Transcripts For CSPAN Sean Spicer Apologizes For Hitler-Assad Comparison 20170413

Hitler. N adolf also taking part, Kellyanne Conway and journalists who cover the white house. This is four hours. Good morning. Ceo the president and the of this museum. Tois a pleasure to welcome the first 100 days. We are the preeminent National Organization that explains, promotes and defends the five freedoms of the First Amendment and the right of free expression. We welcome over 800,000 visitors a year to our building with we all know that there will inevitably be friction between an administration and journalists. However, perhaps at no point in living memory has there been more concern about freedom of the press in good part because of real or perceived conflict between the Trump Administration and the media. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 83 of americans believe that current tensions have made the relationship between the administration and the news media unhealthy. And about three in four u. S. Adult say that these tensions are getting in the way of access to Important National political news and information. Staying true to our role as a Nonpartisan Forum committed to fostering opinion and substantive discussion, we are so pleased to present this set of conversations as we approach the 100 day mark of the Trump Administration to explore these challenges, and maybe to even find some solution and common ground. We have gathered a diverse array of present and former Administration Officials and journalists to discuss how we got to this point and how, still early in the administration we might act to achieve our common goal of an informed citizenry that is the bedrock of our democracy. We will employ several different formats, including standalone talks and panels in order to investigate these complex issues. We are pleased that this symposium is being broadcast by several different networks, and were also life casting it at newseum. Org live, and on several social media platforms, hashtag trump and the press. Important support for this symposium was provided by the Knight Foundation for which were extremely grateful. Additional funding has been provided by the kohler fond of the Community Foundation for the National Capital region. I would also like to express my thanks to our friends at especially tammy, Betsy Fischer more and Robin Goldman for all their help in putting together this ambitious program. The newseum will continue to export issues that are vital to our democracy. This symposium will launch a yearlong set of discussions entitled the First Amendment and the Trump Administration. I hope that you will attend future events in this series and other newseum programs that explore consequential issues. Tonight, for instance, in this room we are showing the First Episode of a new Program Inside the fbi, new york. After the episode, i will be interviewing fbi director james comey and executive producer mark levin. Ripped from the headlines indeed. We want to start this morning with a brief presentation from one of the breakout stars of the 2016 campaign and as of monday, Pulitzer Prize winner for 2016 David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post. From his crowd source coverage of Donald Trumps foundation and charitable contributions to the net infamous axis on a date, his work dominate the political conversation last fall. And he hasnt let up. Hes graciously agreed to share his forward thinking approach to Investigative Journalism and his insights into what the future holds for this tour of the vital reporting. And now, David Fahrenthold. [applause] show less text thank you. Thanks everybody for coming. Im so glad to be at the start of what should be a really, really interesting morning. First i should say for those of you who have not been followed the Washington Post is a new pretty gothic dives into darkness. According to the new company policy, we have set the mood, will turn down the lights, turn on the fog machine and i brought a cd of Haunted House sound effects. Two minutes of organ music and screams to get everybody ready. I guess thats not possible. Thank you. We will just imagine. I want to say this at the beginning. This is a time of extraordinary power for the media in washington. I mean that, power, although there are number of people, some of whom they come on the stage later today who have called us fake news or the enemy of the people. The truth is we live in a time when the folks in power, the folks with power in washington often lack the cohesion, the ability, the organization to shape the narrative about themselves. Usually one of the dynamics we deal with in washington is a president ial administration sort of acting as a unit to shape the way the public sees them. We dont have that now for better or for worse. The public more than ever depends on us on the news media to make sense of whats going on in washington. Weve seen times with the people who have power depend on a static sense of what just happened to them. Remember why did mike pence added mike pence learned the National Security advisor mike flint had misled him about his contacts with Russian Ambassador . He read about in the Washington Post. How did House Republicans find out a couple of weeks ago that this health care bill, as obamacare bill they been talking about for months had been pulled without a vote . They read about it from the Washington Post and the New York Times. The president himself had called this news. One of the dynamics we dealt with last year in the transition. Before President Donald Trump took over was the power of his twitter feed, his ability to use twitter to get around us or two more often command us to cover whatever he wanted. But we now have seen even a few weeks President Donald Trump has diluted the power of that weapon, diluted the power of that account by repeatedly using it to hit that he would do things that he would not do or to make claims that he had no evidence to back up your so just a big one example, in chicago doesnt fix the horrible carnage i will send in the fence. He did not send in the fed. 3 Million People didnt vote illegally. He wasnt wiretapped at trump tower as far as we can tell. Those things, those actions, those tweets have taken away what was his ability to act as Americas National news assignment editor from his bathroom or from his bed, from his kitchen table. That ability that no president has ever had to sort of command the media that we saw in january doesnt exist anymore. So we come back to the idea people not rely on us more than ever to make sense of whats going on. Whats our responsibility now as a news media at this moment of unaccustomed influence . Beyond the ageold requirement that we do right in with the fair and fast, i would say theres a quite enough to be more transparent than ever. We have all these people who normally tuned into washington political coverage in the last month of the president ial election and to doubt again. Those people are now engaged. They are reading, excited or encouraged or theyre terrified, whatever it is, theyre reading the details of House Intelligence Committee meetings and investigation and Court Decisions in maryland and how why come all the things that used to be things we covered for washington audience and some audience beyond now is his enormous national audience. So for those people coming to us for the first time or acting as a sustained audience for the first time, we must show them why we were better. We have to show them if they dont know it from our name, we have to show it to them in our work here so last year in the course of reporting stories about Donald Trumps chervil giving a promise to give to charity, i tried to use social media as a means of economic transparency. I use it to show readers what i knew, what im trying to learn, but i still didnt know and how i knew what i had known. I knew. This began not by any plan but by necessity. Last year, in may, i had this reporting problem that i never had to do with before. I had been writing about the promise is donald trump to give money to children charity. Hisuding 1 million out of pocket and said he would give it to veterans. Both of the money i could not account for especially the 1 million that came out of his pocket. His Campaign Manager called and the donald trump had given 1 million away, this was in may after the original promise. He gave it away to two Veterans Groups but he could not tell me when or how are any amounts. He will not share that information, he said. Said, take his word for it. I do not want to take his word for it. This is a hugely important promise. Made that a huge selling point. If he gives his own money i want proof but how do you get it . Be able to prove a negative, you could not prove that he gave no money away. I tried to prove a positive, to find some evidence. I tried to find one dollar of this 1 million and i did it on twitter. Here is one example. I tweeted at veterans organizations, journalists who cover veterans, anyone who is active in the world of veterans on twitter and i asked them, have you gotten even one dollar of this money trump giveaway, it is a Million Dollars, do you know anyone who did and i included trump handles. So he himself would see. Either a Veterans Group would see i was looking for it and they would say i got money and heres the truth. Or trump himself might see it. I spent a day searching this way and i did not find a dollar. That was because the money did not exist. I was told he had given the money way he had not. Ofwas not until the night may 23 after i had done this long public search that trump gave the Million Dollars way, he a group called the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation whose leaders he knew. There we go. Trump called me the next day to say he had given the money away. I asked him, did you just give this away because i was asking about it . And then he called me a nasty name. That is the last time we talked. Nasty guy. If donald trump had been willing to wiggle out of a promise to veterans under the brightest journalism, have an what would he try to do when no one was looking when he was just a private citizen . We found evidence he had promised to give away millions of dollars over the years in set out to prove him right. I started calling charities and i asked to help identify charities he had given money to. He did not respond. Charities that were likely to get money. He would have given money to them. I made a list and took pictures of it and posted it on twitter. 0 fifth charities. 450 charities. Charities that he had given money to from his foundation, that was not his money, anybody i thought, if he had given a dollar of his money they would have gotten a. It. I thought he might call again and to me the truth but he did not call. My search turned out between 2008 and 2015, a time when trump said he was giving millions away, i turned up one gift that was for less than 10,000. In this process, i used social media to ask supporters, anyone who might know where he had given his money to come forward and make a suggestion and added to the list. At the same time i was using social media to try to solve another problem, which was the donald j. Trump foundation, was it really his money, he had been using it to buy things you should not use your money to buy if you are running a charity, like giant portraits of yourself. In one case, trump had bought with money from his charity paid 10,000 to high alert portrait of himself. I need to know where that was. He bought it with the charities money, it has to be used for charitable purposes. Whatever he had done with this giant portrait it had to be a charitable purpose. I needed to know where it was. This is one of the numbers of times that i asked my readers and twitter followers. They find found things i would never thought to find on my own. In this example there is a reader of mine, allison angular, atlanta. Tory writer in she had the idea to look on the trip advisor page of his golf course, where people have pictured posted pictures and 350 photos in she finds at the bottom a picture of donald trump. A portrait i had been searching for, the missing portrait was shown on the trip advisor page hanging on the wall of a sports bar at his golf resort in durell. Dated 12 february 2016 dated february 2016. Nationales the spanishlanguage broadcast. Doral was fourt blocks away and used his points and made a reservation. Andoes over to the doral checks and, it is late, 12 30 a. M. At night and he asked the cleaning crew to let him in the sports bar and there it is. In the flash. In 14 hours we went from not knowing where this portrait was a may could happen anywhere to having it on the wall in the flash, in this case apparently breaking the wall. One of the funniest parts of the story is the excellent nation for how this portrait from the Trump Campaign of how this came to be hanging on the wall of this sports bar. He said yes they said it may appear that the charity, did the buyingbar a favor by art. The sports bar is doing charity a favor by storing their charitable portrait on the wall of the sports bar. It has to be one of my favorite quotes of the whole story. A legal expert said it is hard to make an irs auditor laugh but this will do it. [laughter] so since President Trumps inauguration, i have seen a number of other news outlets using, embracing transparency beyond social media. The great things the New York Times had done where they post the full transcript. They want to give people everywhere to so people can dig through things they find interesting, to see how trump responded to questions. You see it in an incredible ,tory from us at the post times where they talk about they are writing about west wing infighting and they tell you how many people meet with them from the west wing. Isyou are someone like me it more people than you thought worked at the west wing who are being quoted. There is a story i admire where they talked about a rebranding effort where 20 people had been gathered together to talk about the messaging of trumps first 100 days and six of those 20 rate. , an incredible i talked earlier about how we want to show people by what we do is better. If you read that story you see the six out of the 20, you have a confidence that story is right. Being transparent haps helps readers understand. It forces us to focus on what we know and be in more explicit in our writing and if you want think it is better to have 20 leakers, the 19th person might tell you something you do not know. Or that the first 19 people were wrong. The story gets better and being more explicit about how we know what we now, exactly who we talked to, makes are reporting better and makes increases that trust. In closing, for the news media, our new power should come with a profound sense of humility, and openness to criticism about what we ignore and what we do not think is worthy of of an explanation. We have to listen to what comes back in as we become transparency from people who think we are not doing it right. I hope there was greater transparency, we can show readers why we deserve their time and trust. I hope the it makes us more likely to explain ourselves. I look forward to hearing from a lot of people. Thank you for letting me start it off. [applause] quest thank you and congratulations again on the pulitzer. Next up, communicating for president. Some say it is one of the toughest jobs in washington. Familiar faces who have represented president s from each party on our next panel. And to do introduce them here to introduce them in moderate the session is the cofounder and executive editor of axios. It is a special pleasure to welcome mike allen. [applause] you andank congratulations for an amazing turn out. Light up and congratulations to david and his wife elizabeth. Whose work isue inspiring. The vicechairman is over here, Betsy Fischer and all the people who have worked so hard to bring this session to us. Talking about communicating for and with a president. We have two of the great practitioners, gentle mary jen palmeri. Position in same secretary clintons president ial campaign. When the New York Times did a story about her joining the campaign they pointed out she tended to work with the president instead of against the press. She is a was a Deputy Press Secretary for president clinton and the john edwards 2004 campaign. Presse kateri for president bush. The podium and the 2000 campaign he was working for the enemy, a lisbeth dole before joining george w. Bush and started to medications as a hill rat. But they have known each other since 1991. He worked fore, leon panetta. Were friendly and our paisans and work i will together. It was relatively uncommon in those days but more now. It is a era long gone. How long were you with president bush . Is the biggest mistake you made at the podium . Jen i cant think of one. To watching what happened poor sean yesterday. I twice had to issue apologies and retractions for things i said at the podium. It is immense pressure. What was the other one . Ari that is right. April ryan, one of my favorite reporters asked me a question once about isnt bush to blame about the violence in the middle east, he was not doing anything to resolve the situation and ill clinton was in there was no violence when bill clinton was president. I did not like the premise of the question. I pointed out that the violence began september 2000 when bill clinton put the status of negotiation jerusalem on the negotiation table and i continued in an effort to shoot the moon, that is when the violence began. The headlines were bush blames clinton for mideast violence. Condi called me into her office and said i needed to apologize. I said i dont. After five minutes of that conversation i realized, yes, i do. I marched myself into the oval and turned myself in and i had to apologize and the second was in the lead up to the war in iraq when i said the war could be avoided if the iraqi people took it in their own hands with one bullet, there would not need militaryeed for a operation. That one was totally taken out of context. What a surprise. The everyone from Washington Post ombudsman to ted koppel defended me. Anchortook with the called a very magnanimous view of yesterdays situation and you the rightspicer did thing. What should he do today . We will hear from them shortly. Ari i think he should show up here at explain it. That is what you do when you make a mistake. You walk through it. He has an obligation and i say this as the secretary and summary who is very proudly jewish. He has an obligation to say what he was thinking, what he got wrong, and to make clear that is a heartfelt apology. What has surprised you about how the Trump Administration communicates . Jen i am surprised that it is relatively conventional. I thought it is, i think it is helpful for the press and america, it has been helpful for democrats and my side of the aisle, there is a daily briefing. I wasnt sure they would continue that. It does not need to be a very effective way seem to be a very effective way for the Trump White House to drink it with the American People. There is a lot that comes out of that briefing that is newsy and that is right for the public. There certainly have been moments that were helpful for us. From fox and trump tweets. They do not do much communicating other than that. I thought they would be more unconventional and trying to reach local press, regional press, doing President Trump could be going on some of the softer television shows, what i saw as my job and working for president obama was right it is his job to Committee Kate to the American People, right, so that takes a lot of forms. You want to communicate your message and what you are achieving but you have a responsibility to explain what is happening to the American People. And explain how they should think about world events and there came a time in our white house where it was not possible to do that through the press, right to my and if you are only talking to the press, youre not doing your job as Committee Case and stricter because you are not reaching anybody. We thought about how you reach everyone where they are so that he could be communicating with them. White housetrump are talking to you guys which is great and the press has risen to the occasion and how trump is and how trump is being covered and not letting important storylines go by the wayside. Leaving a lot on the table and not comedic eating with others communicating with others. We were interested in the balance between serving the president , the boss, and the needs of the press. We isolated at tweet and this is after the inauguration when sean spicer did the briefing about the crowd size and we can see the tweet there for those who are listening online, this is Ari Fleischers tweet. This is a statement you make and you know the president was watching. The saturday beginning to the administration, the inaugural celebration. It was a foolish endeavor from the start to the end and the notion that crowd size mattered. The president needed to weigh in on what the size of the crowd was is a validation of his sean wasand poor sean, sent out to argue with the press and it was a terrible way to begin relations with the press corps on that saturday night. I said at the time that if he fumbled the ball on saturday night, he picked it up, recovered, and ran for first down on monday when he had his first briefing. I give that quote to nightline and they chopped it and put that quote on the air that sean fumbled the ball. It is the job to reflect the president and i will make the case that the White House Press corps anytime today, would you rather have a press secretary who you really like and you get along with well, who treats you nicely but has no clue what donald trump is thinking or would you rather have a press secretary who is in the office, in the oval, knows intuitively what donald trump wants to be said even if he does not get along with you and every answer is they would like to get along but they would much rather have a press secretary who knows what the president s thinking because that is the press secretaries job, love him or dont love him. How often was there conflict between comedic eating effectively for the president of balancing the issues access . Jen it is inherent in every withrsation that you have, your colleagues and inherent in every dimension decisions that gets made involving the press at the white house. Decision that gets made involving the press at the white house. We thought they would value someone who they would prefer having a source that was knowledgeable than someone who gave them access elsewhere in the white house or someone who was pleasant and that was always forst important credibility the press secretary and their commodity to protect. When i worked for president clinton, we would make sure that was jay carney was the press secretary and josh earnest. That their relationship with the president had to be, everyone has to understand that that was could walkthey had, into the oval office in any point, was in