The Press Box - CBS News’s Margaret Brennan on Covering Ukraine, TV News During a War, and Hosting ‘Face the Nation’

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Bryan is joined by CBS’s Margaret Brennan following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They talk through the ongoing war in Ukraine and touch on how the United States is responding. Then, they discuss the responsibility TV news has to its viewers, and break down the preparation and execution involved in Brennan’s Sunday show, ‘Face the Nation.’ Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Margaret Brennan Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Erica Servantes. We are recording this on Wednesday morning.

A little less than a week after Russia launched its full-scale. invasion of Ukraine. As you know, I've spent the last seven days watching TV news basically all day, and I am very excited to talk to our guest because she is part of it. Margaret Brennan is the chief foreign affairs correspondent of CBS News. She's also the moderator of their Sunday morning show Face the Nation. In this interview, I want to know a bunch of things. What's Brennan's take on the latest developments from Kiev and the White House? What did the chief foreign affairs correspondent do in those first harrowing 24 hours of the invasion? And what should a Sunday morning Q&A show look like in 2022?

Here's Margaret Brennan. Margaret, we're talking the morning after Joe Biden's State of the Union address. What struck you about the way he talked about Ukraine last night? Well, one of the most striking things is that it was topic A. It was the very first thing the president addressed. It is rare for a president in the United States to go before Congress to talk about the state of the union and instead talk about another country and a country in which the United States is not actually committing troops. But it really emphasizes that for the president,

his thinking and that of Western officials within the NATO alliance, they are thinking of this as really an extension of this autocracy versus democracy battle in the global order. and that the president putting it first on the plate really drew a strong underline to that idea that this country, largest in Europe, size of Texas, but 5,000 miles away, is actually directly impacting U.S. national security. Why? Because it's a proxy battle between the United States and Russia. That's why the U.S. is not committing troops. They don't want to risk being drawn into a head-to-head collision between two nuclear powers. But the United States is pouring in money and weapons to shore up the Democratic government of Ukraine. And it is impacting Americans' pocketbooks. It will impact

global power balance. This is going to be hugely consequential. You mentioned money and weapons, also the sanctions of which Joe Biden announced a new one last night. Does the White House think they have options on the table that can actually change the trajectory, excuse me, of the Russian invasion at this point? The White House and the top national security team around the president do believe they have options that can change the calculus of what is possible for the Russian military and what the thinking of leadership may be. But that doesn't help someone in a bunker now. And that's where you see this divide because you hear from Ukraine's presidents, Zelensky, you hear from their leadership saying, I need something now. I need a new fly zone to stop the

planes from dropping bombs on civilians. You know, President Zelensky has begged for that publicly. And that is not what he's going to get from any Western country because no Western country is willing to put their military in this fight. The limit that the Biden administration thus far has gone to is providing anti-aircraft defense systems, Stinger missiles that President Biden greenlit on Saturday night. Those are in transit. They haven't yet been delivered into Ukraine, but those could help, for example, shoot down helicopters. When it comes to other options, the United States thinks they have on the sanctions front, I would expect more rolling sanctions to come out here from the administration that will eventually have an impact on the Russian military and what is accessible to them.

But the fuel shortages you're seeing among Russian troops that you hear about from the Pentagon and the food shortages and the low morale, that's not due to the sanctions. That's due to poor logistical planning, it seems, that the Russian military didn't anticipate it would take this long. Perhaps because the Russian forces either weren't fully briefed or the assessment was just not accurate in terms of the resistance the Ukrainians would put up. I know you've been doing some reporting on this. What do U.S.

