Examines the changing technology on journalism. He is in conversation with Susan Glasser of politico. Also the author of a new book overload finding todays truth in news. It is an honor to be with you. I am a little bit humbled to be given the task of interviewing such a legendary interviewer but thank you for taking the time. Time. Guest thank you, and im honored to be interviewed by y you. You are a wellknown person in journalism, and it is good to be with you. Host we are trying to make sense of the effects right now. We might as well go ahead and start with the proverbial elephant in the room, the president ial tweeter in chief. Once again, they are fairly consistent. The president of the United States said it isnt freedom of the press when others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even when it is completely false. That was not an accident. Its frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. The First Amendment seems to allow us to write whatever we want to write. How do we make sense having a president that doesnt seem to buy into the First Amendment . Guest i wish i would have thought of this first because when the president said its disgusting that they can write anything they want to write and we ought to look into this, jake said i did look into this and heres the u. S. Constitution. And thats the interesting part to me. The administration has tried to picture us at the Opposition Party as people that somehow want to run the government or run campaigns. That is not what we do. What we do is remember first of all the politicians deliver a message. That is what they are supposed to do. Our job is to check the message if it is true or false and what the impact will be you cant have our form of government unless they have independently gathered information that they can compare to the governance version of events and then they decide what to do about it. If we do that, we have performed a crucial role and im not sure you can have democracy as we know it without that. It is as important as the right to vote. And yet the president doesnt agree with it. Host if the president doesnt accept the best in the freedom of the constitution. Guest all of this namecalling now ive been called every name one could be called off way back to the Nixon Administration and that i was referred to as a female hygiene product. I get it all but i dont Pay Attention to that part o of allf this that is going on. What i do Pay Attention to and i am very concerned about is when people try to destroy the credibility of the free press. Whether it is the president or anyone else in a position of power. Most president s dont like the press and you can understand why because they are not under this microscope this is what we are supposed to be doing. To somehow suggest that we shouldnt, do they want only a government where the only information comes from the government . Even donald trump doesnt want that if you stop to think about it there are authoritarians around the world often to start off by attacking the press is not that much difference between his tweets about the press and the words weve heard from turkeys leader or vladimir putin. To follow through, overload is the title of the book. How much is it a threat to that democracy that you talk about if we are doing our independent reporting but it doesnt make a difference and people can no longer tell what your gloss is on the news . Guest the first thing we have to do is keep doing what youre doing and that is to sort out the truth from the false and that is an overwhelming job. Its a bigger responsibility than we have ever had because we are dealing with so much more information. We now have access to more information than anyone else in the history of the world. But we are running a little short on kerry hers right now and getting so much information that we really cannot process it with the coming of the web and now digital it is harder and harder to separate this stuff out. We used to hire people to go out and find the news and now we have to have an equally large group of people just sorting through the information we already have defined which is true, which is not true, which is relevant. So it is just this overwhelming overload of information, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And i would argue and i do talk about this in the book that i think the coming of the way is as great and profound an impact on the culture as the coming of the Printing Press on the people of europe and that they. We all talk about for the great thing for a printin about prints an obviously, it was literacy was increased. We saw the counter reformation that we sometimes dont think about the result of the religious war before they reached the story of equilibrium. I dont think we are quite there yet. We are thinking about the first trimester of this revolution of it and seeing it in technology. It doesnt feel like equilibrium i must say. So, tell me, you started this amazing career in the 1950s. How different do you believe the media and the political atmosphere was, obviously there is the centralized world as a reporter, how different wasnt . Guest everything was turned upside down. Nothing is as it was. I got my first job when i was 20yearsold. It was my sophomore year and i went to work at this little Radio Station at fort worth. They had a technological breakthrough. What would happen if we had these trucks loaded up and we would listen to the Police Radios in the raced to the scene and the strokes and with a twoway radio we did on the scene reports. We didnt have even recording devices in those days. We were still on the wire recorder that we couldnt play back a tape from the scene. But he would just interview people on the scene and then later i went to work at a telegram and the Police Reporter whose name was promoted to the night city editor and we covered a lot of the wrecks together and he interviewed me to take his place. The orderly way that we gathered the news in those days and most towns had three television stations in a pretty good newspaper, and whether