every meeting, and that was the key thing. It was also our job to advocate for the press within the building. That is a very unpopular thing to do. Was true of the clintons and barack obama, your friends in the press. Says your i have had friends in the press. Your people, go tell your people. Jen your people. You have to, but you understand that is part of your job, not just because you have to service the press but you are ultimately constantly trying to keep your side out of trouble. Whereas where is the line between over responding to, buying into the premise of a processing story that the press are pushing that is damaging your white house, where is the line between lets ignore it and try to make, wait for it to run its course, or we are ourounding are probably problem by not engaging and trying to figure out when you engage and when you do not, that is the constant battle that is going on in your head. Didn the best days, president clinton or president obama like that press, understand the press more . Jen president obama, i guess. Sident obama would get president clinton, the funny thing about both of them issue could see either one of them having chosen journalism as a path and that they understand communicating and understand the power of journalism. They would both get frustrated by journalists who they considered to be lazy, taking the easy way out, being cynical by dumbing down politics to just process and that would frustrate both of them. President obama had an interesting Learned Behavior. A good example, i worked at the white house during health care healthcare. Gov, which counted at the time as a huge disaster, sort of quaint in retrospect. That was the big crisis in the country was the website did not work. People were not Getting Health Care fast enough. Obama saw that it was a wreck, there was unbelievable stress, it was ridiculous. We were at a meeting in the oval Office One Day and i started to walk out and the president was like, hold on. He said, i want you to know that i know the press around the website is not going to get better until it is fixed. Like, you should keep trying but i want you to know i understand this is not a press problem. This is and until it works and people are Getting Health Care, the press is not going to improve. I do not do not carry that with you. Thank you, it lifted a lot of pressure and i was assured by mike colleagues that that was a Learned Behavior on his part that he did not walk into the white house thinking that the press staff should be able to fix this problems and it was a big joke in the Obama White House and i credit my colleagues because they would look at me, i storysay just because a appears in the press or at issue is aired out in the press does not make it a press problem. Usually it is just a problem or you read about it in the press. They would give me a look and say, i do not know, it is like a Egg Communications problem Big Communications problem, or ebola, people are worried about ebola that is showing up in the press. They understood the difference between you could, what was just a problem that needs to be managed, and they were communication problems. In the early days of the Hillary Clinton 2016 president ial campaign in your effort to broker a recent between secretary clinton and the press, which partner, which half of that was less cooperative . Jen a deep sigh. Something coming out of campaign. N Hillary Clinton is someone who understands the press and politics and is a good strategist and understands that all much better than people give her credit for or understand and thought that there possibility for the press relationships to be different. I think that if you talk to the press that covered the campaign, partwould say we did our to keep the relationship pretty good and under the circumstances, i had a few screaming matches on tarmacs, everyone does. Into was thed press thought that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. If they were harder on her and came after her in an effort that i thought they believed was going to make her a better candidate, was going to make her a tougher president , blewde an issue out of emails into such a big issue, we never could get ahead of that. Ishink that i think that why, they thought she was going to win. That is elian, that is in the spring of 2015. Proportion,out of no sense of proportion. Grossly mishandled i the press and obviously, haunted her until the election. Us . Hy does she hate jen she does not hate you. Singular you or plural you . She does not hate you, mike. Hard to looketty at what Hillary Clinton has been through in the last 30 years and not understand that she is going to have some doubts about how the press is going to treat her. I would note that when she was secretary of state, she had a great relationship with the press because her relationship with them was on her job and issues and she even socialized with the members of her press corps that covered heard during the state department, but that is different than what happens in the president ial campaign where it is much more of a cat and mouse game. To the detriment i think of the public. Is much moree it iout her personally, and could write a book, i may write a book about how she is a generational he challenging figure. She is a baby rumor. She gave a challenging commencement address, she was a woman, a baby boom or she was challenging the norms of what the roles of women should be. First time we saw her was she was first lady, she had a career, she was not going to stay home and bake cookies, that was challenging, and she drew a lot of fire from that. That fired to find her. It reminded a lot of people and her press coverage has been colored by that ever since. The hatred that hangs around that woman is completely irrational. I think it has its beginnings in the decades before and it continued in her press coverage to this day. The New York Times interviewed you and you had a great quote. Everyone complains about the press but most people by their their tongue. Bitedonald trump does not his tongue. When you have dealt with the press for some 30 years in this town, it is a fair conclusion to reach that the press is biased and the press goes about its job in a way that does not inspire the American People, that they are covering the news and a fair manner. Fair it is working for him. A couple of polls i brought with me. I had a feeling this would,. In 2015 a gallup poll came out asking do you have confidence in the press to tell the news, report the news fully, fairly, and accurately . A historic alltime low, 32 of the American People have confidence in the news to do their job. 14 of republicans have confidence. percent of independents. Ll, they gave a list of institutions and said give an f grade to these institutions. Give thec was asked to grade to the voters. 13 f. Who gavelinton got 21 her an f. 30 , donald0 , gop, trump, 35 , the press, 38 . I am not done. Dont dismiss it. This is my point. After the election has anything changed because donald trump was so unpopular, are there changing thoughts question mark the dow poll came out last week. 5 , k12 principles, 7 , business leaders, 14. News media, 21 . Week,y, gallup poll last 64 say the press favored democrats and 22 say they favor republicans but the press tends to dismiss it and go beyond it. To acknowledge it, they have heard it for so long but they do not care. They do not chaired change. This is the problem with the press and this is why donald trump strikes a chord. He does it in a way that is over the top and can be offensive and it resonates with a lot of people who are tired of it at think the press should change. My only advice to reporters, the group for people i enjoy working with, it is important to have a strong, independent press is you have to take seriously when you are at a historic alltime low and people do not have confidence that you are reporting fairly and accurately. Stop pitting one camp against the other, for this focus more on substance and stop telling the American People what they should think or follow. Tell them the facts and leave the judgments up to the people. [applause] why is the press so focused on palace intrigue . There is the, it has a rolee, in coverage. It should be covered to some degree. It tells you a lot about how the white houses operating and that is relevant for the American People to know and it tells you what kind of leadership the president is employing and that is somewhat relevant for people to know. It goes way overboard and to appoint to being a distraction not just for the press, the can burn up a lot of time in the white house. It can burn up a lot of time in the white house. It is something the white house is ignoring. Whatever the press is saying about the staff and we need to keep that at a minimum. It can be distracting and that is distracting for everyone. It happens because it is a way for the press to resist covering issues and a deep and serious way because if you and doing so, youre coming down on one side or another. Process,ver personalities, if you just judge the white house on who is getting along and who is not, or are they executing well or not and you do not have to weigh in on what they are actually doing, that is a safer place for the press to be. I think when i worked in the Democratic White House i found, i think and this has been changing, i think most journalists are probably winning to the left than the right. Think about the person who is drawn to do this as a career. They believe in government, they think politics matter, they like it, they find it interesting. They do not make a lot of money. Business does not concern them. On theme after us harder palace intrigue, on the process, on things that should not matter. But contribute to the cynicism that is revealed in these numbers because you are not talking up talking about what people care about. We were chatting backstage and talking about the topics that would be fun to cover and the topic that both brought up was bias. You are making the point that because of what you think reporters natural inclinations are, they are likely to be harder on you then general in general. Jen i remember during president clintons years come a gas prices were high. They were coming after us on something and it was during gore and bush, the election. You guys would not be coming after him on gasp prices gas prices. Are democrats, youre supposed be better than this and found a i definitely different standard and covering democrats than covering republicans. It is just a different metric they apply and they come after us harder on both being able to also one problem or process and intrigue. Ari it is interesting to hear jen say that. What you are saying is valid about the clintons, the press had no like for the clintons and i think it was reciprocated. The press was soft on barack obama, they were hard on the clintons and they are even harder on donald trump in my estimation. Halfway through the obama story saidion, a working journalists went into the Obama Administration. Do you know what it is like to be a press secretary on the phone with a reporter asking legitimate newsworthy stories only to realize their porter entered the administration against those ideas that you hold and they will say to yourself, we are fear, independent, neutral minded people but 24 went into the administration. It reminds me of the saturday night live. The press loves to cover it when it radicals donald trump i remember in the skit where there was the debate between obama and clinton. How manyion was pillows would you like . I do not think that changed in the eight years of the obama coverage. The press left brock obama. They left his story as a candidate in 2008, his speech in 2006 and i brought with me some of the greatest quotes. The politicaled equivalent of a rainbow, inspiring awe and ecstasy. Meredith area. Viera. Many people after your speech, they want to pronounce her name but they were moved our you, you tapped into something. He touched people. And it never stopped even during the years when he was president. Post. The washington between workouts he was photographed looking like the paragon of a new kind of president ial fitness, one geared toward winning swimsuit competitions. The sun lifted off chiseled pectorals, sculpted during four weightlifting sessions, a body toned by regular runs and basketball games. Eli faslow. Post. Shington we are accustom to the Obiwan Kenobi come. It is the opposite of flash and the entrances this the antithesis of rhetoric. Spare us the dead or alive bravado, the gates of help bluster, the drama of a 3m for phone call. A 3 00 a. M. Phone call. The competent man is king. N it sounds like the Committee Case ands staff did a great job. Staff he came a great job. Agreeing with your point that media do not Pay Attention to those numbers. One of the seasons that are Ari Fleischer provided. If you were hired as a what advice would you have for them about how to fix or adjust their coverage . Ari how much would they pay . You are expensive. The white i left house i deliberately wanted no politics. It is one of the reasons i enjoy politics. It has nothing to do with my livelihood. I will answer your question with a direct story. That is when i was on the ways and Means Committee in the 1990s my in 1997, salt 12 students came for a weeklong program. I talked with them about how news is made on capitol hill. At the end of my talk i said to the students, just out of curiosity, how many of you voted manyob dole and then how for bill clinton . Clinton first and 11 hands went up. I looked at the 12th person, only one of you voted for abdul and the 12th guy said no, i voted for ralph nader. Journalism will never fix itself until it addresses the selfselection issue of hope who goes into journalism. Give me a newsroom of love and Ronald Reagan voters and one patent get pat buchanan voter. The nature of news will change. Journalists cannot correct it within the newsroom. It is a matter of the type of person, the type of people who go into journalism. There is nothing nefarious about this. People who go into wall street are cut from a certain cloth, the same about journalism. You need ideological balance. You are need people who are able to think differently. You are missing what is going on in the heartland. Is it rang so long to journalistic years. They could not relate. Sonny perdue was named secretary of agriculture they put out a headline mocking perdu e for praying for rain. There was a drought in georgia. He prayed for rain. This is not uncommon in religious parts of america. Post rose to the level of a headline of a man praying. What is man what is wrong praying . The man prays. A consultant, how would you recommend covering the Trump Administration differently . What is being missed or what can be done more sharply . Better thanerage is i expected. I think that i believe President Trump, i think that he is a real threat. Normal,ot have conventional standards of how democrats respond to him or how him. Ress treat has been better than expected. I was concerned that important storylines would get dropped like russia. I understand when he tweets goinging, people are so back to the storylines that matter. I do think that there are, there is still a lot out there that is hidden in plain sight about how the white house operates that they need to think more critically about. If you look at some of the circumstances. The president reach waiting excellent fox reporting that is clearly classified material in the nsc lake. It is so absurd. Think about what that means. Someone in the white house or is leakingtion or nsc information to fox to justify tweetesidents false about president obama wiretapping him. You want to protect the president in an investigation, you want to make sure the president does not know all the details of the machinations of what youre trying to figure out before you come to the notlusion, so they are contaminated by that. I find it really hard to believe that anyone is protecting donald trump when he is asking questions about what kind of intel do these people, do the obama people have on me when we came in here. There is still not enough Critical Thinking at every new development about what that means that is happening now in that white house. The point of view of the people in the west wing, how do you do with them . The Obama White House did not have a lot of them. Definitely a tone set at the top. There was a lot of respect for everyone. White house did not have a lot of leaks. The Clinton White house, i would say that is more volatile. A little more fluid. And we had more leaks. Can say the best you about someone who leaks, they think they can control the outcome or they can protect their own reputation by leaking. This is a problem sean spicer has. If he does not have credibility at the podium and there is reason for why that is a problem , then everyone who is leaking has more credibility. The press will go, they do not feel like they are getting with a need from the podium or press secretary, they go to the white house or everywhere else and that is what you see with the proliferation of stories that are based on leaks. Obamas is where no drama served the president. The fact that he kept a calm hand and that spreads to the staff, the staff takes on the personality of the bus and if the boss likes pitted camps, the pitted camps act like pitted camps which is prime leakage for reporters. Obama had a good ship in the sense of no leaks. Changes toested two the format of the White House Press briefing. He would take it off of live tv and have the video and barcode embargoed. The briefing has become a tv show and it has lost its value as a serious briefing. The press secretary acts like a artistic and in a tv show. I used to figure out what my fight was an figure it out with a bite was and figure it with a little hand movement. It becomes a stage you act on. The cameras do the cutaways of the reporters. Weareporters used to jackets or ties and you notice the tv ones do. They know their editors are watching and their question will ake it onto the air. I would take the briefing off of camera and reporters, if there is an event like september 11, by mutual agreement, you can change the course and times that it should be live but i would work that out with the White House Correspondents association. This white house does not need to shake things up. It needs to call things down. This gas go back to the normal things that worked in this town which is talking to reporters, clue the men on what is going on, it taking questions in the least confrontational atmosphere as possible but the comrade camera makes it more confrontational than necessary. Youd told George Stephanopoulos that the democrats were just figuring out the right way to oppose this president and you said they should follow the rules but they should not follow convention. What is your thinking and how democrats can effectively oppose this demonstration administration . Are certain niceties that washington observes. Rules are what is in the what is in thed law. Not voting for gorsuch, they have to take whatever standard they can take to use whatever leverage they have to pressure at that time the response they were needing to get from the administration. They should be pushing on the lever they have to get a new position on russia. They there are a are a last bastion. They have to use whatever leverage they can even though it has never been done before. E for the young people who are in this room who watch on tv that can help them become you. What i learned is nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems and this too shall pass. Is true in that politics. You mail that leaked about myself from john podesta. I do not know and it is going to pass. What i learned in the Clinton Campaign, i thought i went in there thinking, i know how to do this. I have a ton of communications experience, i can tell a good story, i have control of the narrative. I realized i had very little ability in this environment today to do that but i knew what to do. I could handle whatever did happen. Even if you cannot control what does happen in todays environment, worry about how youre going to handle something. As we say goodbye here, you are at the top of the game, advising president s, personal sports leagues, show us your phone. Mike caught me on my old flip phone. I was at a yankee game and the camera showed me with my phone with my son sitting on my lap and made fun with me. Of me. This is i am a new yorker. I could not wait to move back when i was done. This is my last piece of washington i had, it is still a 202 phone number and it has direct dials to camp david, i am never getting rid of the sucker. We thank our audience online and thank you for coming out. Wseum will be our host. Thanks to Betsy Fischer and for the people behind the scenes. Ari fleischer. [applause] thanks so much. Are going to welcome the man who is currently holding the title white house or secretary. Sean spicer, before coming to the white house was to medications director for the Republican National committee. Abouto talk with sean life behind the podium and the Trump Administrations relationship with the press is a veteran of each of the cable news networks, and a great friend of the newseum. Susteren. [applause] greta good morning, everyone. Sean, good morning. Sean good morning. A lets start with yesterday. The holocaust situation, question. Your thoughts day. Today. Made a mistake. There is no other way to say it. I got into a topic i should not have and i screwed up. I hope people understand that we all make mistakes. I hope i show that i understand soughthat and i saw peoples forgiveness because i screwed up. I hope each person can understand that part of existing is understanding when you do something wrong, if you own up to it, you do it, you let people know. And i did. Obviously there is to takeaways. One is that it is a very holy week for the jewish people and christian people and this is not to make a gaffe or mistake like this is reprehensible. Compoundsks, this that kind of mistake. Second of all, thats first, painful to know i did Something Like that. That was obviously not my intention and to know when you screw up that you possibly offended a lot of people, and so i would ask for folks forgiveness to understand i should not have tried to make a comparison. There is no comparison comparing atrocities and it is a solemn time for so many folks. That is obviously a very difficult thing personally to deal with because you know that a lot of people who do not know you wonder why you would say that. Foremost. Rst and secondly, from a professional standpoint, it is obviously disappointing. The president had an unbelievable couple of weeks. He took very Decisive Action in syria. He made tremendous progress with president xi. Your job as the spokesperson is president she actions and accomplishments. He has had an unbelievable successful couple of weeks and when you are distracting from that message of accomplishment and your job is to be the exact opposite on a professional