officials think the prognosis is for Ukraine right now? Every U.S. official that I have spoken to, whether it's at the White House, whether it's at the Pentagon, whether it's at the State Department or in intelligence agencies are very plain and brutal in their assessment and fearful,

frankly, because they know and expect that Vladimir Putin could repeat a pattern that we have seen play out in countries that the West has looked away from, has chosen to not harshly punish him for. They are thinking of what happened, for example, in Chechnya and the brutal slaughter of civilians there when Vladimir Putin was not running the country, but a key intelligence official running operations there. They look at what has happened in Syria,

where President Putin backed a war criminal, Bashar al-Assad, actually intervened in a war there and turned the tide of it. How, by using weapons that were so lethal and brutal that it really crushed a popular uprising and resistance? He was willing to do things that go outside of the military code of justice, what we would refer to here in the United States is the military code of justice or law of war, just the basic premise of what should be possible, what the Geneva conventions were drafted to prevent. Vladimir Putin is willing to go all in. And that is what I hear time and again. The U.S. ambassadors, the U.N. said to me on base nation on Sunday, nothing's off the table with this guy. That's a direct quote. I had been asking her about chemical weapons, the biological weapons.

There was real fear of the brutality ahead. You said the other day, a U.S. official tells CBS news that a tactical seizure of Ukraine is possible within the next four to six weeks. What does tactical seizure mean in this case? That is based on an assessment in a brief given to congressional committees earlier this week by the top administration officials on what's happening. When they sketch out what the next few weeks look like, it's that an encirclement of key, the capital city, could take place within a week from now. And that in the following 30 days, you could see the largest cities where leadership in the capital or in some of the other secondary cities, where those are taken control of by the Russian military. It doesn't mean that every inch of Ukraine is occupied and under the boot of the Russian military, but it means operational centers. It means potentially the decapitation of the government as well. And so that is what is militarily possible.

These are estimates, though. And because of what I was just saying with the brutality factor, if the Ukrainian resistance is as strong as we are seeing thus far, even with a far weaker military, does the Russian military then choose to use things like the Ukrainian ambassador has accused them up, which the UN ambassador, the U.S. ambassador to the UN just confirmed was being moved into Ukraine. and that is very brutal weapons that are banned under the Geneva Convention, including vacuum bombs. So if you see a real brutal assault, that timeline could change. The other side of this is that you hear, I've heard from officials as well that the long fight

could actually last 10, 15, 20 years, that the Ukrainian people, particularly in the west of the country won't be easily crushed. They will resist. And I spoke to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi just yesterday and asked her, once we see the government fall, is there willingness to support, pay for, and authorize the funding of an insurgency against a Russian occupation? And what she said was absolutely. So this is going to be a long fight. But the tactical seizure means that Russia gets control of the key cities. When you're trying to help viewers keep all these events in perspective, including these acts of heroism that we're seeing day to day from the Ukrainian people

and the Ukrainian military, how often do you feel you need to mention that estimate of a tactical seizure? You're seeing this, but this is what we fear is going to happen in the next weeks or next month or so. Well, I think it's interesting because I've been following this closely since, first we noticed some of this buildup in the spring of last year. And then really in the fall, the drumbeat seemed to build. And then U.S. officials, as you know, chose to try to brief the public and the press on what they thought Vladimir Putin would ultimately do. And a lot of the Western governments

didn't believe it. I can't tell you how many diplomats I spoke to from European countries who said, we know what your intelligence officials are saying. We see the buildup to. But Vladimir or Putin wouldn't possibly bomb a European capital city. Well, guess what? You know, U.S. intelligence sketch that out. But here's the thing that's different. They had estimated that KEEP would fall in one to two days. We're on day six or seven now.

It hasn't. And those estimates of how the Russian military would be able to actually execute in the field, didn't take into the assessments that they'd not have. proper logistical planning. We were talking about whether the ground was frozen or not, and if the wheels on their tanks could get traction. We weren't talking about the fact that they didn't pack enough food. So, you know, realities on the ground change these estimates all the time. The thing that I get concerned about as a long-term foreign affairs watcher is that the public loses interest and starts to turn its eye. And, you know, there are some big

potential markers here, one of them being if and when he falls, if and when Vladimir Putin is confirmed to have used weapons banned under the Geneva Convention, what will the United States do? And what's the answer from your perspective for TV news? What can you do to keep the public's attention on the story? Well, I will keep reporting it just as I did, by the way, the brutality in Syria and elsewhere in the world. It is interesting that there is more attention now paid by the public. I think some of it is because this just is so unthinkable for so many to see a European capital city being bombed that this would come so close to all the institutions that were built up after World War II,

specifically to prevent something like this from ever happening again. it's showing a real challenge to the global order. So I do think that President Biden won't be able to park this in the corner and say he wants to turn back to, for example, China where strategically the United States, he would argue, needs to focus for foreign policy and economic reasons. He will have to do both. He will have to do both at the same time. And this is, I don't think this is something that we easily.