or not you agree with the editorial policy of the paper, we were generally find something was on the front page of the paper or broadcast on the network is cominnews,you assume it was truy had gone to some effort to check it out and they didnt print things that wasnt true so we base our opinions on the data that we were getting from those television stations and local newspapers. What has changed now and turn everything around is now you have 700 channels on television and even more than that on the web. We are not getting the same facts. If you listen to this source over here and somebody else listens to this one over here, you bring different facts and so people are basing their opinions now on different data, not on the data that they used to and i think that is the number one change that has come about and only now are we coming to realize how profound it is. Host you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own set of facts and that has been reversed. Talk about the policy. Obviously you mentioned on negativism. In the 1950s during the mccarthyism we have seen president ial campaigns in which the media were pointed out and you were called names and everybody else, so how is this different from the point of view in the Political Press . It is more intense because there is more of it and also because of the lightning speed that the news travels. In my early days in fort worth covering the politics about ten days out from any election, there was always a Whisper Campaign that one of the candidates had a girlfriend on the east side. Why, i dont know. We would check these things out and most of the time they didnt amount to anything. There is no such thing as the Whisper Campaign in politics anymore. Some of the signs of Something Like that, they put it on a blog and suddenly it is out there. Taking it down, its had more of an impact i think on politics than it has as journalists because the person running for office, he or she has to decide do i ignore this and hope it goes away . Do i comment and give it wide distribution, and even we see now if people deny things that are made up, they still hold on. It is still a percentage of people in the country that think barack obama is not an american citizen. How much Fact Checking will it do to finally knock that down . Pizza place in washington. I Hillary Clinton in the basement totally in the foundation. They fired her weapon and he was going to shoot the doorknob off so he could go down in the basement and rescue his children. The first thing he found out his there is no basement of their. He was arrested, taken away and is in the court system now. But there are still a number of people who believe that. Demand he leaves it still has to have private security because hes getting death threats. That is what has changed, the speed with which this stuff happens. Mark twain or winston churchill, somebody said a lie can go around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on and that is more true today than ever, that is what we are dealing with. Thinking back to the 2016 campaign, as i try to inflict on what went on, it wasnt that journalists didnt do a good j job, but including unprecedented amounts of Fact Checking of the public statements and the fact that we are already on the record made many of them very alarming and that is what this challenging for us as journalists we have more transparency and information about the public fingers than ever before and less accountability. It didnt seem to matter. Host people who have done the psychological studies about what has come to become known as fake news and why is it so difficult to take them down. One of the things that happens is you counter this like we did in the obama a birth certificate saying heres the newspaper article that appeared in the paper the day that he was born. But there is a certain number of people that they see what they call kind of a backfire effect, and that becomes part of it. They say no, that isnt true. I. This just made up. And once it is there and they believe these things like america never went to the moon, it was all made up, you can always convince people with the facts, and that is the part that is very hard for us. How do we do this and i think in most cases we will never be able to completely take down some of the stories that are made up of the whole cloth. Host the golden age of conspiracy theories. So, lets stifle back for a second. This is a really interesting project that gave rise to the buck. When you decided to step away from face the nation, you decided to be a podcast or which i am now, too and i guess like you i wasnt listening to a million podcasts five years ago. This is a whole new medium. Some you have this series and its given rise to this transformation in the media. Tell me about how that came about. Guest i know so little about podcasts i thought they were called an ipod. Andrew schwartz is the chief of communication. We got to know about rumors and all this stuff going on. By people having a credible press they can believe what do you read and what is reported and so we started kicking this around and decided to start coming to these podcasts called about the news. One thing led to another and somewhere along the way they said maybe we ought to put out a study like think tanks to. If we are going to do that, i would assume write this book. We must have interviewed 45 or Something Like that and i need from places as some of which i had never heard of and it turns out that they were very influential. The good news about the podcast and the good news about the internet is the internet makes all of these kind of things possible and that is great news. The bad news is that they can all find each other now. When i came into journalism and people used to talk about maybe we should license journalists. Our licenses the First Amendment and anybody in the Printing Press is the publisher and nobody can tell them not to be. You dont nee need the inc. Or e Printing Press anymore because anybody with a phone is the publisher of the point i try to make in the book is that