level , it is disappointing. I let the president down. A a personal level and professional level, that will go down is not a very good day in my history. Greta did the president say anything to you last night . Sean i did not talk to him. Not get into private conversations. This is my mistake, my bad that i needed to fix. I am not going to get into any additional conversations but i will say that this was mine, mine to own and mind to apologize for and mind to ask for forgiveness for. Greta do you think the press was fair to you or gunning for you . I do not think it is monolithic. Some folks have an agenda. Some folks probably root for you but there is a spectrum. Is the surprise in the job for you . You were at the republican headquarters area and what is the surprise in this job . Sean i think the level of i would not say it is a surprise but the magnitude to which it exists is fairly unbelievable. No matter what you do, what you wear. It kind of gets amplified to a degree that you could not imagine. The prioritiesat are about what gets covered and iat does not get covered, think and the obsession with some of the process which i understand. I have been doing this for a long time. I understand process and i understand ups and downs but when you look at the issues that are our world and country are dealing with, sometimes the a position with who is up and who is down one week or who said what in a meeting versus the substance of what is being taken to improve the lives of the American People or protect us or to deal with world incidents is intriguing. Youa do you have a sense work for the president , the white house, or the American People, who do you think you are working for . Sean to some degree it is all. Greta you are in a position of advocating. Won anhe president election. The American People voted. I ultimately answer to him. It is his agenda that is being pursued. That is the case of anyone in a elected office. You are elected and you pursue an agenda. You feel that you communicate it to those people are accountable to those people that you brought it up during the campaign or not. First and foremost the president my job to go out there and help amplify and discuss what he is doing and why hes doing it and the accomplishments that he has. How much access you had to the president . That is not a problem. Everyday and spend every time everyday . I get up around 5 00, 5 15, starting email and then usually try to do some kind of exercise. Again, we are monitoring the issue of the day going over what the events are in meetings early in the 7 00 hour and then basically figuring out what we are advancing as well as with the income is in the issues playing hot, what issues they think will overtake the day in the events happening and how we will communicate those. I assume you get complaints in the media. What are the complaints you get from the media . Is always an issue with access. They want more. Access to your access to the president. It doesnt matter. There is nothing that they dont want access to. So that is probably first and foremost, what they want. And obviously an Administration Officials, the president , you name it. Other complaints in the press . Theres been one or two. Im trying to see how to facilitate a better relationship between the press and the white house. Its naturally combative because no matter what the administration or what the party is, the press is always going to want more of what it is and that the nature of the relationship. There are some things to your question to the advent of your scenario, deserted most recent Republican Press secretary directly at the republican side, that there is an element of being first in trying to get things on social media, et cetera that is change the dynamic by which that room in a relationship exists. People would much prefer not to have Anonymous Sources. I think theres a difference. There are people on a policy level who are implementing that are helping to shape policy. Because of the nature of what they do come in a dont want their names out there not because theyre hiding that because they are there to serve the people and the government, but when you can bring someone into the Briefing Room, everyone can see who they are. Thats a much different thing than well get a phone call to say we have five backgrounds are safe bets they you cross the street the wrong way. The question is theres no accountability. We dont know who they are inside the white house or outside the white house. That is very difficult to respond to because you are shooting and almost ago. We try to minimize the use and i shooting at almost a ghost. We try to minimize the use and i wouldnt say Anonymous Sources, but background sources to make sure that people can see the individual is now, but for a lot of folks in government, they are there to serve the American People, to work really hard to work on a particular issue and they dont necessarily want to have their name and family particularly exposed. Ive heard the complaints coming generically from the white house, people in the white house complaining about the overuse of Anonymous Sources by the media and members of the media rolling their eyes thinking that some of the people were saying this on the very people making statements wanting to be anonymous. Again, theres a big difference. We get hit with a lot of this. 18 people said the following our following and we wont tell you who any of them are. What i think a lot of times happen is they would say i know someone who knows someone whose brother jimmy is friends with them on facebook. Thats not really a source. When youre basically defending, thats not somebody in the room. We will have an event in the oval office or in a particular room and therell be four or five people there and we get a call from a reporter that says we have six sources. There were not six people there. Its hard to imagine the talk to people who talk to people. Weve all seen a game of telephone. If you do it among children, youll get the reason we teach the game is to show how the message will vary by the time it gets two or three people deep is the question is how reliable is that source . When you can get four or five people that say we were in the room that didnt happen and they go yeah, i know you have four people actually cared going to go on the record but were not going to accept because we have two people who knew two people who follow them on twitter. You have to weigh that difference of who the sources are and i dont think thats getting as much of a play. Is it a twoway street, the president will treat things like for instance that is being surveilled by president obama. We dont get the sources im not but yet the rather dramatic assertions. Again, theres a question about how this happens. We asked for an investigation through appropriate channels. A lot of that material is that a classified after the bomb was dropped. Essentially after the treat. Essentially after the tweet. The tweet came first. You understand not. How classified information is handled as a whole separate discussion. I think that weve seen and used in both bipartisan outrage on this. There is some level to which classified information is being shared with journalists and others who are not cleared and that presents a danger to our country. While journalists want to toil in this and people want to read a sensational story, theres a reason its classified because it threatens the safety of the United States and their sources being protected. We should be applauding the leaks of classified information. The president s right is right to call this out as a major concern. You have seen people on both sides of the aisle called this out. It is concerning one of classified information and sources being used to perpetuate a narrative. If you think about it, it ties their hands when you go to respond. Just because you claim you know something classified, you can then we cant fight back on it because it is classified because thats engaging in a conversation is a difficult spot. Not to belabor a point, but this is a city where a lot of these are classified they dont need to be classified. For decades theres been over classification in the city. Not an insignificant one. On matters of National Security when youre talking about sources and methods and the use of certain things for inappropriate purposes, that is not an over classification. President says hes going to continue to tweet, and i imagine that complicates your job somewhat. Thats the default narrative but also when you realize he has an ability for all the channels he has over 100 Million People he can reach out to. Some of the neatest frustration as he does have this direct line to the American People or he can communicate accomplishments, and push back to false narratives and false stories that frustrate people who want to control that. Another way to look at it as he dropped a stinkbomb essentially and 140 characters or less and then leaves and theres no sort of followup and no giveandtake. I think for a lot of people, especially outside of thing, they have yearned for an authentic voice that is not tried to script everything perfectly as a lot of politicians have done. Even if you disagree with policy, one of the things people give a higher mark for his mark for his keeping his word. I would argue if you look at her engagement with the president in terms of myself and him and other members of the staff, we are engaging outside groups and coalitions and individuals, unions, members of congress and an extremely robust way, so there is followup, there is a discussion not in a vacuum that its occurring. Last night he gave an interview and i read the story in which he said the u. S. Is not going to go into syria. Did you say that . I did. One of the things hes also said he sees not going to telegraph his plans. He is not just telegraphed to assad and i said and how you reconcile that. I think that is specific to ground troops. One is that doesnt mean howre going to deal with crisis as a deal with isis as a whole. If we have to deal with isis and was into syria thats one thing. Go in and occupying syria, the express purpose of regime change is something that the president has been very clear on throughout the campaign. I think to sort of try and extrapolate that, this is something he talked about well into the campaign the use of force and use of military. That shouldnt be a shocker. Thats something hes been talking about a while. So assad shouldnt take the comments that we are not going to go to syria were not doing another airstrike. Absolutely not. 100 . The president said in the same interview that should they continue to use gas especially against children and babies that the president will keep all options on the table. Make no mistake about it, the president showed last thursday night that he will use decisive, justified action to right wrongs. Secretary of state tillerson is in russia today in moscow. Do you know if he is going to meet with putin . I will leave it at that. Assuming he were to meet with putin, hypothetically, what would be his mission . What is the message . Think theres going to be too folds two folds. He will communicate the same message which is, i think theres a shared interest in the region, that we have a National Security concern that should align with their set with their National Security it would have been party to an International Agreement on the use of Nuclear Weapons Nuclear Weapons chemical weapons. Russia should live up to its obligations. Russia is an island. Its russia, north korea, syria and iran. That is not a group you want to be associated with that. Russia is the only nonfailed state. If you are russia you are isolating yourself by aligning , and not calling out the actions that you and he specifically said he would not engage in. What are the consequences. I think we had a consequence. Putin says,today should this meeting occur and he says ok, i get it, no chemical weapons but i can help us odd with his barrel bombs and Everything Else because i like my base in syria and meanwhile he continues to and annihilate civilians and push refugees out of the country. I think first and foremost we have a shared interest in the stability of the region and defeating isis. Russia is in syria. I think we can all agree defeating isis is important. I think with respect to regime change, we cant possibly see a stable, peaceful syria with assad in charge. We can have that discussion, i will let the secretary of state have that discussion, but i think we have projected our interests and concerns very clearly. They are toward the coast of north korea. Kim jong un on has had his provocative words but they have had five Nuclear Tests in multiple missile test. What is the endgame . Are we just waiting to see if he does something on the birthdate of his grandfather or what is the program . We need to get the World Community in agreement, particularly china who can play an important role. This is almost like russia with isis, but we have a shared interest with china of making sure we dont have a nuclear north korea. We do have a nuclear north korea. They have a Nuclear Weapons and 20,000 Artillery Weapons on the border. Im not going to get into discussions about their nuclear capability. Its in our shared interest to not have the capability to fly and launch rockets with nuclear capability, and i think the president had very productive with president xi last week, and i think we need to continue to make sure the World Community stand strong with us, which they have to make sure that we all understand the threat that north korea poses. I dont pretend to have the answer to north korea, but that is the same thing we heard from president obama, president bush 43, president clinton, no one has been able to Deter North Korea and it keeps inching forward. What is different now . I would go back to last thursday night. We had six plus years of the last administration drawing redlines and not doing anything. I think with north korea, as i mention the president had productive talks with president from china and we will see where those talks land. What can china do it . This is not a discussion that is one that you have an open setting. I believe that the president and a lot of the cabinet had productive talks with china. There is a lot of stuff that happened diplomatically to continue to isolate north korea and to undermine their ability to possess and launch Nuclear Capabilities that threaten us. We have historically had very little intelligence on whats going on. But, if china is the purse for north korea. If china were to set up money to it,ere to cut off money to i think they had no problem just starving his people. I think china plays an economic and political role of influence in north korea, but we will see. I think this president has clearly shown to the country in and in the world that there will be a change in how u. S. Interests are pursued and we will have to see how that shakes out. Tax reform. Are we going to get it this year . I know the president and a lot of members of Congress Want to do that. Why are they doing this now . Why cant they multitask . They are multitasking. [laughter] weve talked about this the last couple weeks. The meetings we have had internally annexed generally. Internally and externally. Weve met with the finance committee and leadership, its interesting how a couple weeks ago we were rushing too quickly and the other day on multiple occasions we talk about how her laying out a systematic plan to engage folks. Tax reform hasnt happened since 1986. Im not saying its easy. Im just asking where are we. I think we have been talking about this. Ive probably been asked about this multiple times in the briefing and laid out where we are. Weve had internal discussions and were engaging with stakeholders and congress. We have gone 30 years without good tax reform. On the corporate side we have a big problem with our Corporate Tax rate to maintain and grow businesses. They are fleeing our country. You are seeing the progress on the regulatory front. He has made tremendous progress. He can do those by executive order. And he has. But this has to get up capitol hill in order to move. Absolutely but i think on the regulatory reform, i think it gets overlooked and whether its the automotive sector, the steel or coal and mining sector, we are seeing progress. People are coming back to the United States talking about investments they will make the cut i think his accomplishments and actions are creating a Better Business climate for them to be here the other pieces the tax piece. I am more critical of congress on this. Congress is the engine so we will be there by the end of the year . That is the goal. We have to make sure we give relief to middleclass americans. By the end of the year there will be a huge revenue shift one way or another. Do you expect it to be effective 2017 . Any idea. That will be part of the discussion. To get ahead of when that reform will go in place, whether its fiscal year 2017 or 18, that will be part of the discussion. Trump spoke about steve bannon last night and it appears there is some sort of feud going on in the white house, theres something between jerry fisher and steve bannon. Whats going on. I think a couple things. I think a lot of it is overblown, what you see in the media, he brought together a talented team of successful individuals whether its business, academics, government and theres a lot of opinions, but frankly its the same team that had a very successful campaign. I think sometimes we see that spill over into the public and thats unfortunate the cars that is unfortunate, because there will be, on policy issues, a very spirited debate. I think thats healthy for the president that hes not getting a monolithic group of advice that says you should only do this. He gets a lot of opinions and ideas and policy shifts that help guide his ultimate decisionmaking. Thats a healthy thing. I think what we bring together is talented individuals. There are a lot of things being done to improve the government. There will be spirited debates. That is a healthy way for the president to get guidance and make decisions. Does the media get in the way . Is this a distraction . In what way . We report about the feuds. There are important people in the white house. We have the president s two top aides seemingly having disagreements. I think from a process standpoint, whether someone is getting along or not getting along, it doesnt make anyones life safer or better. To your question, the focus is on what are we doing, to make the country better to make it safer, to strengthen it. What are we doing on tax reform . Where is it . Who is involved in the process in . What are we doing to make our country more competitive . Whether or not you live in california or connecticut, your focus is on am i doing ok . Am i able to help my family and kids . Is my job safe . Is the business i am working for growing . Am i able to get a raise . Can i contribute to my 401 k . On my streets safe . Are my is my country safe . Those are the things that most americans are worried about. What am i going to do about Health Care Premiums . Can i keep up . Can i see a doctor . Those are the issues most americans are waking up and going back and forth in the white house. I understand there will be a little palace intrigue but i think the proportion ive seen of how it works is a little out of whack. Whats your wish list from the media. What do you want to change . We only have one minute 50 seconds. It doesnt, in all honesty, the media has a job to do. We have a very robust media both left and right leaning and i think as long as we have a healthy and robust media, im fine. I wish more people would focus on the policy and get it right. This is the beauty of living in a free country. I think we want a media that takes their time and gets their stories right and doesnt worry about being first but worries about being right. How much do you like the job. I love it. That is probably one of the things people say all the time. I truly do believe its an honor to have this job. Its a privilege. If you dont believe it so, you shouldnt be here. Nobodys going to the dinner. The president s not going, the members of the white house are not going. I just dont think this is the appropriate year to go. Why . [laughter] lets go back two questions before that. I dont think we should take it. Going to a dinner where they should fake it. Going to a dinner and sitting around like everything is fine is not an appropriate year to do this. I think they should have their dinner, and i know they put a lot of time into it and thats great, but i dont think sitting there and watching celebrities walk by is somehow an indication of how much you care about or respect the press or the First Amendment, i think they should have their dinner but i think we have a right to say this isnt appropriate to go and it sends wrong signal and if things get better we will attend next year. Next year you will go as my guest . [laughter] the time is up. Nice to see you sean. Sean spicer. [applause] thanks very much. That was great. Day, our next guests go to succeed hundred pennsylvania avenue to tell the world about what is going on it when honored to welcome a group of White House Correspondents and our from fox, brett baer news. [applause] thanks everybody. Good morning. How are you . Good to see you. We have a great panel for you. They are coming out ahead of q. I will introduce them altogether and we are excited to talk about covering the president , covering this white house, first on the end, jim acosta, senior White House Correspondent for cnn. Spent 2016 covering the Trump Campaign number primaries. He covered the Obama Administration and around the world. He has been on the receiving end of more trump tweets and Heated Exchange with the president. Julie pace chief White House Correspondent of the Associated Press since the getting of president obamas second term. He joined in 2009 after covering. Bamas 28 2008 campaign she has been turning up scoops with the ap ever since. She serves as a board member of the white house respondents association. We have trolley spearing we have charlie spearing. He came to breitbart in 2014. He started covering the white house during the Obama Administration. Next, the White House Correspondent for nbc news. Nbc frequently in the front row of the Briefing Room going back with the menus assault, sean spicer. The man you just saw, sean spicer. She spent 2016 reporting from the trail of Hillary Clintons campaign. Has a long history, going back to his days with newsday covering and interviewing donald trump, has some history there. Last week, he and his colleagues conducted a headline making interview in the oval office with the president. He joined the times a few months ago from lyft where he was just from politico where he was the chief correspondent. Lets give them one round of applause. [applause] all right, glenn. The press briefings have been pretty interesting, the fact that you have a saturday night live character is a factor. Talk