turn the page on. And by the way, at your kitchen table, you're going to feel it. We already have inflation at a 40-year high. Gas prices are already up 40% from where they were a year ago. The price of milk, all these things, the price of bread, the global supply chain that was trying to work, we were watching officials try to work out the kinks in the global supply chain because of COVID and disruptions there. Now you have another disruption to the global supply chain here, which is this geopolitical risk and this uncertainty. How long does this play out? What will it mean, not just for the energy markets, but for the European economies that are going to be potentially impacted by sanctions, but also disrupted by a massive refugee crisis?

We have almost 800,000 people who have fled just in the first week of this bombing campaign. The economic part of this is what Biden was nodding at last night. What was his line? It's going to be okay something along those lines about in terms of gas prices and stuff like that. Well, the president can say that. And ultimately, and you'll hear Republicans talk about this, that it's not like there isn't global supply of energy. There is, the question is whether the flows will continue

and the willingness to pull it out of the ground. I mean, President Biden, remember, really wanted to prioritize climate change and turning away from fossil fuels. but you can't do it overnight. And right now there's this debate over, can we try to turn off the Russian spigots overnight so that it will really hurt them

without impacting the rest of the world and reliance on their cash cow, their petroleum products? That is what keeps Vladimir Putin's coffers full at the moment. And so at what point can the United States go ahead with sanctioning some of their oil supplies? Look, it's been done to Iran. It's not unprecedented.

The question is whether it can be done now and whether the president wants to take on that political pain and whether European countries want to take on that political pain. I want to ask you about those anonymous assessments of the Russian army that come from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials because you've had a lot of experience in that world reporting. It's reading a New York Times story yesterday. And it quotes one anonymous official saying, we think there's low morale in the Russian army right now. But we cannot tell you how widespread the last. low morale is, and we can't even tell you how we know that there's low morale in the Army.

That was the essence of the story. So what is the best way to pass those assessments along to viewers with the necessary caveats? It's a good question that gets at the challenges of covering a conflict like this when you don't have boots on the ground, so to speak. You have reporters right now who are risking their lives, and I thank my colleagues who do that in Kiev and in other cities in Ukraine. It is a really hard job. But they are also, when you are also constrained there, you know, how do you confirm morale among the Russian military? In explaining it to the public, you have to say where the source is. It may be.

be an unnamed Pentagon official, but the Pentagon's briefing it. Certainly, you could argue that's information warfare. But if you look at what's happening on the ground, it certainly does seem to match with a pattern of their Russian military not making the progress they expected to make. Within the time frame, they were expected to be able to encircle the capital city of Keeve. So those two data points do seem suggestive of each other. But I think you do have to attribute it to the source. Just like when I was telling you about the vacuum bomb allegedly used in Ukraine, the United States hasn't confirmed that it was used.

They have confirmed that a vacuum bomb was moved into Ukraine by Russia. And the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States was the first one to make it public. She said it had already been used. So we're talking to officials from different governments, from different intelligence agencies, and you have to make clear the source on that and provide the skepticism to say, I can't independently confirm because I'm sitting here in Washington, and my colleagues who are risking their lives in Kiev can't get out and travel to the site of each and every bombing. You're the chief foreign affairs correspondent of CBS News.

So when Russia begins its full-scale invasion last Wednesday night, what did your next 24, 48 hours look like? That was a very intense. Look, it's been a very intense past few weeks. I am fortunate. I have an amazing colleague who reports from the Pentagon and has for decades, David Martin. I have a number of other colleagues who all of us were sharing tidbits of information for days, just constantly updating each other on I'm hearing this from this government.

