidence to say Rupert Murdoch actually has integrity with the Wall Street Journal.

I think it is useful to him, but I also think he's very proud of it. But I think he's hands-off. He seems to be hands-off. Well, the best example of that was during the Thurnow scandal, where Rupert had invested $25 million of himself in this, what proved to be a either, I guess. And he let them cover it and he didn't touch it. He just said, you know, the, the

Elizabeth Holmes called him and said, you know, get your reporter off it. His reporter wasn't simply covering it. His reporter was uncovering it. Right. And he said, do your, you know, they get to do their work. that's not how this operates. And that's to his great credit, and I've talked about that many times, because it's right, it was a big moment. And he lost 25 million bucks, but he kept his integrity. He doesn't care about 25 million bucks. No, he doesn't, but I'm just saying he kept his integrity, right?

So fine. We have to wrap it up, go ahead. So all I'm saying is, if the Wall Street Journal, which is a newsroom that I think tries exceptionally hard to operate from a nonpartisan shop with integrity, who happens to be owned by a clear cut Trump ally politically, says we can't authenticate this in a way that we feel comfortable with. I think that you've got to say maybe they tried very hard to report on this and it didn't happen. At first. And then they did great reporting on it. And then they recovered. They did, but then the rest didn't. The rest had to be dragged into it. And like I say, and the notion that this is the same, like, no, we're just going to buy the books. It's exactly the way we'd handle it. I mean, how many Trump stories? Look, it took two years before other papers

besides the Washington Post really took Watergate seriously. You know, like it takes time for people to catch up in their reporting and their sources, their conclusions, the whole thing. We live in a more immediate time and more immediate world. But I think the Hunter Biden response was flawed.

But I also think the folks bringing it are not people that you can instantly say, I totally think that they have faith because they've always brought me accurate information and true information in the past. Well, I agree with that, but there's also two layers to it, which is one is that at first it was tough to swallow, so you're afraid to cover it. But the other one is, and this is- But listen, it's not that tough to cover.

Hunter Biden was known as a drug addict and as somebody who probably had done all kinds of illegal things, so it's not an impossible thing. Do you remember how the Steele dossier got into the news? I do, and can I tell you something else? BuzzFeed published it verbatim,

and people, I think rightly, as I said expressed at the time, and subsequently feel more strongly, were saying, this hasn't been authenticated. They shouldn't put the whole thing out. And I thought that about something that was negative towards Trump. Right. But once it was out, everybody covered it. Even though it was not authenticated, people, nobody treated the laptop the same way. Nobody said that it's not authenticated, but this is what it says.

Maybe they learned a lesson. Well, no. Well, no, I don't think they learned a lesson. But maybe they did the thing they should have done with the Steele dossier in the first place. No. Which is hold off until they can validate it. Right. But as I've said already, by October, we already knew.

The difference between the Steele dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop is that the Steele dossier was impossible to verify because it was information coming from Kremlin sources. That was not so easy to verify. Everything on a laptop was verifiable within 48 hours. It was. All you had to do was get the person on the phone who is on the other end of these emails. And to the extent that they won't answer, that's a story in and of itself. And then you ask the president, why are they not answering? How can you say it's a hoax if it's a hoax? It's so obvious. Again, it's so obvious. I don't get it it's they should be ashamed of themselves and they got it wrong so

but circling back and that's why we should be very careful about these new standards that if the reporter if we find out afterwards that the reporter had a personal belief about it that's evidence that they knew they shouldn't report it because unless the reporter actually has firsthand information about something as's a factual matter, it doesn't matter what they believe about a story. What matters is what they knew, and did they or did they not report accurately what they knew. So let me express something you may agree with, and it won't take it super long. I know we're over.

It's that there used to be a time where people would say, report what she says, report what he says. You've got the information. That's a fair way to do it. You present it, you go. The way news has evolved for good and for ill is that there's an idea instead of a perfect balance, fairness. And so the idea is you're fair, but sometimes people misunderstand what I think, what fairness means. I think fairness means yes, fairness to you, fairness to him, fairness, uh, to the people you're reporting on, whether or not they're part of the story, uh, or, or, you know, are participating in the story, uh, fairness, uh, to your audience so that they have context to understand it and fairness to the facts. And that, that sometimes means reporting what you know and what you don't

know and being clear about it and just being maybe a little less seemingly concrete or certain that you have all the information that you need to evaluate this. Being fair to those facts. That fairness is the ideal, I think, that people strive for and often fail to get. But in the heat of the moment, people make the wrong choices. In the heat of the moment, make the wrong choices in the heat of moment I think the problem is as it's been problem for decades but plays out in different ways people go as a pack and so they all go one way they all go the other way but there is this you know what shall I say people have accused the press for many years of being liberal and whatever but there's many way this

sort of conservative infrastructure, which is, some of which is part of the press and some of which is not, but all of which is interested in, shall we say, undermining the press's standing and credibility. Let me make a point. Then I'll let you go. If Jesse Waters had

a one-on-one, I can't believe you got that spot, if he had a one-on-one interview with Biden and he asked me what to ask him, I'd say, ask him in the debate when you said the laptop was a hoax, did you know it wasn't a hoax? And he would say, oh, that's a good question. I'll ask him.