about covering this particular white house and the challenges in doing so. I would like to congratulate , whatever newseum they put into seans coffee called the things down. Calmoed things down. And jim and ine were talking about this, the tone was set the day after the inauguration when Shawn Spencer came out and decided to great the media to berate the media about the size of the crowd. As bizarre as that was, that wasnt the salient issue. My problem is he came in, shouted at everybody and refused to take questions. That was a fundamental violation which is not about questions, it is about answers. I have heard sean in a lot of different the news. I think he was very subdued today. I have seen a diminishment of that room over the last three months. The Obama Administration fought to cool it down after the press secretary who would make news from the podium with great regularity. I think what we have seen is a series of missteps. Ands entirely appropriate unbiased to say that the level of information, quality of information we have received is not up to the standard of what we believe ought to be in the Briefing Room. In terms of i would put this out to mr. Spicer and his staff, we have been on the receiving end many times, lectures about what we need to do professionally in terms of dealing with our process. I would encourage him to do the same. Julie, let me ask you. When i was White House Correspondent, a lot of information came outside of the white house. Same logistics . Absolutely. One of the things you learn when you cover the white house is there is information you get from inside but the information you are really after is from outside. It is something it took a while for me to grasp when i first started covering the beat. It was covering just coming back to the beat coming back to the beat, two of my resolutions were to go to the briefing less and spend more time after outside of the white house. You get a lot more depth in your coverage when youre talking, not just to the communication shop, but to who is talking to them on capitol hill, who is talking to them in the lobby world. One of the great things about covering President Trump is he talks to a ton of people. The traditional people in widengton but this really range of people who are his friends and associates from new york, maralago, his business world. For reporters, it gives us a great advantage to not just get to know the people who are surrounding him every day inside the white house, but to really get perspective about him from outside. Kirsten . I agree with everything that julie is saying. Some of the best information i have gotten comes from his friends who dont necessarily ive in bc live in d. C. The thing that makes covering this white house really striking is the amount of energy this president has, and that requires a 24 7 news cycle anyway that is on a whole new anyway that is on a whole new a. M. , 11 00 a. M. , and we are often reporting out our stories overnight. Literally until midnight, 1 00 a. M. In the morning. You always have to be prepared when youre Walking Around that white house, because he sometimes invites reporters into the oval office it i was invited in for an impromptu meeting with him. You have to be on your toes to make sure you are getting the best information, pushing the headlines forward. I mentioned some of that back and forth. Has that involved evolved . I have not been invited to any private meetings . Perhaps you could of figure that out. We had that his conference where we had that back and forth back in january which was the only News Conference during the transition. The president elect only had one News Conference on january 11. Later, i was positioned on the north lawn of the white house, right in the middle. The president and first lady walked right past me. I asked the question andy answered it and he answered it. He knows television. He is not going to miss a moment if it is serving his purpose. Just a just just to quickly go over that, our News Organization was being attacked on the day. We were being called fake news. I felt our organization deserved which is this idea that the Trump Campaign was having contact with russian officials, russian intelligence during the campaign. Things have evolved since then. You may have noticed there was the one News Conference where he and i went back in forth eight minutes and he asked if i was akin to alex acosta. They did happen. To some extent, he enjoys the sparring. We are told we live in this nothing matters world. We are in this posttruth world. I dont think they could be further from the truth speaking truth to power means everything. From the truth. Speaking truth to power means everything. My colleagues here try to do it everyday. Would you do it the same way again in a i would do it the same way again. If our News Organization would you do the same way again . I would do it the same way again. If our News Organization really quickly, that night i heard from a news executive from another network and said you did a great job today defending your network. I texted back, i was defending all of us, because it could be your network tomorrow through the s charlie, you cover the Obama Administration, inside the white house. Breitbart is a Different Organization in that you have previous ties with someone who is inside the white house, steve bannon. You have to separate that, i suppose, and how you cover the white house. Talk about the unique challenges. During the campaign, the president made a lot of promises to our readers. Made a lot of promises that we feel it is promised it is important to hold accountable. He talked about immigration, building a wall, helping our thats just helping our helping our vets. We were one of the outlets that took him at his word and published everything he said as it was. We didnt suggest that maybe he was lying or fake. We have a bigger responsibility to . To tackle his work and hold him accountable. Is it unique, this white house, in trying to get information for you . Do you have more access . That is funny, because the frustrating part is when readers or when people read their Breitbart News website and assume that everything is coming from steve bannon dispatch. I dont get phone calls from him. He is a useless source in many cases. He talks to the New York Times and other outlets more than he talks to Breitbart News. Steve bannon is pretty open on who he is. Certainly we are going to cover him as a member of the white house. If he strays from anything that our readers believe in, we are going to hold him accountable. You heard him talk about the coverage of policy and policy decisions versus the process. Here in washington, we get a lot of behind the scenes about who is up and down. What is going to happen and there could be many things that happen inside his white house. How do you balance out that as far as coverage . Dispute theall, i notion that the process is not policy. Process is policy. That manifested itself clearly and sean start meeting started making the argument having to do with the devin nunes to the campus of the white house where he kept saying as we were asking questions, really important questions about who he was meeting, who authorized the meetings, did the president know . Sean reduce that to us asking questions on how people were dressed, what gate they came in. It behooves us from his perspective of being a flach to make a differentiation between process and policy. I started off my career and policy. Off my career in policy. It has been a putt it has been an interest for long time. I would like to engage members of this administration and i find it difficult to find people to engage at that level. In your phone, the process with important, because they have violated issues of process and in some instances, i dont think they fully understand what the appropriate processes. Were you surprised when the president called and done interviews with maggie and you and picked up the phone and called . No, i think he gets props. To me, this is something i dont think he gets enough credit for. It was funny, maggie and i and a bunch of other people who cover the white house come at it with a crucible of new york city health. Ive said that to me having covered the Obama Administration, this seems more like a national the new white house. Covering giuliani was not dissimilar. When he had that amazing press conference as president , a lot of my colleagues who covered the white house as the white house were like, what the hell is this . And i was like this is aimed at conference. Ess we talk about trump barack had the name of six or seven reporters that he would call and he never diverged from that. You would ask him 32nd questions he i recall in charlotte would ask him a 30 second question and he would give a 28 minute answer. I think in general he is much more willing to engage and he deserves credit. What about access . I think that glenn is right, there is this perception that our access is being taken away. Because the president does reach out to reporters at times direct way, in that directly, in that sense he sort of differentiates himself. I never experienced that in the five years i covered the Obama Administration. At the same time i think the challenge becomes trying to delve more deeply into some of the policy issues and trying to get direct answers to our questions. You talked about the issue of process and that speaks to the very underpinnings of the white house it self. We have been following this backandforth between steve bannon and Jared Kushner, and the reason that matters is because you look at the debate over syria. We know that is something that banning considers himself a nationalist and does not necessarily support. Those types of discussions matter. I think it becomes dangerous to downplay the significance. I am a guy who covers the process and i get that. I was just going off the sean spicer comment as he was leaving with greta. I want to go into the campaign and if that factors in your mind how to deal with the white house because a lot of us missed what was happening on the campaign and did not see it at the very end that it was going to happen. Does that factor into how you cover the white house now . I think it does, and one of my regrets from the campaign is that we did not take our anchors out with us on the campaign trail, or some of our executives. Perhaps i have post campaign stress disorder. We were talking about access, i am not sure access the issue so much as attitude toward the news media. The president , to some extent, has an unhealthy attitude toward the news media and i think i am being diplomatic and i say this. He referred to the news media as the dishonest news media, he called us liars and crooks and thieves and i cannot think of all of the other names. There were chants of going after cnn that he would policy for and allow the crowd to continue those chance. Chants. He did take my question, are you concerned about undermining american confidence in the news . We need people to believe what is being said in the mainstream news media. I think the president has to understand that he is doing real damage to what we do. He is doing real damage to the First Amendment in this country when he refers to the news media as the enemies of the people. I know some of that is production. He is from 5th avenue so there is a little bit of broadway. Maybe glenn has more insight than i do. I think words matter, and those kinds of attacks have to be taken seriously. I have talked to people inside the administration, why cant the president lay all of some of lay off of some of this fake news and enemies of the people stuff . And they say, what do you guys do and throw it back in your face. At some point we will need a detente between this administration and the news media or else it will get worse and worse. We need people to trust us, and i think we have been acting in a way that garners that trust but the president does not like bad stories about him and this is how he responds. We have got to figure a way around it. What is so striking is there is the public perception, the Public Comments the president makes and then what actually happens behind the scenes. I think most of us would agree, we have pretty good working relationships with trump officials. It is so critical to underscore the point, it is not just about the backandforth between the media and the president , it is about protecting our democracy. The point that jim makes about our First Amendment, i think sometimes that gets lost in the public debate. It becomes a fight between two sides, the press versus the president and that is not what the debate is about. It is about making sure we protect the First Amendment. On the campaign there was always this talk, this is where he is going to turn. This is where he is going to be different. Do you sense that President Trump is going to somehow evil evolve in the way he handles this or is this how he is . This is how he is. He has lived a decade in the spotlight and there are things about him that never are going to change. We should not expect that is going to happen because he moves on to a new phase of his political career. At the same time, i think you are seeing a process in the white house where, i dont know if they are fully accepting at this point but they are learning you do get treated differently as president. Trump has relationships that come from being on reality television, that come from the business world, from the gossip pages of new york. That is how different different from how you are covered as president. You are held to different standards, and i think that is ok. I think that has been a learning curve for them. Sometimes im surprised when i hear from white house officials about what actually bothers trump in his coverage. Often it is not that stories are negative, it is the tone that a question was asked with. That bothers him. It is this feeling that he does not have the relationship with the Washington Press corps that maybe he had with the new york press corps. If you are waiting for a policy evolution or personality evolution with trump, get over it, it is not going to happen. Charlie, does the serious straight syria strike change the dynamic and how is it perceived at your organization . Certainly, the syria strike was kind of a surprise for a lot of our readers but i think we covered it in a way that made sense, focusing how it was a little different than the America First Campaign Message he shared. I think in hindsight and the president even said, reassured people who are concerned about our Foreign Policy, he reassured them we are not going into syria. I just want to refer to his comments about the media. The president made these comments about the biased media and fake news, he did not do it to denigrate the press. He did it because it was popular among his base. His base has a real problem with the way the media is perceived and i think he was in a large way, playing to the crowd, something conservatives have complained about for a long time. But you think that he has gotten to the point where he knows he is the president , he won, he does not have to keep going back to the election . [laughter] the campaign is over . Do you sense that he is fighting that pr battle still day today . They oday daytoday. We have an armada, what he calls an armada in north korea. I certainly hope he does. I think charlie is 100 right on the whole issue of it eating something be something that works with the crowd. Trump refers to people as customers, and i think he views it is a different mindset than we have had for a president ever. I think it is fascinating because we think of him, and he has held himself to being a businessman when in fact he is a salesman. Having covered new york real estate, you have got to sell the hell out of it. He is a somebody who has a remarkably sophisticated gear for the electorate that he was able to win over. He understands his capacity to sort of calibrate the kinds of, this balancing act that charlie was describing between what the base wants and what necessities the presidency demands. That is probably the most interesting dynamic, how does he reconcile what he has to do with the base versus as president . The syria thing is such a crucible. He does like to be liked, we have to put that out there. The fact that this syria strike was well received on the left and right largely, and he was getting props from senators who do not usually give him props, does that somehow, do you think, change his outlook on how he is going to deal with foreignpolicy decisions Going Forward . Possibly. I think he is the first person to tell you he got broad, bipartisan support for the strike. It was a real turning point for him because he had a number of rocky weeks and days leading up to that. A lot of people saw that as the moment when he really started to absorb those responsibilities as president. Based on my conversations with Administration Officials, they have acknowledged there is a transition going on with him, that he is starting to realize everything that worked on the campaign does not necessarily work in the white house. I think the syria strike was emblematic of that, the fact that it was very calibrated speaks to his internal conflict with engaging in some of these foreign situations. But absolutely, i think you are starting to see a shift in that regard of absorbing these responsibilities. I do not think he will change who he is but he is starting to accept some of the reality of being commander in chief. I think this is important for people to know about trump. His interest in knowing the realtime reaction to his decisions is so unique. President s have covered in the past are aware of their polling and aware generally of how they are being perceived, but trump wants to know minute to minute how he is being received. He watches it on television. He reads it in the papers. When you talk to some republicans, this worries them a bit because he is going to find himself in position as president to make a decision that he and his advisers think is right but they know will be unpopular. It is inevitable, it will happen. Where does he fall on that . Does he have the capacity to make a decision that is the right one even though the shortterm reaction will be negative . Can he deal with that and handle . It leaves people nervous, especially on foreignpolicy when the actual outcome is not known for years. I was going to say, if you look back at the president s tweets from 2013 where he was saying, dont go into syria, the serious strike is an indication that he can change, he can change his mind on something, and that is not a bad thing. Sometimes when you are president of the United States you have to stop the campaign and start the governing. My understanding is that he was deeply affected by the images of those children after they were gassed. You have to give credit where credit is due. I am not saying this will be the best policy decision moving forward down the road, but when you have what we have had in washington where war crimes should be responded to and perhaps in a measurable way, on balance it seems he made the right decision. There is no sense he will change the tweeting. No. Live by the tweet, die by the tweet. He has not died yet. I do wonder at some point, i would love to talk to him at the end of his administration, what he thinks about these tweets. Honestly, they have gotten him in so much trouble. This issue of tweeting at that president Obama Wiretapped him, going back to watching spicer, one of the most excruciating things we have had to watch over the last couple of weeks is the white house trying to explain and justify the president s tweet, which is a misstatement of the facts that president obama did not wiretap trump tower. He says, we are talking about surveillance, it is a surveillance thing. Cnn is reporting that by talking to folks on both sides of the aisle and the intelligence communities and their staffers that no, the intelligence tells us at this point there was not even any unlawful surveillance going on and that susan rice did not do anything wrong, or conduct yourself in an unlawful way. These verbal gymnastics, i can understand why yesterday happened. The exhaustion, the level of exhaustion he must be feeling having to deal with this president who is just sort of unwieldy and difficult to corral. It must be a draining experience. If you wake up and see a tweet that changes your entire day, that is interesting in 140 characters or less. Talk about that for a second, about covering a president who has his own printing press. [laughter] it is a unique thing. Anybody . I just wanted to mention, i think what upsets a lot of our readers is when you hear the media be so willing to exonerate using right as jim just susan rice, as jim just did, and they take a hostile attitude to the president. A lot of our readers see that is coming from one side. That is why they are comfortable with the president describing the media as the Opposition Party. They do not know too many of the president s supporters, and i think there is a difference in tone coming from the Mainstream Media versus breitbart. When you say i just let susan rice off, i did not let her off the hook. I doubt with her a couple of years ago where i did not let her off the hook. When the president recently tweeted that barack Obama Wiretapped trump tower, it is like watergate, do you think in the back of his mind he was thinking susan rice unmasked people and that is what i was thinking about . It seems the white house is fumbling around in the dark for a justification for these tweets which are just erroneous. My question is, why doesnt he just withdraw the tweet and the accusation . We have not gotten to that point. Why cant the folks on the conservative side of the news media see the facts as they are . Dont you agree, charlie, those tweets on their face are just wrong . The president was not wiretapped at trump tower by barack obama. There is an element of truth that comes from his tweets, and he was basing his tweet i am not talking about an element of the truth. I am talking about the truth. Why cant we just have the truth . [applause] and as much want to go after cnn and beat up on cnn, which your readers do and your side of the aisle does, i was with steve bannon where he referred to us as the Opposition Party. We are not the Opposition Party, we are just trying to get at the truth. When you have a side of the news media that insist cnn is out to get the president or certain people in this country, it does a tremendous disservice to all americans. I do not think it is american to go after areas of the news media. Brett knows because brett is a pro who does a great newscast every night. I watch him. I am not watching wolf blitzer. You can dvr. And i probably have. We have got to get to a point where we are not demonizing each other and cutting each others throats because we do not agree with one another. [applause] i am not trying to play to the audience here. I grew up in this city. People say, or member the days of Ronald Reagan and