What are you hearing? We had a window. And then that window of time where the bombing. was estimated to begin that day passed. I had different information, as in another colleague of mine with different estimates. And so you're constantly on standby. It's like you can't ever turn off the news or your ability to stop making phone calls. So for a week, we were constantly checking in with sources asking what they're seeing and what they're hearing. And my sources were right. Our sources were right and we were in the chair ready to go with a special report when the bombing

began because we were hearing about that build. And then since then it's just been a deluge of just trying to confirm information, check in and make sure that our teams on the ground have that information. That kind of team reporting CBS does means that we are sharing our information across the board. So my colleagues who are in Europe right now are hearing from all of us here in Washington on a regular basis. And how do you guys share stuff

on a daily, hourly basis? It could definitely be done more efficiently. There's way too much email. I feel like I'm drinking from a water hose and a lot of it probably gets lost. But I have a colleague on the ground in Poland in right now who's sending me, I have one source telling me this, this is what I'm seeing, can you get a second? And I make calls. Or, you know, in our Washington Bureau, some of the folks,

for example, on Capitol Hill, we're trying to chase down what administration officials had briefed. And we all talk and spread out along the agencies to try to do that and then put it together in reporting notes. But there's, there's so much out there that I feel like we're just, scratching the surface. I wish that we could put it all out there all the time. You see sort of the highlights from it on the evening news and the morning show. Yeah. This is one of those times, right, that it was you almost need a 24-hour news network just to fill, to be able to fill all those, get those all those nuggets onto the air. Well, there's that digital network we have. CBS News has CBSN, which is now referred to as CBS News as well. And, you know, some of it can get

on there. I also, because of my dual role with Face the Nation, I view everything during the week is also preparation for my show on Sunday. So a lot of it just stays in my brain as kind of a big file cabinet for the interviews I do. And so it's all preparation all the time. I heard you hit this line particularly hard on the first night of the invasion. No one is coming to defend Ukraine. Why emphasize that for viewers? Well, one, I think there is a strong feeling that cuts across party lines in the United States of opposition to the use of military force that involves U.S. combat troops. I understand it. I report on it. I'm a military wife. My husband's the United States Marine. I'm extremely proud of him. I do think it is worth mentioning,

though, that when people hear, you know, I'm aware that folks who are just turning on the news aren't tracking all these developments as closely as we are. And they hear President Biden stand up and say he's sending U.S. troops to Europe. They might think those troops are actually being used in combat. They're not. They're not going to Ukraine. No country is coming to the defense of Ukraine. No one is willing to send in their troops to defend Ukraine. They are sending in their weapons. And the president drew a very bright line saying, if you go farther west, if you touch Poland, if you touch Romania or Slovakia or any of those countries that are actual NATO members, Ukraine's not, that that would trigger a response.

But I think it's also worth underscoring that when you draw a bright line like that, someone like Vladimir Putin may hear, oh, okay, well, I have carte blanche to do what I want up and to this point. The president has said he doesn't, right? The president has said, I will do things like provide weapons and funding. from Ukrainians to put up a fight. But let's be real here. The Ukrainian people and Ukrainian civilians are the ones in the front line who need help right now. And so they are thankful for the weapons. They are thankful for the sanctions. But just as human beings, I think it's important to remind ourselves not to feel too holier than thou when we say we're standing up for democracy.

When you hear these stories of women giving birth in subway tunnels that they're hiding in because their homes are being blown up, that's the reality of war. That's the reality that all of us in Washington and in European capitals can't lose sight of. We can feel good about what we're doing, but let's also be honest about what we're not willing to do. You can debate the merits of it. Well, let's just be honest about it. I want to ask a bit about your background. You grew up in Connecticut, majored in foreign affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Virginia. Was your first inclination to be a journalist or a TV journalist in particular? I didn't know I wanted to be a journalist at all. My mom suggested to me that I try out journalism,

specifically television journalism, and I interned at CNN one summer down in Atlanta. and just loved being in a newsroom. But I did not know I wanted to be a journalist. I thought I was going to be a diplomat or something that was related to foreign policy. I don't think you always know when you declare your major exactly what you're going to do with the degree. But I knew what I was passionate about and interested in. And I thought that that was a good sort of instinct to follow and that I'd figure out the details later. So what was the moment when you said I'm destined to be a journalist?

