was struggling. i always thought i was pretty empathetic, emphatic. i think i was very, excuse me, empathetic. you know, that s an example of the stroke, empathetic. before having a stroke. but now after having that stroke is, i really understand, you know, much more kind of the challenges that americans have day in and day out. what you saw and heard there, the auditory processing challenges, the speech challenges howard: the nbc correspondent also shared this observation with her viewers we did find that in small talk before the interview without captioning it seemed it was difficult for fetterman to understand our conversation. howard: this prompted a fierce backlash. podcaster kara swisher called burns account just nonsense. maybe this reporter was just bad at small talk. new york magazine offered up a cover story on fetterman saying his comprehension is not at all impaired. he understands everything. burns didn t suggest otherwise, but plenty of stories have r
openly questioning dependenterman s abilities. fetterman s abilities. the democrats want to put a guy who can t process speech in the senate. he can t process it. how is he going to be a senator if he can t hear what s happening in the senate? howard: joining us now to analyze the coverage, ben domenech, editor at large at the spectator. and in los angeles, leslie marshall, radio talk show host. ben, what do you make of the coverage of john fetterman s efforts to talk to journalists in general and the nbc interview in particular? first off, i think our sympathies can go out john fetterman and his family, everything that you have to deal with after a stroke is very challenging. but these are critical questions about whether you belong in the u.s. senate or not, and they are absolutely up for debate in terms of his mental condition and whether he s able to understand what s going on around him. this nbc reporter, dasha burns, has done, i think, a phenomenal service in terms of both h