If you had a one-on-one with Joe Biden and I told you to ask him that, I don't think you'd ask him. I think you wouldn't want to be disrespectful. I think that you are part of that. It sounds like I'm being nasty. I don't think you'd ask him. I think you wouldn't want to be disrespectful. I think that you are part of that. It sounds like I'm being nasty. I don't mean it. I take it not personal.

But even if you take Brett Baier, for example, at Fox. The community that you represent, they used to be very oppositional to everybody. I'm the ambassador in plenipotentiary. NPR is a good synecdoche for everything, but the NPR would not ask Biden

such an obvious question. You looked in the camera. Let me just say this. I would match Steve Inskeep, Michelle Martin, or a bunch of our hosts against any tough interviewer on any network okay i don't know him that much but i'm just saying that those guys uh uh in a respectful way will task the toughest questions imaginable and they're terrific i have yet to see anybody not uh part of

the fox post uh could you know uh i think it's valid questions about listen i think it's valid to ask questions about Joe Biden. We know now that the president went in that debate and he looked in the camera and said, this is a hoax. And we know now he was lying. Do you know that he knew that he was lying? Of course he knew.

Of course he knew. Do you have documentation to show that? Well, then that's why you ask him. But I think it's almost he had to have housed. What you're telling me is he shouldn't be president of the United States. There are emails there with his close associates. Are you telling me Biden never called up Rob Walker or his brother and said, are those your emails?

That he aggressively showed enough disinterest? I just want to go up there and say it's a hoax. So please, I'm not going to ask anybody. He had every obligation to take 30 seconds and find out whether it was a hoax or not. It was completely available to him. You're proving my point. Look at the somersaults. You're turning yourself into this guy.

This guy went up there and said, it's a hoax. Overwhelmingly, if we feel he should have his finger on the button, we have to assume, it's very, very likely, he knew it was not a hoax. If he didn't know it was not a hoax, he's a real problem. But I'm just saying, has anybody yet asked him that tough question? Mr. President, you told us it was a hoax.

What's your explanation? They used to do that to Clinton. When Clinton pointed to the camera and said, I never had sex with that woman and turned out to be a lie. It was a big deal that he was lying. This is exactly the same type of thing. The difficulty is, you know, despite hearings on the Hill, which people follow for the right reasons, which is they could produce something that's very damning about Biden himself, who's the president of the United States. You're asking him about the actions and misdeeds and possible crimes of his son that took place not in his presence.

No crimes. He was taking coke and he had a gun and he did other stuff. There are crimes involved. Some of the money stuff might amount to it. He didn't report certain... I think there's a question of whether he reported certain income in that. That's different than saying it's a hoax. You're a reporter and you're excusing

his lying because you feel sorry for the dad. You're not listening to me. I'm saying that it's a different question to ask a president about his own personal activity than things. People can ask the president that. I don't have any objection to that because I think... Don't they have a responsibility to ask the president that? I think it's reasonable to ask the president that. Not reasonable.

Don't they? It was a presidential debate. It was a big issue. If he had said, no, I have to admit that laptop is real, who knows? The election came down to a very small number of votes. It's a consequential event. He looked in the camera and he probably lied. Maybe he didn't lie. Either way, we want to understand what went on.

No reporter feels that question goes to the top of the list. It's crazy. I don't, I don't get it. It's be, I, we know the reason because they support him. That's the reason. But you are doing the thing that you attack reporters for doing, I think in some instances wrongly, but you're saying, you are supposing that that's why reporters do that. Let me just finish. I know what you're saying. Go ahead. I'm doing it for the benefit of our podcast listeners who may not. Are you're assuming that reporters are not asking that for a particular reason because they have partisan rooting interests? That's what you think. I think that those questions that it is legitimate to ask president about the activities of his son or his brother or anyone else who does things, particularly taking revenue, violating federal law.

He's the chief head of the federal, you know, the executive branch of federal government, but also, you're also – and I think our viewers and listeners and readers deserve to make whatever conclusions they want to make about the propriety of the answers. They can decide they hate him, will never vote for him as a result of those answers. They can decide they support him. They can decide it's not of any consequence to them. That's fine. Not a problem for the reporter involved. I do think that when you've got an adult child, it's not a child, an adult son, who has so flagrantly screwed up his life in public view that tonally hammering a public official for that portion of that person's life is a, it's a hard ask.