I loved being in a newsroom in that summer and CNN, just picking all the basic stuff you do is an unpaid intern, as I was, picking up the phone and speaking to journalists in the field and hearing from them and hearing them by to get on air and to share what they were seeing in hearing. And it was just such an amazing global reach. it was kind of like being in the middle of this nerve center. And I thought it was incredible. And to talk to all these journalists who had this vast experience, Christian Amunpur had been a hero of mine. You know, I had always admired her reporting for years. And getting to see people like that up close,

I was like, I think I want to do this. Let me try this for a little bit. When I was a young writer, I had people in the business I could point to and say, I want to be like that. Not exactly that, but like that person. Who was your person? Was it Amman Poor or somebody else?

She was the journalist. I think I, she was the journalist I admired the most, but I was sort of almost like terrified of her when, you know, when you admire someone so much and you're like, oh, there they are. That was my reaction. But, yeah, I don't know. I didn't have the I want to be you instinct. I had the, wow, they're really good.

That's really amazing. I want to do something like that. That was how I thought of it. You started behind the scenes at CNBC, and I know making the jump from behind the scenes to on air is a big deal in television. How did you make that jump? I did.

I took an entry-level job at CNBC. With my background in Middle East Studies and foreign affairs, it wasn't like an obvious choice, but I knew in graduating from UVA, I had a few job offers, but it was like, you know, you could barely support yourself. As you know, a lot of these entry-level journalism jobs, they pay next to nothing. I knew that I wanted to try this, but I wasn't sure if I wanted it as a career. And I knew I wanted to move back to the New York City area. So I took on with CNBC. I worked for an anchor there named Lewis Rue Kaiser, and it was all off camera, just learning financial news, you know, tracking news stories, working on a news desk.

And gradually, maybe two years in, I started trying to go into the field, doing things on top of my job and figuring out how to write a script. And I ended up doing a segment at 5 a.m. on Fridays on their show, on the morning show there. charitable giving. And, you know, I'd go out and I'd shoot stories and I'd write the script and another anchor would track it and voice it. And then eventually I was doing it and I started getting access to CEOs and get the chance to throw a question at them and started getting noticed.

And one day, the executive producer said, why don't you try tracking this? Why don't you try fronting it or at least do a stand-up? And so I did, and they were pretty awful. But that was my very first on-air gig. Let's talk about Face the Nation a little bit. In a parallel universe this week, you'd be talking about Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Gintagy Brown Jackson, maybe Biden's congressional agenda, stalled congressional agenda. What do you want the show to do during a story like Ukraine?

You know, we speak every Wednesday. Wednesdays are Mondays in Face the Nation land because, you know, we work the weekend. And we try to forecast where we'll be by Sunday. Where's the story going next? And for the past few years, we've had these rolling crises. Ukraine and Russia are one of these rolling crises where we don't know exactly where we will be by Sunday, but we know this is a developing story. So it will definitely be front and center on the program, which portion of it we talk about, we will figure. year out. But we do still keep an eye towards the domestic, which is why, for example, last Sunday,

we brought it back to the economy and to explain to Americans why they need to care. If they don't care about upholding the global order and transatlantic alliance, well, they will realize soon that the inflation they're experiencing may be worse, or to explain to them, you know, the the risk level of this escalating. So I try to bottom line it in that ways. And I try in that way for every story. You know, it's kind of unusual for two weeks. We haven't talked about COVID in the way we had. And we've been talking about it for two going on three years. So we're chewing on a lot of ideas of where we will be by this Sunday. You had six guests on last week's show from Linda Thomas Greenfield, Ambassador to the

UN to James Clyburn. Am I right that as the Sunday morning shows have evolved, they now have more guests and you're touching on more stories than they did in the past? That's true for Face the Nation. I don't think it's true for all the shows. For us, particularly during the pandemic, my executive producer, Mary Hager and I were of like minds and saying like there was so much information and yet we felt like we weren't able to, you know, we were all hungry for more. It was almost like the hour wasn't enough.