tip oneill . That actually did exist. Brett and i are friendly with each other, and i have a tremendous amount of respect for carl cameron and fox news. I would love for all of us to get away from this day where we are just ripping each other apart because of political differences. I think good people can disagree on the issues and it is time for good people to disagree in a civil way about how the news is covered in this country. I would love it to start down the street at pennsylvania avenue and i would love to see it in places like breitbart, and perhaps our folks can do a better job at that as well. I think there is sort of a go along, get along, everyone gets along in d. C. Climate is what americans are tired of. They are tired of the stories that everybody is hanging out and going out to dinner and partying. That happens with republicans and democrats too. It is not as if reporters are hanging out only with him across. But it is part of the establishment, part of the swamp. The Trump Supporters were verys were very sick of. Charlie, the campaign is over. The best party i have been to in a year is the daily caller christmas party. I have a question about the president and his tweet. I think it creates a climate where the media is even more important, because the president has a platform as president obama did. President obama was very effective at trying to go around the media using twitter, facebook, white house produced videos, and present their side of the story. We probably could have been more aggressive as a press and making sure we were instantly coming in with fact checks and information to try to bolster what the actual facts were, not just what the white house spin was. I think we have stepped in and done a better job under President Trump. That doesnt happen without the press. The facts that get added on to the tweets, the context that gets added on, that does not happen without us. We play an incredibly vital role even when we have a president that has a huge platform. Glenn . Two data points. He is the least popular president at this point in his presidency, in modern polling history. A couple of reputable polls have him at 35 to 37 . At the very best, rasmussen has him peeking occasionally above 50 . These are abysmal numbers. There is no honeymoon. One thing you hear focus groups, primarily republican focus groups, they will tell you almost uniformly his supporters want him to tweet less. It is an incredibly powerful tool if he is able to evolve, and in the wake i notice the subtle difference, in the wake of the infamous wiretap saturday morning tweet, he has chilled it out a little bit and used his account more strategically. This i think is the overarching question of the presidency and a question that will manifest itself in its twitter account first. It has been my experience and the experience of other historians, the presidency shapes the president , not the other way around. I want to see how he fall. Evolves. He is not going to apologize, it is not the guys style, but his contrition is cloaked. What i want to see and i think we have seen it in the personnel roster of the west wing, and charlie knows this because his readers are probably hating it we have seen a normalization of the staffing of the white house. We have a National Security officer who was essentially handpicked by senator cotton, who was a conventional choice with a lot of conventional, militaristic, oldtime republican views. You have madison, the same old. You have steve bannon, whether he is your source or not, perhaps being moved to the margins. It was extraordinary yesterday when he told the New York Post he only knew bannon for a weekend. [laughter] if that is not writing, that is spray paint on the wall. Tillerson, picked essentially by gaetz and condi rice and others. He is chattering willynilly over the past 48 hours. Everything he says is incomplete variance with donald trump and what he said on Foreign Policy, which is perhaps why he wasnt speaking. For your readership, and that is the core of this mans support, the white house is moving in a much more conventional way. You could say, we have had three months of shakedown and this is moving in a fairly conventional republican direction. I do not want to overstate that because he is a really unpredictable guy but i think things are moving in that direction. I think that is absolutely right i think in terms of the tweets, this is the way the president feels he can have a direct channel to the American People. I was talking to one of his top officials who said one of the reasons why he reaches out to individual reporters is because he feels like it is the only way he can be heard, and cut through all of the noise. That is not to excuse some of the disinformation that jim described, but one of the things we are seeing why he will never give up twitter and i cannot underscore this enough we covered the Obama Administration and we had fights with them, not letting our cameras in to shoot a meeting. We would have a knockdown, drag down fight with the Obama Administration because of this very issue. Yes, it is important for the president to have a direct line to the American Public but it is important for the press to be part of that process as well. I do not think you will ever see him give up tweeting. His tweets have been more policybased to some extent, particularly in the wake of syria and dealing with north korea as well. I do not think we will ever see him give that up but i think it will be kind of an ongoing debate, more press access. I would like to point out he has done i think eight interviews, six with Fox News Channel overall. I would point out that my request and Chris Wallaces request and shannon brands request, we are still waiting. So are ours, brett. And i know yours are too. If you could put in a good word. Maybe you can with me. I think we have a responsibility as the press to not throw up every tweet on the air in real time. [applause] to sort of process what is in the tweet, what does it mean to fact check it. I think we are having those types of discussions in our newsroom, how to better do that. What is something that we are not covering enough, from a White House Point of view or a white house relationship point of view . I think there is kind of a long list. If you look at a situation like north korea, which is getting covered on a daily basis in terms of the president s morning china, the president is warning china, the north korea story is massive and one that could potentially shape the entire direction of his presidency. Beyond warning china he will act alone, i dont think we have a great sense of what he is willing to do their. The consequences for the u. S. , for the region, for key allies in asia i think could demand a lot more of our attention. I think in terms of his relationship with congress, this is a political story, not a policy story. I am fascinated where trump will end up in 2018 when we are in an Election Year and he has this complex relationship with his own party. He wants the party behind him but does not feel beholden. Do we start seeing trump and his Organization Going out and primary people, are they going to start to raise money for primary challengers who were not with him . The idea of a President Trump without a fairly United Republican Party behind him for his last two years of his term, i think its fascinating. At political dynamic is something we should start focusing on. Your thoughts on what we are not covering enough . You have to give the president credit, during the campaign he tapped into something that nobody saw coming. This idea of the forgotten american, people who live in pennsylvania, wisconsin, ohio, indiana, folks in these towns where the factory was shut down. For eight years under the Obama Administration, they just did not address this issue. The Unemployment Rate was going down but people on the margins were suffering, trying to figure out how am i going to put food on the table and get my kid to college . President trump tapped into that and put some divisions out. He was dividing and conquering to some extent, it is because of the mexicans coming across the border and taking your job, and so on. I think it would be great for reporters to go back to some of these towns and find out what is happening, and are they waiting for President Trump to come in with some policies. A lot of those folks are on obamacare and you saw that flareup at town halls. One issue i am fascinated by and want to see covered, if he says hes going to build a wall and make mexico border pay for it, i want cameras on that wall and he has to be held accountable if that was just a campaign device, which Newt Gingrich called it, that was being used to get votes. Will we see a wall on the border . That is one of the biggest stories i want to see covered. It is no surprise i agree with jim on that. Our readers certainly care about the wall and whether trump will build the wall. It is have to started an hour readers will be happy. Start it and our readers will be happy. Maybe the future president will finish the job. I think jim is absolutely right. We in the media tend to focus too much on Foreign Policy, and we saw this during the launches in syria. I think you had a lot of reporters that got obsessed with the glamorization of going to war overseas, talking about the beautiful missiles. I think it was such a positive experience for President Trump, why would he think twice about launching another attack on foreign soil . It seems like we in the media are too comfortable with him acting overseas and do not question him enough. I really think that the media needs to focus more on domestic policy. So many lists do not even include creating jobs, and forcing the border, helping our that. Vets. These are things that resonated with all americans and i think that is why trump won the election. He needs to focus on that agenda. If stuff happens overseas and he wants to act tough and make america strong again, and he wants to beat isis, i think the American People will have a limited amount of support at that but i think the priority should remain squarely on the United States of america. Yesterday he said he wants to go at health care again and get that done first before tax reform, and the relationship of congress, the fact of getting a legislative strategy to get from point a to point the seems to be where they have not line that up as of yet. I was just going to bring up health care. This was one of his Signature Campaign promises. The white house moved on rather quickly, made attempts to revive it, and we moved on quickly from that i think we need to resist the pull to move on quickly from one of his signature promises. He vowed to repeal and replace obamacare and this is something that a lot of his supporters want to see get done. How does he do it at this point, and are these efforts to revive it real . Other premises, on taxes, on infrastructure which might be the one point of bipartisan agreement, there needs to be some type of infrastructure overhaul in this country. While we are covering all of these other juicy headlines, it is important and critical to remember what he promised his supporters. I also think it is critical that we continue to track the way in which his family sorted into racks, plays a role sort of into racks, plays a role interacts, plays a role in this white house. This is something we have never seen. I think there are questions that have already been raised and will continue to get raised along the way. Listening to charlie talk about the notion, the prospect of having breitbart holding President Trump accountable for his Campaign Promises to me is fantastic. And i think represents to me, it is why i love media and i am the exact opposite of trump. I love reporters of all stripes working for all organizations. I feel like the loneliest reporter is morally superior to the most exalted flak lowliest reporter is more lease appear to the most exalted flak. The Media Holding the president accountable is the ultimate validation of the way the system is supposed to work. I just think it is awesome. [applause] here is the reporting from the stage thing, as kristin was talking about, the family. This split between Jared Kushner and ivanka and bannon. He is why the president cannot let steve bannon get too far out of the tent do you want him in the white house working with you or outside holding the president accountable, reminding everyone this guy is not fulfilling Campaign Promises . He is turning into a third bush president he. That would be enormously damaging and the core support that the president enjoys to a great degree, has been consolidated as a result of the an end bannon and the coordination of that group than himself. What is interesting is watching Rebecca Mercer and the mercer family, a big republican donor, involved in breitbart, watching the daylight between them and what the trump agenda is will be an important space to watch. I think you are exactly right and whether bannon stays in the white house are not, he has a whiteboard with all the promises that candidate trump made, and that is easily transferable to an Online Presence that is hammering him every day. Julie, lets wrap up and talk about covering the white house Going Forward. Are you disappointed about the white house responded in her . White house Correspondents Dinner . You are on the board. We as a board invited the president , the Vice President , and the white house staff. There is a lot about the dinner that could change and is changing, and that is positive, but i do think that charlie made the point that there is a lot of coziness between reporters and sources. Yes, that happens to some extent but i think one thing that is nice about the dinner is it is an opportunity for our sources to come to a dinner that celebrates the press, and show that they respect us, that they respect the First Amendment, that they respect our role in these democracy. This democracy. The white house is choosing not to do that. I wish they would come. It would be good for everybody to come together and celebrate the First Amendment. To make our entire relationship with the trumpet frustration about the dinner Trump Administration about the dinner would be to overstate it. Maybe a late edition. Our invitation still stands. One of the things that is important about the dinner, i think we would all really welcome it if he would come. And if the white house staffers would come. We are also raising money for future journalists and that scholarship money is something that i think we all take very seriously. The fact that we are sort of paying it forward, that is one of the disappointing aspects of them not attending. How big is the 100 days and how big will it be lifted up as far as a marker, jim, for this administration . I was going to tell my story about how donald trump came by our table at the Correspondents Dinner a couple years ago and said, hey, good table. That did happen. Times have changed. And we are running out of time. I think the 100 day marker is very important and they are conscious of this inside the white house. The president would desperately like to see some wins on the scoreboard. It may have sounded a little crass but i spoke to a white house official who said, we feel really good about the way this last week has gone, referring to the syrian operation. Whether you want to call it a military strike or win on the scoreboard is maybe not the best way of putting it, but at this point it is really the only thing they can point to. Neil gorsuch. But it took the Nuclear Option for that to be done, which i think is an indictment of our political system. Gorsuch is a wellqualified, yes, conservative, but certainly not objectionable from a constitutional standpoint, from a scandal standpoint. That it took the Nuclear Option to put him on the Supreme Court, that just goes to show you the partisan bickering and brinksmanship in this town is just nothing that we will see depart the scene anytime soon. Health care did not get done. The travel ban that tied up in the courts. My sense of it is the way they came into this administration is the way they were campaigning. That is to just tear everything apart, smash things, and show everybody who is in charge, who is the new sheriff in town. Previous administrations have had this town problem with things have not gone through and insight hindsight, had they done something with more bipartisan appeal they probably would have been in a better situation. The phrase Permanent Campaign is something that predates the administration but is where we are today. I think the republicans will look at the 100 day mark and say donald trump has gone a good job done a good job. I am not sure there was a bipartisan feel on the democratic side after this election, and that chuck would have moved and done something differently. Had he put the ball in their court and said, lets do infrastructure first, had he not come out and said my inauguration size was bigger than Barack Obamas inauguration size, and had not tried to put a ban on seven muslim countries immediately and wiretapping trump tower, had he not done those things and tried a more bipartisan, that is what people wanted. Is that what your readers wanted . You talk about the bipartisan tone, the tone was very onesided. The overwhelming coverage was obsessed with the russia coverage. It is a story, i am not going to say it is not as tory, but the level of emphasis placed on that story, the details coming specifically from one side, the democratic party, that is where you have a frustration. That is why the president is always on twitter trying to combat these things, because how was he expected to move forward on any of these issues when 80 of the coverage is focusing on his campaigns relationship with russia, which the number one source of that kind of reporting is that you have to somehow believe the president would purposely sell out his country to get elected. I think that a lot of reporters are approaching it from that angle. It is important to point out, there are bipartisan investigation. It is not just democrats that are investigating. An fbi investigation as well. And the media is trying to do the investigating for everybody and squeeze out every little bit of information about it, and highlight it as the number one issue that should be important for american. I think a number of americans are frustrated. Your line of argument towns extraordinarily similar to me. , oh, the emails thing from every single clinton person. I am not saying there is no validity but suck it up. This is the big league, president of the United States. I remember at one of the trump events this nice lady grabs me by the arm and is, i wish says, i wish you would cover the clinton email story. I said, where did you hear about the clinton email story . I saw it on the news. I read it in the newspaper. Are we doing our job . We are covering the clinton email story and charlie, you have to agree, 11 days before the election the fbi director comes out and says, we are reexamining the clinton emails, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. I think that this story is going to continue to play it else out. Glenn was making a crescendo here. No crescendo. More of a face plant. Look, i think this is the big league. He got the job. You take a lot of slings and arrows. It is also the biggest bully pulpit and the world, and i think one of the real problems is they have diminished the stature of the office because partially that is how he got elected, running down washington. When you do that, you deny yourself the tools by which to amplify your own presence as the president so he is not capable of transcending these things, because of the way he has dealt with the crisis but also because and yell at them every night. The parts are wearing down, folks. Devin nunes, courageously or foolishly, stepped into the breach and got obliterated. Anybody who steps forward, steve bannon is working the one thing we can all agree, the man is working 18 hour days. [laughter] have an ice cream sundae. So people are wearing down. Trump wears people out, so the question is how can he reload, freshen up, and start using the office of the presidency to move beyond this . Lets say there is nothing beyond this russia thing, it is an a strange coincidence. You should be using the tools of the office and part of that, by the way is understanding the history of the place. It is one thing to come in and break the furniture and say you are going to do it differently, but have a sense of history so you do not have to reinvent the wheel every single time. He got elected saying he would be the bull in the china shop in washington, and he has got the bull part down but he is trying to recreate the china shop you should trademark that. You have got to sell the china at some point and has something going on. We still have 400 plus senate confirmable seeds that have not been nominated. And he is putting himself at a disadvantage. I understand him not wanting to do things the way other administrations have done it, but the government is massive and as president you cannot be involved in all the details every day. You have to have people in place that you trust, and by not filling those jobs he is putting himself in a weaker position. Broadly, one of the things that will be interesting to watch in the Trump White House, can they get e. On the i beyond the idea of winning the day and winning the week . You get that built in and are judged by the combination of your action and the decision to make, not what you made on a tuesday in april. I think that if he can get to that point, that will put him in a much more successful position four years from now. Last thing, is it possible for this president , this administration to succeed . To shoot the gap and actually do big things . Does this panel think that that is possible in this current environment . I think it is going to take and i have been thinking about this it is going to take an act of contrition on his part. I think if he were to go public and say, listen, i have made some mistakes, tweets about wiretapping, some of these things were not thought out, i think it would do wonders. I think the American People are very forgiving. Look at what Ronald Reagan did during the iran contra affair. He came out and apologized to the country and immediately helped himself. President s who acknowledge their mistakes, admit the errors of their ways, reap the benefits of that because the American People are forgiving people, and he was elected. There are a lot of people out there who agree with some of what he wants to do, particularly on the economy. I think he would do a Great Service to himself, as glenn said, and i do not think he apologize once on the campaign, never admitted he did anything wrong. There could have been something about megyn kelly where he said reach weeding something about heidi cruise may have been a mistake. That is the only thing we heard during the entire campaign. To me, that would do wonders. He absolutely could succeed. It would take a