Asking him, did you think that was a hoax at the time? Or were you saying that to defend your son might be a way of getting at that question. Or did you think it was, were you saying to defend your son? You're feeding him his excuse answer. You say, you said it was a hoax. All right. So why did you say that? Did you believe that to be the case? That's fine. People can ask that question. I just don't think it's the most interesting question of a guy who's been in office for three years. There are other things you can hold him accountable for.

This is exactly. I'm happy I let you talk. You don't think it's that interesting. Do you understand that 48% of America finds it very interesting because they feel that their president lied to them, and that's the reason that lie might have greased the skids for his election. Because you don't find it interesting because—

No, no, I didn't say that. You would find it interesting if Trump had told a big lie and then— My friend, you're forgetting that Trump told lies repeatedly over the course of his presidency, and I didn't think that him being asked every time about Eric or Don Jr. or Ivanka was the most interesting question to ask Trump either. His policies had effects that affected hundreds of millions of Americans. So am I to take from this that you think the news is playing it straight? They treat Biden the same way they treated Trump? I think they are playing, what can I say? I think they are treating

the most conventionally establishment politician president that we've had in a long time differently than they've treated the most unconventional unpolitician president that we've had probably ever. Does that mean it's fair? I don't know. I think they treated them differently.

But I do think they are also two, they are inherently two very different figures in the American presidency and American history. That doesn't mean that you treat one better than the other. It just means that there's going to be a difference. And only on Fox and the Wall Street Journal are personal feelings responsible for the way coverage goes? I wouldn't say that because I don't have access to it.

What I can tell you is that it's less personal feeling. To be honest, the thing about the Dominion case that originally attracted your interest, although we talked a lot about the younger Biden, is that the Dominion case was fascinating because you don't have to rely on what my sources inside Fox tell me, and I relay to the world. You're relying on their own words. What turned out to be the most interesting thing is what was presented to the American public through Fox, and particularly to an audience that, by and large, was more inclined to support Trump than not,

contradicted not their personal sentiments, but what they thought the evidence showed to be true. These were people who, by and large, were often supportive of Trump versus Biden and said empirically, he lost this race, not simply over the machines, but that he just lost this race full stop. And they said, we can't tell our audience that we are damaging our brand. Yeah, I agree with you.

So that, to me, was the interesting thing. It's a much simpler story to say, oh, they're conservatives, they want this. No, they were- And MSNBC didn't want to tell their audience that the Biden laptop was real. Or like, they certainly didn't tell their audience that the Biden laptop was in the hands of the FBI.

They didn't tell them that. I just haven't looked at the transcripts, so I believe you, but I- No, I did hard Google searches, you know, site.com. Yeah, it's just been a while since I delved into all this. We're going to do round three. This is going to be two episodes because that's how long we've been recording.

We'll play this whole episode on our thing and Lou will cut it down for serious. It's fine. I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Maybe you'll come back for another round. I also find it endlessly fascinating that what seems to be so clear to me, which is that journalism is more than ever before part of, you know,

saw itself, became part of the resistance, and is so populated now by people of a certain profile. But if you started talking about that, we've had a lot of consensus on that. I know, the profile of you and me, elite people. Forget about that. No, it's part of it, though. But that's fine.

But I'm just saying there's truth to that. I think there was truth to that on cable in particular, on CNN as much as MSNBC. I think that happened in major newsrooms where the Times tonally shifted in that direction. And the Washington Post, which actually I think tried to do it more down the center, nonetheless did endless coverage of the same bites at the Apple because it fed an audience that desperately wanted it. And once Trump was out of office, a lot of those ratings subsided. A lot of those clicks abated. And there were, what can I say, financial models built around that.

On the other hand, what happened in some ways was that the caricature of the press as an explicitly liberal part of the political establishment, which had some truth to it, but was not totally right, was, let me just say this, was foisted, I feel, by elements of the conservative sort of counter-establishment. They built Fox in the image of the newsrooms they claimed the left were building, and then you saw some of these other sites going in that direction. You read Eric Wemple's blog where he explained why it is that nobody objected when Bennett got fired when he ran the Tom Cotton editorial where he essentially just says it. I mean, I wrote a lot about that too, and Eric did great

work on that, but I don't remember. He said exactly everything I'm saying now. It's like, you know, you just couldn't do it. The pressure was just so hard. It's clickish. Some words in his mouth, it's clickish. But, you know, through this podcast, I've gotten to know all these journalists.

They all come from the same, they believe the same things, they read the same things. One of my advantages on this podcast has been, it's amazing what they don't know. Let's wrap this up. I want to tell a story off the air. I want to thank you for coming.

I'm hanging out with our mutual friend tomorrow night. If you want to come down and join us in the olive tree. Nice. I wish I've got I've got small ones to attend. But our mutual friend is someone who we got treated very badly. But all right. Well, thank you very much, Nicole. That's it. Good night, everybody.