and add on to that the complications of having people, you couldn't have people in person sitting around a table. We never went remote during the worst of the pandemic pre-vaccine. I was in there every single Sunday, and we couldn't have guests sit across from me. So we nixed those panels where we'd have a group of journalists chatting. So the other shows, a lot of them kept those up and did them remote. We instead just did back-to-back interviews and tried to get as much from,

frontline workers, you know, mayors, governors, and the like to give us an idea of what was happening in parts of the country because we couldn't get out there ourselves in the same way. So that's a long way of answering the question to say, it's a very intense Sunday preparation now because I'm preparing for five or six interviews, often on different topics. That's a lot. And the interviews, just tell me about the behind the scenes here, the interviews are recorded at various times Sunday morning and then not necessarily in the order they appear on the show? Well, we try to be completely live to the extent that we can. Sometimes, I mean, this is a little

behind the scenes sort of stuff that may not be interesting to you, but for example, the White House, they may have a few cabinet officials they're putting out. And some of the other Sunday shows air before mine. They air in the nine o'clock hour, for example. And mine's at 1030 Eastern time. And sometimes the cabinet officials will say, I just want to sit and do them all at once. And so you end up taping, you know, I wait for my friends at NBC or ABC or CNN to finish. And I then get my shot at that official. So you end up taping that sometimes. Not always. Oftentimes that guest is live. It's sort of a you do what you can when that person is available. but we do prefer a lot. Sometimes with foreign officials,

if they're overseas, you have to tape because of time differences, that kind of thing. So it's really a mix. You mentioned the remote interviewer during a time of COVID with a policymaker. I remember Ted Cople during the high period of nightline,

love to have people not sitting physically across from him, even if they were in the bureau, he would put them in another studio so he could look at them in a monitor because he felt that created a different dynamic between interviewer and guests? What do you think about the remote interview? That's so interesting.

I'd love to ask him what he thought he gained from that. I think for me, if anything, I miss the human interaction because I think, you know, I'm used to it. I'm used to talking to a camera. I know I'm talking to you and I'm not looking at you, right? Like I'm fine with it because I do this professionally. Sometimes off-putting for someone to sit and just stare into a black screen or a camera,

it changes their behavior. It changes their connection with you. I think sometimes it makes it easier for someone to revert to kind of a robot talking point versus if they're making eye contact with you. You're picking up in each other's body language. You're picking up on all those things that come from human interaction. The dynamic is different. And I think in person, it's usually a better interview.

I personally believe. And particularly if it's something really difficult or emotional. The other thing I would say, you know, we've all got used to Zoom interviews and you do what you can with what you have. But that vibe of being able to interrupt or interject is also weird when there's a delay or it comes across somehow as rude when it's just if you and I were sitting across from each other, you'd read that I wanted to get. get in there or follow up on something. How much time do you spend thinking about the questions you're going to ask on Sunday? Oh, my gosh. I spend a lot of time thinking about the questions, how they're phrased, what order, what flow

to the arc of the interview, whether there are questions that I'm not thinking of, are there topics that are must ask, are there, you know, how do I prioritize them? So I come up with a bunch of different questions. I have producers who think and research things as well. well, who are throwing in their two cents on what they think should be asked. And then you kind of triage them and then sit down knowing that, particularly with a live interview, if you've got seven minutes on the clock, you've got to either get through this or choose which one you lose to follow up on a different question.

It's challenging to do that because you're going through this sort of decision tree in your mind. If this, then this, you know, particularly if it's a contentious interview. Right. Yeah. If I follow up here, then I lose question number seven on the sheet. Exactly. Right.