little more selfdiscipline on the part of the white house, and some of it will be out of his control. Do not underestimate the impact of a Strong Economy and a country that is not engaged in war, and the reverse of that when he is running for reelection in three years. He cannot control all of that. Charlie . I think he can be a success, especially since he has republican majorities in all three branches of government. We are anxious for a w. Exactly, and i think if he can wrangle congress to get behind some of his agenda that the American People loved, his agenda was very much a bipartisan, proamerica agenda. Fixing jobs, fixing thats, fixing problems with health care, i think absolutely americans can get behind that and he can be a successful president. I absolutely think he can, and part of that process will be learning how to get a deal done in real estate and business versus in washington, and figuring out who he can work with, who can be potential allies, and who are the democrats who will be willing to reach across the aisle. There are 12 Senate Democrats up for reelection where he won 82 support or more. Some leverage. Since i made a bunch of dumb predictions in 2016 i am going to make a dumber one now. I think his first term will be a tale of two presidencies. If history is any guide, they are going to lose some see. But i think lose some seats. But i think his presidency will follow bill clintons first term, where a midterm, and erosion of his support i disagree with charlie the arose in erosion will make him a successful president. Doing deals when he has no choice because his we will save this tape. Thank you very much. [applause] analysts, thank you so much panelists, thank you so much. I am the president and ceo of the newseum. We would like to welcome you to our first symposium. We are grateful for the support from our primary sponsor and the kohler fund for their support. Perhaps no one has done more interviews on behalf of candidate and President Trump then our next guest, Kellyanne Conway, special counselor to the president. Ms. Conway was the first woman to run a successful president ial campaign and it is really a pleasure to welcome her to the newseum. Interviewing ms. Conway is veteran media reporter mike wolf, currently running for the holiday reporter and usa today, and spends a lot of time covering the district, the president , and the press. Please welcome Kellyanne Conway and michael. Michael wolff. [applause] michael it is nice to be here. Kellyanne and i have been having this conversation since early in the transition, starting the conversation about the media, which appropriately started at michaels restaurant in new york. So, a report card. The media, lets make the f grade the media as Steve Bannons Opposition Party, and an a grade as the obama honeymoon. Where are we now . Kellyanne as a mother of four who comes home with report cards routinely, i will just give and i, incomplete. I think it is too early to render a judgment and a grade on this president , this administration, and the press. I want to say that some of the words being used that you are repeating i do not use and have not used. I think it is important in a healthy democracy to have a free and fair press, and part of that democracy is to have a president the, no matter who the occupant, that is shown respect and is shown and openness to cover all of the items that he has put forth, and his considerable accomplishments in the first 80 some days that have gone uncovered. I do not want to grade but if you ask me one thing i would change, or one grievance i might have, it is not biased coverage, because if there is biased coverage i have faith in the American People that they will see that and say, that is really unfair or, that is really over the top, or you keep saying the same thing over and over again and im not convinced it is news. I have faith in the wisdom of people. My grievance would be what i call incomplete coverage, it is the many things that we hear from americans that are meaningful to them and consequential to them in the first 100 days and do not get the same amount of coverage of say, this executive order or that attenuated, unproven relationship from the campaign with a certain country. That is really a thing, because if you are an american, and a coal miner who came to the white house or someone who lives in the northwest, if you are somebody who will benefit directly from the president having opened up the keystone Dakota Access pipeline, this all matters to you in a different way than you are hearing. Michael what about the tonal issue . How do you feel waking up every morning and you see democracy dies and darkness . Does that wrangle, does that send a message . Is there a message beyond the leads in each story . Kellyanne a few things, and i think they are different given that this is 2017. Theres this quest to make interviews go viral, where one has to wonder if the interview being conducted to inform the viewers with a Larger Population or electorate more broadly, or is the interview being done in a way that is meant to entertain other journalists or impress advertisers or executives . That is one thing. The other thing is, you can turn on the tv more than you can read in the paper because i assumed editors are still doing their jobs in most places. People literally say things that are just not true. [laughter] kellyanne they are not even disguised as opinions. There are people who presume they know what is going on in the white house, how the president is thinking, what motivates him. They stated like it is a fact, and it is not, often, and that is all right. At the same time, i listened to your other panel and there was a discussion about twitter and the president s use of twitter. It is true that the president regards his social media platform, twitter, instagram, facebook, he has millions and millions of followers, he looks at that as a way to cut out the middleman and communicate directly with people. It is what i call the democratization of information which means you do not have to wait for the evening news to see what happened that day. Everyone can access it at the same time. It could be the guy on the job, the stayathome mom who is busy with her children, the billionaire ceo who has 20 people outside his office checking social media. Everybody sees it at the same time. I think we have to have a conversation about the use of twitter among the media because there are things said about this president that would never pass an editors test. Something i talked about on the campaign, it is just true and it continues on. I see people live tweeting at sean spicer while he is in his press conference. Michael obviously there has been other republican, conservative, and rightwing administration which the media has accepted in a businesslike way. What is the difference here . Why is there an obviously continuing resistance and underlying message that has, i would certainly argue, not been there before . Kellyanne some of it is who this president is and the unexpected result that he is the president. I think people were not repaired for the result and did not prepare their viewers and readers the result. I am astonished that in a nation that many people, the media are constantly saying is divided, that so many people never even entertained the possibility that in a selfdescribed divided country, one of the other two candidate might actually win. I think of it as being caught unaware and leaning so far to the other side that the race is over, the path is gone and the Republican Party will be destroyed, you will take down every candidate with you. This is going to affect generations. If you go back and look at those headlines and see a lot of what was said on tv, it is unequivocally wrong and embarrassing, but we do not talk about it. In some ways, it was we did not see this coming so it must not be real. Lets try to make it not real. The other thing is there is so much media and this constant opportunity to engage. You have all the social media platforms. You have the media using them cost only, not waiting to file the story for the next day or the evening news. We just have an ongoing opportunity to communicate. Do you find yourself thinking to theing to really get nut of what the media thinks and you andresident other members of the administration . How personal you take this . Kellyanne take what . You,is coverage of democracy dies in doctors darkness. You are the darkness. [applause] darkness. Im not the it is what i tell small children. Just because some he said something does not make it true. Just because they say it does not make it true. Im not elected to anything. About the wayking the president is covered, there is something called present of negativity. You can look in something and say it is positive or negative. It isis president negative. It is not on not it is not just unfair it is inaccurate and denies the viewership of the American People of the opportunity to hear what is really happening. Haveset improvements you seen improvements . Journalist to gimli had taken some time to get to know this president and how he operates. Maybe some of the senior Administration Officials. And are doing much better doing their job. Know that folks have said ok, i missed a lot in the election. They should say i really got it wrong. I also did not understand what was happening in the country. If he could go back he said he would take his anger anchors on the road. Why not do that now for everyone . Why not go back and meet the forgotten feel rooting for the president and country in a way they want him to make these premises. Theyre are part of the numbers is 93 . At 12 andilders higher than consumer confidence. Will are people out there be looking for positive signs and optimistic signs of progress on growth on prosperity on security and safety. They are going to look for that and regard us of what is going to be said to them. If you were a part of the very large group of people who are charged with covering the wrong, doho got it not keep getting it wrong by covering the president the way you covered him as a candidates. This presumptive negativity is important unfortunate. Saneness. Comfort in as the media, i dont see them as a big group. Comforting when it comes to coverage Familiarity Breeds contempt. I have already seen the same questions as some of my colleagues from certain people. Theyre all the same questions. I will give you an example. Talky everyone wanted to about entry. You know what happened friday . For the first time in 11 years a republican nominee of the United States Supreme Court was confirmed. 40 years from now no one is going to remember the staffers name. They will remember neil gorsuch because he will have sat on the Supreme Court for 40 years. If you look at things us wake and play long ball. What is going to impact real people over time . To divide and conquer better. Why is the internal white house story such a big story during this administration . I am not sure these names will be forgotten. These names are being enshrined in Popular Culture as we speak in a way that other names and other administrations were not. Why is this such a big story . Ask the people who are covering us. This is a president who took the issue of trade and illegal immigration as a candidate and catapulted them from single digits. It was not even offered as an option. To those issues and make them about furnace to the american economy. Now as president he and his secretary of commerce commerce are taking a strong lead against abusers on trade. He has taken dozens and dozens of executive acted and there is one that gets all the covers. Is what i need about incomplete coverage. People will go and see what is being done on jobs, the regulatory framework, health care. By his be judged combatants. He will be judged on when healthcare reforms happened. Do you think you said he will be judged by the voters. On what basis do you think the media judges him . Kellyanne on what basis . They judge him according to their predisposed beliefs about what hisvates him, personality is, how he makes decisions. Him is important to thematically and issues. A lot of the right questions are not being asked and there is effecteme that has its where people are afraid to go first. There are a couple a can think of but i will must name who are doing a really good job about covering things different. Glass,re looking at this you only have to tilt your head 2030 degrees and you can see what everybody else is seeing. What do you think the media wants . What you mean . They want something. Theyre in business like everybody else. Maybe they want donald trump to the less rightwing or maybe wanting to be a democrat or maybe they want him to offer the media more access. There is a deep discontent on the media side and so i am trying to think trying to ask from your point of view what is it that you think they want . What can you give them, what can you not give them . Do a Little Family therapy here. [laughter] in my view they wants to get the story and they want to get it right. They want to have access, sources, have access to the president and Vice President. Some in the media want to prove they have been writes about him and you have a couple of people in the media openly questioning whether they should refer to him as President Trump. Where have you seen that before . I was not raised that way. Respect the office of the president and its current occupants. You are pointing to individual people, not to an institution. Some people appropriately the words using to describe him i can tell you he is somebody that sacrifices tomade become president of the United States and did it for the right reasons and had a way of communicating with people that is very organic. Outspent by so much and understaffed by so much and he and governor pence were so effective. I think the media has not gone back and talked to the people. If the coverage of candidate trump and nominee trump and president elect trump as President Trump look relatively the same then i say we have not really progress into how to come him as a president or administration. It feels the same many days. There are these issues which from the articulated president s. Issues with the media. A real sense of acrimony towards the media. I think this administration has characterized the media more negatively than any i can remember and yet i kind of think this administration talks to the media more than any other administration. This . You balance is negative view of the of ministration of the media and yet this eagerness to talk to them. Everybody talks where you call it leaking or talking. If summit her talks to the media, you are free to talk as much as you want. No but suspect you are talking to the media is fascinating. Say dosue i would you think he is covered fairly . I think not at all. Democracy dies in darkness. Every time i look at this, i think all my god. From my point of view as someone who literally writes about this. We are in uncharted territory. Having said that, this administration is more mediacrazy than any other i have ever ever watched. You talk to the media all the time. You want coverage all the time. You hurt when the coverage is bad. There is this interesting kind of thing it goes the other way obviously. The media hates you but cant get enough of you. You hate the media but cant get enough of the media. Cracks i dont really hate anyone. I have four kids. You cant scare me. We are scared together. Generalizations and i dont want to overgeneralize the relationship with the media or the media at large. A lot of folks worked really there predawn, postdusk. I guess i am surprised. Yet the cabinet secretary, something ive been advocating for months. Interviews andat headlines will not immediately be struggles to explain the contradicted her. Knowpeople really want to is what does it mean . Why should i care . People will go find the news if they cannot find it in the news. That is the message people have now. When you talk about the hostile relationship. In a free and fair press that comes with responsibility. It comes with a certain responsibility. This is very important. It is a very important point because it would never past pas editorial muster. Is 10 15 a. M. And youre in the building where you worked, people see you as a presidencyring this objectively. When you have spent an hour of your day responding to people want twitter or tweaking nasty things to other journalists. I think that is not covered at all when one talks about the president tweaking. Him ando are covering tweaking come some of those are a hot mess. We want the relationship to be better. There is a reason that the president decided not to attend this correspondent dinner. There is a twoway responsibility here. Give the thing i will say is this is also selectivity to reporting. Poll showed the Approval Ratings are higher than disApproval Ratings. You will not hear that. Way, itre the other every screaming headline. There is a selectivity also. What do we choose to highlight do weress versus what choose to allowed to proceed into the background . Times has aork virtual beat. The beat as President Trump is an aberrant president. This i would argue is owned by haberman. Another president s view of and white as he speaks to her . He does not like her. He has told me. [laughter] kellyanne i have to push back. I think it is inappropriate to say who the president does or does not like. You just made my entire point about how he is covered by sitting next to you on the bus. He is the president and he obviously give her an interview last week. Is what i am asking. He journalists he called she literally lights dass you thenot conclude aberrant presidency of donald trump New York Times beats. She is the writer on that. I know what he has said about her. Yet he reaches out to her. Maybe that is a good thing. Kellyanne it certainly undercuts the ongoing premise that he is not getting access to the press or he is not fair to the press. He does. He gives interviews. I have to back up because you mentioned summary by name who i regard as a hardworking, honest journalist. She is very hardworking who happens to be a very good person. A mother of three who works hard who seems ubiquitous on print and tv. Unless profile written about her. Donald trump is somebody who, as a businessman, a successful businessman, a new yorker, had vision when no one else would. A master brander. Successful in television. He is somebody who has always dealt with the press. This is not unusual, on familiar, uncomfortable at all. He is a natural with the press. What is different is him being in politics. Covering somebody in politics, now in the presidency, who is not a typical politician. Who you were not used to where you had that relationship with them and their staff that was political government in nature, was State Government in nature. Everybody is still trying to find their way in that regard. But President Trump is somebody who has had a relationship with the media and frankly, has had a lot of positive press over the years when he has been interviewed about his businesses are interviewed about his real estate projects, or his other products he has put out there, his goal courses, which people love around the world. Ihis golf courses, which people love around the world. What is new is he is the president. Everybody,lore really, when you look at and you think about how the first 100 days will be covered, i could tell you exactly how they will be covered and exactly how america is going to want to see them. We will speak directly to america because if you look at the long list of things the president has done that mattered to people that have real people impact, it is impressive. When people feel like jobs are created or employers decided to attract and retain the workforce here, rather than take those jobs abroad, when you think about the investments that were just sitting on the shelf and the billions of dollars that some of these companies have, this is a president that has done things for the job creators, the job seekers, and the job holders. We intended to convey that message, whether or not it ends up being covered. Let me say something. There is this story that has been talked about infinitely on tv that is almost gone this week. I would argue, there are always other things that would have filled the vacuum, just nobody wanted to cover them. It is not exciting to cover Energy Independence and common sense environmental regulations. It is not exciting to cover tax reform. It is not exciting to cover how to get back on track with health care reforms. But thats how he will be judged. The forgotten man and forgotten moment did not come out of nowhere. They still feel they are forgotten. Let me ask you something. Let me ask you a process question. So, you have a quantitative increase in news outlets and you increase initative the news that you are producing. More news comes out of this white house than any certainly in my recollection. Kellyanne yes, he is doing more. [laughter] well, he is making news, certainly. In that situation, dont you get to a point where actually you can never keep up so many news outlets, so much more news . Kellyanne that is something i intimated earlier. You are asking me why this coverage . Some of it is the sign of the times. There are so many ways to be the media all the time. On social media platforms, doing live outtakes on a tv show. This is very different from decades ago. It is even different from the last republican president , president george w. Bush. There is just more and more disparate media. There are additional opportunities to always be on and covering. Michael how does that change the nature of coverage and the nature of this white houses relationship with the press. Kellyanne people have a responsibility to try to look at everything that is being done and attempted overtime. Way that ist in a responsible and honest and gives people full information. Again, i sighed during the campaign and i see it again now. Re is a huge disconnect from what people are being told is important to them and what is important to them. That has not changed in covering President Trump, from candidate trump to president elect from. People are being told, this is what is in port into you, so we will talk about it all my long on cable tv. This is what is important to you. I know it is important to you because i keep saying it is important to you. And yet, theres not a lot of evidence. And if you look at those tv networks, and those print outlets, look at their own polling, what is important to people is not being covered, jobs, economic growth, health care reform. When i say covered come i dont mean check the box and cover the tuesday meeting at the House Freedom caucus. I mean issues at hand. There are people who say immigration is important to them. There are people who say the border is important to them. One a la covered attorney general sessions at the one outlet cover the attorney general sessions yesterday. Why are they covering this attorney general and he is up the border . Exciting