everything that you see on the internet is not embedded in the way organizations like you and i work for. We give it the oldfashioned way and that is we do not print or broadcast anything unless weve made a effort to find out if that is true. Especially now that we are into the social meeting and it is just a different deal that people are still getting that information. How do you find them to be different than face the nation interviews . Guest when he tried to time them about the time a person would work out, most people were killed about 40 minutes, so that means the most popular links that we do not have any set, ten, nine, eight and you are off kind of thing. I really like them because you can do like we are doing today. We can talk about a lot of Different Things in some details. Face the nation in a lot of the interviews are eight minutes long and that is pretty long for an interview on the daily news. I think it is just the time that you have and they are a little more informal which i think is good. I am more of an advocate on parenthetical phrases and all dot. So the podcasts fit into my way of viewing and reporting. Host we talk a lot about the crisis of newspapers for example, but it strikes me that podcasting and the ability to go along and pursue your interests is a pretty direct challenge to other broadcast mediums as well. Guest im not sure that i would call it a challenge but i think it is a great new innovation. If i do not get a chance to read the newspaper, i read it when i get to the office. I read the times and post and the wall street journal that are delivered to my house. They do read the news apps on their phone, and i think eventually that is where most newspapers if they are going to succeed. I think tv is going to be around. It is the service we have now, basically a 24 hour news chann channel. It is a streaming service aimed at a file, we want everybody to watch it but it is aimed at a younger audience. Lets just say i think the morning shows are going to be around for a long time. They already know what the news is, so it is our assignments to try to broaden that are in some way into the more analytical than we have in the past. I want to turn on the television in the evening and see what cbs thought it was the most importanwas the most importantt. I think 60 minutes is going to be around forever. The sunday morning shows like face the nation and meet the press have a long line and we may see the evening news broadcasts go the way of the afternoon. But right now, theyve still got five to 7 million people. That is an enormous audience compared to what you see on cable, but they are there all day. They turn on their tv at 6 30 at night we are going to provide a service for them, but that may change and it may be generational. The ages for a Network Programs are older folks. Those audiences are getting bolder but i think you will see most move to a streaming kind of Service Program and face the nation i think they are going to be there for a long time. They add to repeat. Guest they are expensive to produce. They spend a lot of money and it is obvious because they investigate for months when they are doing these programs and it takes a large workforce, but the difference in that we have to maintain a reporting staff in the newspapers around the world to be able to cover the unexpected. What they can do any reasonable way if they dont have to be prepared to cover the unexpected. When something happens they can pick and choose. They dont have to be responsible for telling you every single thing that happened that day so that is the basic economics of it. Host what surprised you in this as he went around and interviewed the sort of types of the new media . Guest it was fun to start with. They are not all young. I call him the bridge between old journalism and new. He is just a fascinating character. I lovi love to be around report. I think they are funny and interesting. David eisenhower said that they are not as interesting as they think they are but they are probably interesting like david eisenhower. Hes a nice fellow. I shouldnt say that. I will tell you something, it is also a good way to figure out who is getting their news and where the resources are. If you talk to enough reporters covering the white house host which is what your podcast has morphed into. Guest and we decided that the interesting story right now was donald trump and how he is being covered. So we are basically just kind of talking to people only in the white house and its really fun because they all have tale to tell. People always ask me what is your favorite beach, because ive covered them all. They say i guess its the white house, right . Theyll work for the same guy. My favorite has always been capitol hill as they are all independent contractors and that is how you get news. But that isnt really apt anymore because now there are as many factions in this white house as there are on k. They pretty much o are on the se page for the most part and there was a certain discipline. They all talk to reporters and talk about each other. A lot of them dont like others in the white house and its most unusual, that would be the best way to put it back from the standpoint of being a reporter, you are under pressure but its also google turned up some news. Host how does it compare with the Ronald Reagan white house . He came to blow up some of its orthodoxies. Guest you know, he did. He put together a great team led by jim baker. Not the best person for the best politician. Thats what im saying. The second best i would say is melvin who was the secretary of defense. Secretary of defense. He had been on the hill and was a master of understanding mike johnson. And a the third one was jim bakr but somehow or another had thiss ability to understand how to make things work. He understood perfectly how the press operated and he didnt see them as an enemy, he saw them as something he could use and sometimes heated probably more than the press would like to admit. He knew part of that was communicating in the press. If he was going to be on