Which felt like a really good kicker to get to end the interview with. Yeah. You know, and that's the thing is you always, I always walk away going, gosh, I wish I could have done X, Y, or Z, or I should have said this here or there. I also spent a lot of time reading in on the issue. So that, you know, you know the scope and the parameters, essentially, the essence of what you're trying to drive at, because you have to understand that to know what's most important to focus in on

or to hear the news. And I feel like that's a very like Washington skill, too, of hearing the phrasing or the slight turn of phrase from the policymaker that is suggestive of the thing they cannot say yet. Like, you know, there's a whole, all the reporters who are beat reporters who follow State Department diplomats or Pentagon officials, they'll know what I'm talking about there. It's just, and I do, I really value beat reporting and people who really kind of master their still set. So I often reach out to my colleagues and say, hey, you cover.

For example, January 6th investigations every day, what am I not aware of than I need to be aware of? Yeah, there's this big blob of a Washington talking point. And within the blob, there's a little bit of a turn of phrase or a little bit, something a little different. Right. Oh, they leaned into this idea here. I think that means I can push here. Yeah. Do you have a larger theory of asking questions to people who come on your show who are very good at getting their side out, very good at filibustering, very good at running out the clock on interviews?

That's really frustrating. So I have a theory of it. Look, I think I have a basic respect for my audience and the intelligence of my audience. And it really ticks me off when someone doesn't show respect for the audience, for the interviewer, for the office, for the information. I really respect people who, say as part of their public service, they need to sit and explain and they want to be understood. I think that is where journalism serves democracy when you have those conversations to keep the electorate informed. I hate the idea of just, you know, getting stuck in the spin. All journalists do. You want to break through that because you want to get to as close to the truth as you possibly can. We had the Russian ambassador to the United States the week, the Sunday before the bombing began. And I mean, I knew what I was in for there. And we did tape that interview, part because he wanted a really extended period of time. We published all of it. We put all

of it up online. We aired a broadcast version that was a little bit shorter because we only have an hour for the entire show. But I tried to prep on that knowing also on top of the questions, I'm going to have to fact check in here. And that's a big lift too. And so that's part of preparing for an interview like that to read what else that person says to know where they're probably going to take you. I want to ask you about that interview. This is Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador you speak of. He wanted a larger amount of time, like he wanted you to commit to interviewing him

for 20 minutes, 15 minutes in order to do the interview? Well, I don't know exactly what he wanted, but they released a statement the embassy did after the fact saying how frustrated they were with me. So that's out there in the public eye and posted in on Facebook.

So after the fact, I guess he was frustrated that he didn't have longer time. But I mean, I don't know if that probably would have been said no matter what, to be honest with you. But we did post the full interview online so that everyone could see exactly what he said and how he said it. That that wasn't, you know, in this environment where there is concerns. about the integrity of information. We wanted to make sure that we were being fully transparent about everything that happened in that conversation. So we put all of it out online. And then, you know, posted that on Twitter and Facebook and every place we could. It's on YouTube

if you want to get it. So that's how we deal, we dealt with that. And that was before the complaint. You mentioned the misinformation. I think one thing he told you was that Russian military was only operating on Russian soil and you had to correct him in the middle of the interview and say that that was clearly not the case. What is the value of putting somebody like that on the air if you know you're going to get a lot of misinformation, even if you're able to correct it in real time? It's a good question. First of all, we, first of all, I would love to interview Vladimir Putin.

I would love to have Sergey Lavrov, the top diplomat on our program. I would take the defense minister tomorrow because I do think they need to be asked questions. But I think is used to the office of the ambassadors of the United States is that is Vladimir Putin's envoy in Washington. That's him. And this ambassador is not just any ambassador. He was like one of the top defense officials during the first invasion of, I shouldn't say the first, during the invasion of Crimea. back in 2014. He was awarded a medal for his service that was, that actually was named after, and it was called like the return of Crimea. So this was a man intimately involved with

Vladimir Putin's thinking about how to retake in his, it was called retaking Crimea, the honor he was given, as if it were his to begin with, right? So this is someone who is in kind of a unique role. He is someone who was directly involved with an arms control agreement negotiated during the Obama administration. So he would be part of any negotiated solution to the conflict. Because remember, the United States is putting on the table arms control. So this is a player, potentially. And that's the value. The other thing is, you know, people sometimes say, why don't you have so-and-so in your program? I love that people think that everyone you ask just says yes. We had been asking the Russians for a very long time.