ass not as palace intrigue michael . It is in port and it. ,f michael if we had more time i would do want to talk about the nature of message, and who is responsible for that. And how you clarify your message and how you get the media to hear your message. But we have no more time. Kellyanne i will make one, quick, quick comment. I still think our best messenger is President Trump and i favor him doing press conferences. I favor him giving interviews. None of us can be a substitute for that, not on the campaign and certainly not in his administration. He is the best messenger. Vice president mike pence. A are the best spokespeople they are the best spokespeople. Message and delivery. I think what is different is delivery is not just a style. It is pipe and drip, what color tie are they wearing, who is behind them in the shot, these questions politicians have been asking for ever. ,e are delivering the message we as the administration, are delivering a message to many different outlets. Point. The whole social media platforms, traditional networks, cable networks, newspapers, i suppose peoplenline presences have. People are getting their information through so many different systems. They are getting their systems through so many different sources. Again, that i think is very unique and i believe that President Trump is a very unique, wellpositioned messenger to meet that new call of these different opportunities to message directly with people. Michael thank you very much. You and i will be continuing. Kellyanne thank you for having me. [applause] thanks very much. Thanks to Kellyanne Conway and Michael Wolff for that great interview. So, what is the future of news in this divided and connected world . We have heard multiple participants say that the news environment is changing, changing rapidly. Thats the big question for our next panel, moderated by a man who covers the ins and outs of t he media story every single day, the host of cnns reliable sources, Brian Stelter. Brian thank you. [applause] thank you very much. A little bit of a live edition of reliable sources this morning. There is a lot to talk about in reaction to a Kellyanne Conway was saying. Let me start the furthest away from me, the editor of politico, also a former White House Correspondent covering the obama presidency. Next to her, david kirkpatrick. Facebook of the affect. Next, a senior White House Correspondent for abc. She was covering the Clinton Campaign and is now covering the Trump Administration. She joined abc six years ago. Kellyanne conway just says the press is presumptively negative about the menu cover every day. Are you presumptively negative . I am presumptively cynical. But that is my job. Brian not just skeptical, but cynical questioner skeptical brian not just skeptical, but cynical . Skeptical and cynical. And i think we have to be a little bit of both. How tough it is for us to get at the truth right now. But do we start our day, and i think i can speak for all of us who sit in that Briefing Room every day, in a negative manner . Absolutely not. That is not the tone, from my perspective, of our coverage. Thisnd my sense is, perception that there is this adversarial relationship much more comes from the white house than from our end of the Briefing Room. They want an adversarial relationship. For they perceive that to be the case. We are doing our jobs. I dont think the complaints they have are any different than the Obama Administration has had about coverage or negativity, or impair to the Bush Administration or any administration before that. Brian you are saying, same complaints, but maybe they are louder . I think so. I think Kerry Fleischer would have told you the same thing. Brian what about the issue of politic and a substance versus palace intrigue . What about Jeff Sessions at the border . That was ignored. Obviously, politico cover that yesterday. I am not sure why she said it wasnt covered. What is your impression of that kind of complaint about lack of policy . Brian i started covering the Obama White House in 2008, and covered him for about six years. I can guarantee you i heard the same thing from the Obama White House, that politico cared way too much about palace intrigue. I was a policy reporter, covering health care back then, in a way and i would go to them and i guess i would basically hear the same thing. Sean spicer said this morning that they want us to cover policy and not the palace intrigue. The challenge is that the white house itself is very, very focused on palace intrigue and who is up and who is down. It is not just the press who is engaged in this. Like cecelia said, this is a longstanding complaint. We do cover policy at politico. We have 125 reporters and editors who cover policy alone. In what Huge Investment is going on in this town. Yes, i would maybe give them a point in that the palace intrigue stories typically do pretty darn well. People are interested in knowing what is going on inside this white house. The difference is this white house really engages with our reporters to talk about what is going on in the white house. So, you see, that is when spicer and some others really push back they internally say, dont talk to reporters when they themselves are. Brian is that the euphemism for backstabbing each other, for leaking . I think they are saying, dont talk to reporters. They say them privately, and dont leak. Days agostory two where we quoted six people inside a meeting of 30 talking about the strategy for 100 days. That is a remarkable number of people talking to us. Brian do you know who the sources are yourself . I do typically know who the stories are. I am fascinated by this. It seems like it is happening more and more with every story, the number of sources that are being reported, they are getting bigger and bigger. The Washington Post spoke to 18 sources. It is a sign of how much people are talking. You ask about policy versus palace intrigue. I would say until syria last week, i will throw a percentage 70 of the80 to content that gets discussed in these briefings is the press corps asking about who is doing what to whom inside the white clarifyr can you something the president tweeted about. A lot of this is self generated, the fact we are not talking about policy. Brian one more question about this for we talk about the future of news. The president s antimedia tax came up earlier. But from your perspective, what kerry . Impact whebeen, has it hurt us with our audiences, or has it not . I think it has created a more challenging environment. Brian you are talking about all the pages you are getting, right . Are people trusting what you are reporting . I dont have data on that, but i feel the pressure of the divided environment. My response to that is how i set newsroom,for the and reminding our reporters and editors that the basic rules of news still apply even in an environment where the rules do not seem to apply. We should conduct ourselves with journalists from any era. You try to be transparent about how we got the information. I believe that doing that and if to the basic rules of journalism, giving people a chance to respond, engaging with them, that does not change. If we do our jobs, as we always were supposed to do, i believe that is our best insurance for the longterm. It is a longterm play. We are in a weird environment right now. It might not be like this in five or 10 years, but all i can do is make sure my newsroom is living up to all the standards of journalism that i learned 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And i think getting as many sources as possible, that is where we are getting 18 sources or six sources. You want to have a preponderance of evidence and feel completely confident about what you are putting out. That is good for journalism. We are under a lot of scrutiny and that requires us to be as airtight as possible. Brian a divided world and connected world, the title of this session. David, i wonder how you view facebook and other social medias impact on the first hundred days. I could make the case that his tweets dont matter. The only matter when cnn and politico report them. Because on twitter, we are not reaching that many people. I could also make the case that facebook and twitter allow him to go around the media on a daily basis. How do you see this . The bigger point, the landscape created by facebook and twitter changes everything. I think this very well programmed morning started exactly right, not only with the Pulitzer Prize winner, but somebody who won a Pulitzer Prize by reporting using social media to include his sources i mean, include his audience as his source and create a collective process. The fundamental difference of a connected world, in my opinion, is it is a participative age. Everybody wants to participate and everybody will whether you like it or not. Every Single Person in this room probably has one of these and when they are on it, they are not just receiving, they are broadcasting and that changes the landscape. I think his tweets matter a lot. One of the things i would just comment on, this thing that was said in the Journalist Panel about you know, how trumps tweets cannot be responded to, you cannot follow up like you would in a press conference, that is a legitimate complaint in a sense. On the other hand, if you listen to what happened, when he used trumps handle in a tweet about his philanthropy and trump called him or immediately, that is because you can actually direct a comment to the president in a way you never could before. I might argue that is a counterbalancing factor. Regarding facebook versus twitter, and you and i talked about this a little bit before, i think it is easy in washington in particular and given that we have a president who is so twitter centric to forget the primary way most people get their information is through facebook. Oddly, not just in the United States. Increasingly and pretty much definitively now on a global level, the primary source of information for people is facebook. In all but like three or four countries. And that is a big, big change that is going to continue to change the landscape. Brian you are saying facebook is the internet and facebook is the news to a degree we might not appreciate in a twitter bubble. It is a place where people received the news and because it m creates ay mediu context that is fundamentally move. I am a baby boomer. In my lifetime it is fundamentally new to basically have the ability to react. Formally you were a passive recipient. Brian cecelia, Kellyanne Conway says some tweets are a hot mess. During the campaign, this was also an issue. Some were printed out and she chose examples. Do you worry, do you think before you tweet . Without a doubt. They goes back to how we started this conversation. The pressure is on all of us now more than ever to not screw up, to get everything right. Twitter as a medium for me is no different than going on the air on world news or nightline or gma. You cannot screw up on twitter, on air, on the reporting online. There is no differentiation anymore. I just wanted to go back to what you are talking about right now, in terms of how this social media impacts us in real time. Just yesterday in the press i am sure all of us are aware, sean spicer made that comment about the holocaust and syria that has since blown up, rightfully so, he made it. It landed in the press briefing. None of us i think really knew what to do with it. It took about five minutes or so, a few minutes. It feels like warp speed sometimes. Im looking on my phone and suddenly we see from our news desk that this thing is blowing up. We came back around and said, hey, sean, do you want to respond to this . It was in real time in the press briefing that that comment was gaining traction and we gave him the opportunity to clarify and we know that did not go very well for him and he had an apology tour all night into this morning. Is evente house i think struggling with how to deal with this and it impacts our reporting on a second by second basis. Brian that is a fascinating example. I did not know that was how that happened. We heard quite a few times this morning that the press is biased. From pleasure in particular. Fleischer in particular. Fox news is the number one cable channel, right. Thetbart, we could not have session we had this morning without breitbart being represented. We are in a new landscape where there is a much broader range of voices in the media, generally. It is because of the internet that has made that possible. Fox notwithstanding. Showhat anecdote goes to the tail is w wagging the dog. The wrorld is much bigger than the press. The internet has brought in the range of voices dramatically and included literally everybody. One final point, there is a professor at harvard who did a study of the media landscape on the internet and actually, the landscape of the right is bigger than the landscape in the center and on the left. One of the other scary things in the analysis he did was basically, there is almost no communication across the divides. Just doing a mathematical analysis of traffic on the internet, which is disturbing. Brian isnt that the biggest story of all up here, those two alternative realities . Breitbart, versus New York Times or cnn . Is there anything that facebook or the other companies can do . That is the question they are asking themselves. This is a very big question at twitter and facebook right now. Anybody who has read Mark Zuckerbergs extraordinary 5800 word essay of about one month ago, five weeks ago, where he very kind of, i think contrite the knowledge contrite contritely acknowledgment fake news was a problem. I was interviewing him and he said, it is a crazy idea that fake news affected the election, which he has now retracted. Brian you have seen this evil in these you have seen this evolve in a few months. He is racking his brain about this. There are a lot of extremely conscientious people at facebook who asking themselves, what does it mean that we are the fundamental landscape of information dissemination, and what is our responsibility . I think it is healthy they are asking that question, but it is scary for our society, that a commercial enterprise is in the position of having to make many of the decisions that they are going to have to make about how they prioritize public dialogue and its truly a global issue. Just to throw in one data point, there was a great story in the guardian about how this fake news problem in every country. Are 500ny alone, there people working for facebook in berlin, just combating fake news in german. In taiwan, the taiwanese government is worried about what make news is doing. It is hard for a company to do it. Im not sure a company should, but that is the position they are in. Brian we invited them to be here today, but facebook declined. Last summer folks there said, we dont have a responsibility to popular filter bubble. Now they are starting to think they do have a responsibility. Like i said, they are responsible people. Brian very responsible people . They let me post whatever i want on facebook. They did not have to do that. Users, it isllion not that easy for them to police 2 billion people in realtime. The existence of these platforms should be put on us because we are making them big by using them. Whose fault is it . I do think facebook takes their role very seriously. I dont think they have the answers yet. Brian does an outlet like politico think about writing stories in order to reach folks who prefer an alternate reality, where the pope did endorse donald trump . Do you feel the need to pop those bubbles . Did the pope not endorse donald trump . [laughter] too soon. We feel the need to report on the facts come on pizzagate, or donald trump claiming he created 600,000 on his watch. That is what we attempt to do. So, yeah, we try to that is not our only mission these days. But when we are presented with glaring, factual inaccuracies, i do think we have an obligation to make that clear in the course of our writing and reporting. I think it is interesting to watch the evolution of this over the course of the campaign into day 89 or something of Donald Trumps candidacy and presidency and how we as the media have struggled to correct the record. Brian have we struggled . I think it has been. Because, lets just take the tweet on wiretapping, for example. Brian do we have to . [laughter] sayut at what point do we in our stories, this is just not true . Outright, this is just not true. And i think we are now at that point where we are doing that. I think it took us a while to get there because there was this sense of, is that our job as a media to be Fact Checking every single thing . Can we possibly fact check everything we are reporting on . I dont know that we can, but i think we are doing it much more. Brian and to go from Fact Checking to narrative checking. When he says he created 600,000 jobs, what is he really saying . Or, i am going to build a wall. Brian you could make the case that this white house has been pretty conventional. Conventional to some media. Has not been doing live, daily Facebook Live shows with the president. Has not been grading a new form of media through social networks in a way thats been disrupted. Would you subscribe to that idea that we have seen some experimentation, that the world has not been flipped on its head in the last 12 weeks . I agree with that. There are many tools the white house could be using, that the Obama White House used to great effect. The alternative ways to reach out to folks through different platforms using the white house media apparatus to do videos and focusedeir own news projects. And i have not seen that yet. We are only three months in. It is early going, but i think we thought more nimble media teams out of the Obama White House. See the typical twitter sean spicer does do media briefings every day. I think that is a good thing. I support that, but that is something he threatened not to do at the beginning. He is doing it. As i thought at the time, you get in there and you realize the power of being able to command an audience for 45 minutes, an hour. Thee does, he is changing way he reads off a lot of prepared remarks at the beginning of his breathing to get out a message. And they are using that. When the president decided to bomb syria last week, the value of the press pool was clear. 11 00 at night and he had a press pool ready. That is what we were saying before hand. He will realize the power of having this White House Press court there to broadcast what he does. Brian speaking of that, briefly. Is there anything to learn from that night of live coverage, special reports from the networks, some shotty audio when he did speak . Which night . Brian the night of the serious breaks. Of the syria strikes. Did anything stand out to you . Nothing comes to mind. Brian other than the audio quality. That, certainly. Brian there were some issues with the rushed nature. I dont know. I guess i will give them a little bit of a slap on that. Its the first time that anything like this has happened. E was at maralago look, they have got to get the technology together. That is not the biggest offense in the world. I think just in terms of coverage, this white houses policy, when it comes to military action, we will tell you about it after the fact. I think that will be a struggle Going Forward. Brian in our last few minutes, the future of news with the white house and beyond, david, what sort of protections do you share at your conference and what predictions would you share with this audience about what we will see happen between now and 2020, when were talking about reelection . I think any politician should be emulating trump as far as they can in terms of his social Media Presence because it serves him well. I actually think it is a major differentiator from anybody who came before him obviously, that he tweets so much and it is a good thing, as Kellyanne Conway says, a direct pipeline to his audience. Frankly, good leaders should probably do that from now on. I mean, one of the ironies about the Obama Administration that many of us in the tech world were critical of was that he got elected from social media and once he got in office, he did not use it to govern or marshall a community of support for his policies. And trump is definitely doing that. I do think, whatever you say about the breathing, totally not my world, what happens in the white house Briefing Room, it is a little bit besides the fact at this point. Because there is another set of channels that exists and ultimately, media will have to operate more in those channels than in the old one. I really do think there has been especially when i heard fleischer talk, they are just like sentimental for something that is no longer the landscape. Brian cecelia, do you agree . Yes and no. I do think as a reporter from a journalistic perspective, we need that Briefing Room. I think there is a huge value for both sides of this. The president needs to get his message out. The, he can circumvent media through twitter, but he cannot get a Briefing Room message out in 140 characters. Maybe he will tweet right now and prove me wrong. It has happened before. In terms of us Going Forward, to me the mission, in terms of reporting for this administration and beyond is no different from when i started my career and for all my colleagues that came before me. It is just the truth and it matters now more than ever and we cannot screw up trying to get there. It is, stay in your lane and a do your job. It is no different now than it was. Brian that implies you think that is enough. Reporting the truth and being clear on air is enough. As opposed to what . Brian what is the alternative . The alternative, it is not an alternative. It is an addition. Celebrating and including the diversity of voices that now exist that were not available before. The truth is good and i believe in it. But it is a new landscape and if you dont recognize that and operate accordingly, you are not going to do as well. Brian what about politico and how it views this . How is the company changing to adapt to what we are describing up here . As i said earlier, i guess, i ts an intensive process of examination of all the stories that we put out, or the stories we were going to have a lot of scrutiny on. I would say we are looking for new ways to reach new audiences and new forms of storytelling. New platforms to get that message out, thinking about the diversity of mines room, the only racial and gender diversity, but yo but geographic diversity. That is important as well. I spend atime lot of time talking to reporters about how they are doing. Our newsroom has, folks have gotten threats and things mailed to their homes and they are in a very sort of, difficult time doing their jobs. Newsroomcan wear on a and i have to be very conscious of that and make sure, as much as i am an editor, i am a psychologist for some folks, and monitoring the room to see how people are doing. It is a different environment than the white house i covered. And they are doing