Okay, you say you're doing this. Come on, sit down. Let's have a conversation about it. I want to ask you questions. And the embassy said, we're ready to talk to you. And we said, this is a pretty unique moment in time. Exactly what is the Russian message going to be. Let's sit down and hear him say it.

Because remember, at that point, the United States was also waiting for this response from Vladimir Putin to the offer put on the table for diplomacy. So I wasn't sure when I sat down for that interview, if I was going to hear some sort of opportunity being dangled, this ambassador clearly decided he had a message for the American people. What was it? That's the value in trying to move the conversation forward. So you take the interview with Putin. You take the interview with Labrov. Let me ask you one more. Donald Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party. Someone from his office calls and says, former president wants to come on and talk about his future political plans, the invasion of Ukraine and other topics. Would you interview him? I would interview the former president. I would also interview former president Obama. Should he ever decide he wants to do an interview? I would interview the current president, Joe Biden, should he ever agree to sit down with me? Yes. I think

people who are, if not current, but former and very influential thought leaders do deserve a conversation. I think just like I laid out in terms of preparation, it would have to be with an eye towards making sure that I was prepared to fact check, that I was prepared to make clear to the public that what that person, was saying was spin or at least a very strongly held belief that may or may not be backed up by fact. And that's what we have to do for everyone. Let's in here, Margaret. There's this very, let's call it an ongoing conversation throughout the media and I assume it's CBS too, about how people get their news, whether they're watching television, whether they're getting it from social media, reading online, whatever it is. What can TV news do for a story like the invasion of Ukraine? People travel through their television sets. People are viscerally impacted and moved by images.

It's one thing to read about pregnant woman taking shelter and giving birth in a subway. It's one thing to read about a children's hospital moving babies from the ICU underground so they're not hit by bombs. It's one thing to read about all of this and say, Ukraine, where is it? 5,000 miles away. It's another thing to see it because I think, and this is where television is so powerful, it is something when you see it before your own eyes, when it is a humanitarian catastrophe like Ukraine, it is hard to turn off the human instinct that everyone has seeing that.

And I remember this and I think of Syria. and the brutality in Syria for a long time was being reported on and the reports of use of chemical weapons being used. There were stories coming out. I tracked, others tracked. It wasn't until those pictures of mothers and babies gas to death that the American public reached this sense of horror. And so I think for stories like that, that get at the very sort of human essence of, of right and wrong and who we are as Americans or who we like to think we are as Americans, what we like to think American values are,

I think television can be really powerful. And it's also very powerful at holding people to account when you can show something that happened in contrast to how someone perceived it. Margaret Brennan, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you so much for having me. It's time for the late in the week edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline.

Okay. You're back, David. I'm back. The people demand this for this, yeah. Two strain pun headlines. Here it is. This one, this week's headline comes from Andrew Joe Potter. It's from the Toronto star, David.

It's a story about a man who collects vintage typewriters. Vintage typewriters, okay. We all have our, we all have our passions. Vintage typewriters. One of the headlines used on the article was just his type. And not punny enough for us. Not puny enough for us. It's even better.

What was the Toronto Star's strained pun headlines? Is it like a keys to, is it a keys pun? Typewriter key, like keys to victory. Cartridge. Type set type Ribbon Something with a

God, what is it? Is it type? Is it type what I'm working with here? It's not. Just imagine the keys of a typewriter. Alphabet. A certain kind of keyboard is called the It's a cue and a W. Like Cordy?

Mm-hmm. Here we go. Here we go. We're rolling. Quartie. I don't even know what I'm trying to say Cori, Quarty Blank done cheap No I'm just kidding.

Quarty, Quarty. What, I have no idea. Quarty deeds. Oh, Qorty. I was thinking of like 40. Oh, God, Quarty Deeds is good. I'm not sure that anyone would have any idea what that was about, but it's fun. He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantes. See a Monday, David. For more Luke Worm Takes About the Media. See you later, Brian.