very important work and it can be adversarial, but that is the on hidden story, the white house is very accessible. There is a lot of access. That is a good thing. I think it is just maintaining that sense of doing a good job, we have to be airtight, stick to the principles, be above board, our business is a nonpartisan newsroom. Brian what you are describing is evolution, not revolution. It doesnt not sound like you see revolutionary changes. I have been asked that question a lot and i have to say i agree with cecilia. Res we have to stick to, but i am always trying to think of what more we could be doing and having those conversations and seeing how i could buttress the journalism we do in this environment. Because it is challenging. I think we are all grappling with that. Brian cecelia, i wanted to wrap up by going back to the title of this entire event. Of course, the First Amendment and the first hundred days. I think we could make the case that there has not been the legal and other kinds of threats against press freedoms that some may have feared before inauguration day. Right, not yet. Im not saying that. I dont know that they will or will not come, but there were threats before. He has made them and he was very clear. Myfact, somebody tweeted on face but today, i wish President Trump would carry out with his threats to improve the libel laws in this country and kick you out of the white house. Look. Brian you dont reply to that person do you . No comment fact. This is why i dont check my facebook. It could happen. It may. I dont know that it will. Part of my job is to hold the president accountable for the things he has said early on that got him into office. I think the breitbart reporters that was on this stage earlier raises one of the most important points in this presidency. There is a huge swath of this country that elected donald trump because they want my but laws to be strengthened, they want a border wall, they want pick your controversial issue. We have to hold them accountable and ask questions about those well as the we ones he is making now and not following up on. I have given up predicting. Brian i am sure your alls lawyers have fostered some of these issues. Is there anything to say so far about how things have been going . There is a lot of awareness of leak investigations. At there is a lot of education going on, in terms of me and my other top editors about the possibility of more leak investigations and preparing now for how we can protect ourselves. How you talk to sources. What you agree to do. Discussionsensive about how we can protect ourselves now with the assumption we will see more leak investigations out of this white house than the last white house, even though the last white house was pretty aggressive with this. Brian of course, david, there are Technological Solutions to some of the problems posed by leak investigations. What are you referring to . Brian new apps and new messaging software. Some of these very secretive, highly encrypted message systems. Yeah. Tools that can be used to evade a lot of things these days. Mr. Riske are we more divided or more connected in this world . I think we are more connected. I mean, Political Division is a function of connectedness and i think, and function of the proliferation of voices. It has allowed voices to come to the surface that were suppressed before. That is what trump is saying, and the breitbart people. In the long run, i think that is healthy, though i dont agree personally with a lot of those voices. Brian something the president and the press have in common. To the panel, thank you for being here. And thank you all. [applause] that was great. Thank you, brian and thank you to the panel. To close out this great morning, we turn to one of the wise men of washington journalism. Just as he closed out face the nation with many years for thoughtful commentary that made sense of it all, Bob Schieffer is here with us to share some closing thoughts on where we go from here and how we might do better. It is a special treat to welcome him back to this newseum. He is a cvs news contributor and has spoken to the nation for decades about what is happening and how to make sense of it. He has been thinking a lot recently about the future of news and that is the topic of his fifth book, entitled overload finding the truth in the deluge of news. That will be published this fall. It is a pleasure to welcome bob back. [applause] thank you so much. Thank you all so much for being here. And i wanted to congratulate you on your bladder control. [laughter] bob i understand a lot of you have been here since 8 30 this morning. I am greatly honored. Like news. Is its where you happen to find it. I want to start this talk with some of the best advice i ever got. I did not get it in my 60 years as a reporter on the job. I did not get it at a journalism school. I got it at an art school. Second only to my love of journalism is my love of art. Back in the day when i was struggling to find my artistic style, an art instructor gave me some of the best advice i ever got on anything. He said, look, stop worrying about your style. Just find an artist that you really like and copy them. Copy everything he does. And he says, as you do that, you will understand how he res olves problems in your own style believe all out of that. So, i want to tell you this morning, if there are any aspiring reporters, if there are News Executives who are wondering, what is it that a reporter is supposed to do . What is the role of the journalist . I say this. Get the story that david there and fall wrote about how he covered the campaign and copy every single thing that he did. If you do that, you will be just fine. Thats the best advice i can give you this morning. I really enjoyed the discussion. I thought the Previous Panel was one of the most pertinent of the morning. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Brian Stelter and his crew the re. I want to try and i have been asked to put all of this in some context. This was my 14th president ial campaign. And i will say this. It was not like the others. [laughter] has normally, a campaign some slogan or something that always comes to mind when you think of a campaign, or that reminds you of a campaign. I like ike. Nixons the one. All the way with lbj. But the question i was wasked the most often in the thing that always comes to my mind that will make me remember this campaign was, have you ever . And i want to tell you, the answer to that is, no, i have never seen anything like this campaign. I have said that so often on television that it became a drinking game among my younger colleagues at cbs. Oh,ime i said, it bob, said he has never seen anything like that, they had to take another drink. We had a lot of designated drivers, so it all came out fine. This was truly a Campaign Like no other. It was a campaign where for the first time in a long time, money did not seem to matter. Just ask jeb bush. The campaign for the first time in modern history where the two parties nominated candidates that the majority of people mother liked majority of people neither like, nor trusted. Where body parts got more attention than Foreign Policy and were attitude counted more than facts with voters. It was a campaign that for those the former speaker of the house john boehner to brand ted cruz as lucifer in the worshiper the devil society challenge that and said, no. Its not true. Hes not one of us. Its true. You can look that up. This was, in my opinion, the Worst Campaign i ever covered and perhaps, the first in my life. Donald trump won the presidency, but the biggest winner was this massive industry that has grown up around our political campaigns. Once again this year, a lot of people made a whole lot of money. I dont know what the voters got out of it, but they did very well. Some of us were pleased with the outcome and some of us were cast in despair. But i think the overall emotion felt by most people on Election Night was one of surprise. Even among the trump people, who i am told on Good Authority that their own pollsters gave them a 20 chance of winning. They were surprised, too. Those of us in the press were criticized by all sides. We should all take criticism seriously and learn from it and there were lessons to be learned this time. But we should also keep in mind that this is nothing new. s phase. Paign has it negativity during an exit administration. Through the pointyheaded intellectuals who cannot park our bicycles straight when George Wallace ran. Lessyear, they hung some clever, but really nasty names on us. This is all part of the job. It is something that we all know about and expect. Its not that part that part is not to be taken seriously. Lets talk a little bit about this years criticism. First, the press was accused of electing trump because we gave him so much exposure. Then, we were accused of missing the story because we did not take him siously. Finally, we were said to not really make much difference because trump used social media to go around us. Said,boss david rhodes you can pick your own adventure here, but all three of those things simply cannot be true. And they are not. My own belief stated that trump won because he played by new rules, he broke the old rules, and his opponent played by the old rules. He understood and this is sort of obvious in retrospect, but as Sherlock Holmes said, most things are obvious in retrospect. He understood that if he offered himself to enough Television Programs he would be invited to be on some of them. That is precisely what happened. I disagree with those who say the hosts did not push back. But he was going on so many programs, so often, that the exposure overwhelms the pushback. While people were pushing back on something he said yesterday, he was already on another program laying out new allegations, whether he knew it or not, he was practicing the political strategy that was first identified by an australian political consultant. He called it the dead cat theory. The way that works is, no matter what the conversation people are having at a dinner party, if you middle dead cat in the of the table, the conversation immediately turns to the dead cat. Donald trump threw cats, d ead and alive, on the table every time the narration went this way and all the sudden was back on what he was talking about and was on him. I think in contrast, the campaign of his opponent Hillary Clinton did it to the old way, concentrated on fundraising and controlling the narrative, as they say in politics. In other words, never leave your candidate in the position of having to answer a question that does not fit the theme of the day, limit live interviews, respond to old questions with well rehearsed focus group tested answers. On morning had been shows a number of times, i called him up and asked, why dont you ever have Hillary Clinton on . She said, getting an interview with Hillary Clinton is like getting an interview with mother teresa. And i think in a way that sums up this campaign and what happened. That was the story of this campaign and by the time the other candidates understood what was happening, it was simply too late. People were disgusted with the gridlock with both parties. The number of people who now identified as democrats and republicans is at an alltime low. People do not like the choice, but they wanted change. Maybe it was number complicated than what former First Lady Barbara Bush had mused early in 2015 when she was urging her son jeb not to run. She said, maybe it is that people are just tired of kennedys and clintons and bushs. She might have been right. I found many people last year who either really liked or disliked both of these candidates, but i found nobody who said they needed more information before deciding which one to vote for, or to vote against. Sense, and i believe that is some evidence, that those of us in the press did our jobs. Even so, there are some really serious lessons to be learned here. Much information made its way onto the National Conversation and once it got there, it was difficult to remove. We have to be quicker from now on and more figures more vigorous in challenging what we all came to know as fake news. Only now are we beginning to understand the danger that it poses. Only now are the big Distribution Companies we heard facebook,sion about, only now are they recognizing they simply have to take some responsibility to what the information is that they are distributing. They are news media companies, just like cbs news and the Washington Post, and the New York Times. We take responsibility for what we distribute. They will have to find a way to do that. In an effort to show balance, i think too many socalled madegates and strategists their way onto television and were given far more credibility than they deserved. I kept wondering. I would see somebody on they were called a democratic or republican strategist. What did that mean . Long to listen to them to understand they had no understanding and really, no contact with either of the campaigns. But there they were. Reason,for whatever perhaps to add drama to increase the horse race tension, we tended to make i think, too much of slight changes in the polls. We talked about one candidate or another leading by a single point, when in fact, the shifts in those polls were well within the margin of error. There is no such thing as a one point lead in any poll. Too muche also placed faith in general in polling. It is simply not as good as it once was. Respondents were once honored, no people want nothing to do with pollsters. Fewer than 20 a big your pardon, fewer than 10 of the people polled now are willing to actually talk to a poster on a phone. Raises serious questions. I dont care how you rate these polls. What did the 90 of people who refused to talk to a polster, party determine what it is they had to say . Historian whoard writes for the new yorker, told me something i found fascinating. She said, we are tending to look on polling data as some sort of higher truth. She brought up an interesting point with, the closing of so many newspapers and shrinking staff. She says too many times we are replacing a lot of beat reporting and man on the street interviewing simply because News Organizations dont have the people to do it anymore with polling data. We are replacing it with what many News Organizations used to do. They would go to the local pta meeting or local bar and talk to people. Surprisingly, the dean of polling in america, peter hart, who heads the wall street journalabc poll. Peter said that he agrees with what jill said. He told me that we have started thinking in statistics and dynamics and analytics. That just does not work. Because analytics will tell you certain things. They will tell you where people shop. They will tell you what movies they like. But they do not tell you what is in peoples hearts. That is something that i think we in the media need to take to heart. We need to get back to knocking on doors and asking people how they feel. Yes, we want polling to back it up, but we need face to face participation. And checking with people. This wally complicated hole situation was that all of this is being played out, this campaign, which was the most unusual i can recall, in the midst of a technological revolution that is having a profound effect only on how we get news, but on our entire culture. The web gives us access to more information than any people who have ever lived on this earth at any one time have ever had access to. But, are we just overwhelmed with information, so much we cannot process it . Or, are we wiser . I think at this point we are just overwhelmed. So much information, we cant deal with it. The web gives us this unbelievable access, but there are some downsides. For one thing, the nuts can all find each other now. I dont care how bizarre your attitude or your feeling is about something. You can find somebody out there that agrees with you. News, some of this news, falls by design can go around the world in a millisecond and it is simply going to have to be dealt with. The coming of digital has also turned local newspapers into a downward economic spiral from which many will not recover. We lost 126 newspapers in this country over the last 10 years. Other newspapers are now so think that your water bill is probably thicker. This has had a huge impact on politics, how politicians campaign, how people are finding out who is running. I think, unless they find some entity that can somehow do what we have always expected of local newspapers, we are going to have corruption in this country, not just in politics, but just corruption in general at a level we have never seen in this country. This is the great crisis in journalism right now. Is, some of the bigger News Organizations, especially the mere times and the New York Times and Washington Post are finding ways to exist in this landscape. They are no longer just newspapers publishing a paper newspaper every day. They have become 24 7, multiplatform News Organizations. Companies that provide breaking news, video coverage, running commentary, websites, news letters, podcasts. They are looking for more and more ways to reach people. The good news is, this is working. While circulation of the paper newspapers is down, during thember of last year, both times and the post in one month or reaching as many as 70 million viewers, 70 Million People were reading or finding some contact with those News Organizations. The News Organizations execut ives will tell you that while this technology has given them this great reach, their viability will still depend on whether they are giving news that people need to improve their lives. If you can do that, if you can make your News Organization relevant by providing information that people have to have, then they will survive. Must be new concentration on that by all News Organizations as we go forward. But at the local level, many of the things that these big newspapers have figured out how to do they can be a pattern for News Organizations at the local level. At cbs news, for example, we now have inaugurated a 24hour, all News Streaming Network that you get on your phone or your laptop or your computer. You dont get it on your television set, unless you go through during both political conventions we would sometimes have more people looking at than were wamming cbs news. So there are ways, and we will find a way to accommodate. But this is like were in a place here now where the world was after the invention of the printing press. Martin luther said it was gods greatest gift but it took a while for the world to work its way through that. There were 30 years of religious wars after the invention of the printing press. Eventually equilibrium was reached. Were in a period like that. We have to recognize where we are. Ept to close by just talking about in this new and very different world, what is the role of the individual journalist . Quite simply, it is what it has always been, we are not the Opposition Party as so many somed would have you believe nor do we believe we are. Nor sit our place to sit down and shut up and let the world pass by as some have wished that we would do. The politicians government officials and journalists all have very different roles. The politicians are there to run the campaigns, government officials are there to run the government. They are there to deliver a message. Our job is simply to check out the message, determine if its true. And if so what will be its impact on the governed . In a totalitarian society, there is only one source of news, and that is the government. N our form of government, an independent press gathers Accurate Information and citizens, to the and they can take that information, compare it to the governments version of events, and then decide what to do about it. Those who would underline our role are citizens, and they can take that information, compare it to the mean this directly, undermining the foundations of this country and what it was founded on. We must always remember and ver hold ourselves out to be the exclusive source of wisdom or morality. We are not. Our job is simply to ask questions and to keep asking get an answer. That will not always be easy nor will we always be the most popular people in the room. But that is what the founders intended and it is as vital to our form of government as the right to vote. ve been a reporter for 60 years and i have never been prouder of my profession than i am today. Thank you. [applause] i thank all of you por participating. Its been 2 days since donald trump was inaugurated. I think this symposium fulfills our original hope of trying to evaluate whats happened so far and think about how we could do even better. I was heartened by many of the reporters who said that they had access, that they were reporting, that they were doing their job, that the initial fierce that we wouldnt get the information have not, or have not yet depend ong your views been realized. At the same time, i think many of the reporters and the government officials repeated over and over again that we were having problems digesting all the information that was not now available to us on all these different platforms and that we had to do better had to do better to go beyond, how to do better to understand the the longterm policies. And as we heard several times, how to do better to take advantage of all these new platforms that we have available to us. I know that you believe that the First Amendment is not only the the responsibility and privilege of the people who have been on the stage today but really of all of us, that is the foundation of our democracy and something that we need to celebrate and defend at all times. I hope that you will join with the newsium in the months and years to come to participate in these discussions as we continue to evaluate how freedom of the press and the the other freedoms that are so essential to the our democracy are fairing. We hope that you will participate in more programs like this. We hope that you will follow our social media platforms. That you will support our mission. And most of all, we hope that you will be part of this conversation that bob laid that so well on how we all must discuss what is happening to our country now and in the days to come so that we are truly informed citizenry. Thank you so much. Thank you for participating in this wonderful morning of interesting and important conversations. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National able satellite corp. 2017] one of the things i loved when i was scrust driving and showing up first thing in the morning because i wanted to be first in line is that we have all these panels with four authors who are novelists or who are writing about syria, who where these are people who dont get to see each other or have conversations frequently. So theres this moment of conversation where these people are saying something that they are just coming up with at that very instant and its that kind of electric exchange of ideas that can only happen in the moment