Sept. 10, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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There was life before 9-11, and there's life after 9-11. | |
| and there's life after 9/11. | ||
| And life after 9/11 is actually quite different. | ||
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(dramatic music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
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| you can go to KELOLAND dot com. | ||
| And now, more importantly, joining me today is the former anchor of ABC's World News Now and CNN's Newsnight, as well as a former professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. | ||
| Aaron Brown, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am really glad to have you. | ||
| Obviously, this week is the anniversary of 9/11. | ||
| And when I got to know you, and I think when millions of other people got to know you, | ||
| was on September 11, 2001. | ||
| You were anchoring CNN's morning coverage that morning, which you probably thought was | ||
| just going to be like any other morning, and then very quickly it was not. | ||
| There's a rumor out there that you've already started correcting me before we started here, but that was actually your first day at CNN, but you're telling me that's not the case. | ||
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No, it's such a good story. | |
| And I don't know how many times I've been interviewed. | ||
| I don't know how many times this has come up. | ||
| I don't know how many times I've said, honestly, I love this story too. | ||
| I wish it was true, but it's not. | ||
| And it's such a good story that they would write it anyway. | ||
| So how did that come to be that people thought that that was your first morning? | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| How did that come to be that people thought that that was your first morning on CNN? | ||
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Well, I'm not sure I know. | |
| If I were to guess, you know, there are days and there are days. | ||
| And I had been doing, I mean, I anchored the weekend show. | ||
| I did 20 nightlines a year. | ||
| I was on television a fair amount in my life, but none of those days is 9-11. | ||
| And so all of a sudden, this kind of funny looking dude with glasses shows up on your TV screen on the biggest day in your country's modern history. | ||
| And you say, well, that's not Peter and that's not Dan and that's not Tom. | ||
| And I've never seen this funny looking dude before. | ||
| He must be new. | ||
| And I honestly think that's what happened. | ||
| That it wasn't that it, you know, on an average night, CNN probably had a million people watching the President's stem cell speech. | ||
| President Bush's stem cell speech, which I anchored, was in August. | ||
| Maybe a million people watched that. | ||
| 20 million people in America watched 9-11. | ||
| One and a quarter billion people around the world watch CNN. | ||
| And from September 11th to Thanksgiving, I was on TV. | ||
| I mean, you couldn't avoid me. | ||
| I was like a disease. | ||
| And I was constantly there. | ||
| I was on TV eight hours a day, every day. | ||
| Until we finally went home to my wife and kids and we went away for Thanksgiving weekend. | ||
| So I just think the newness of it all probably helped create the myth. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| That's the worst myth there is about you. | ||
| I can live with that. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, hopefully we've dispelled that fake news for all time. | ||
| But let's talk about that morning. | ||
| So obviously, you had had plenty of other jobs in broadcasting well before that, and anchoring, and all sorts of things. | ||
| But clearly, there was nothing that could possibly prepare you for what was going to happen that morning. | ||
| And what was it like to be a part of that. I mean, it was as 8.47 rolled around what what was it like that | ||
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morning. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it was crazy. | ||
| I understand what you mean when you say nothing can prepare you for that, because that's actually, in a kind of literal way, true. | ||
| You've never dealt with an attack on your country, all of these things that 9-11 was. | ||
| All of that's true. | ||
| On the other hand, I think I prepared my whole life for that day. | ||
| No one wants that day, but if there's going to be a day like that, I wanted to be the person to tell the story. | ||
| I felt capable of telling the story. | ||
| I understood the magnitude of the story. | ||
| I had done the 93 World Trade Center bombing by Al Qaeda. | ||
| I felt I knew what was happening. | ||
| At the same time, I'm not going to lie to you. | ||
| I mean, there's that little part of every guy who's going, do not screw this up and do not make this worse. | ||
| This is a horrible day in your country's history. | ||
| And the last thing they need is for you to do something stupid. | ||
| So that was there. | ||
| Yeah, so the main thing and the reason why I wanted to have you on, and I've actually been trying to track you down for quite some time, is that as someone that lived in New York City during 9-11, I mean, all of us, you know, we would go out for groceries, but basically, beyond that, we were glued to the television and not just people that lived in New York City, everybody that lived in America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| and really across the world. | ||
| But there was something about your demeanor. | ||
| There was a calmness and a decency to it that is so, I would say, the complete 180 | ||
| of so much of what cable news has become now. | ||
| And I'm wondering, is that just something that is sort of personally part of who you are? | ||
| Is that sort of what you wanted your television persona to be? | ||
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Or did it all just sort of unfurl as it were live? | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll take that all as a compliment. | ||
| I don't know that I ever, there was a period when I was at ABC | ||
| when I thought I had a television persona and it was horrible. | ||
| I mean, honestly. | ||
| I thought I was supposed to be Peter. | ||
| I admired Peter. | ||
| I thought I was supposed to be more formal than I am. | ||
| I'm just a guy from a small town in Minnesota, and I think I'm at my best, or was at my best. | ||
| When I was just me. | ||
| And I am actually fairly calm. | ||
| I don't, I'm not much of a hyper, you know, I don't like, I don't want to use anyone's as an example. | ||
| But, um, I don't use the word dramatic very often. | ||
| I don't tell people this is going to be dramatic. | ||
| If it's dramatic to them, it's dramatic to them. | ||
| Do you remember feeling the pressure, though, as that first plane hit, and it was still unclear whether it was a terrorist attack? | ||
| Do you remember feeling the inherent pressure? | ||
| I mean, the first plane hit, I wasn't on TV, so I don't know. | ||
| The second plane, when the second plane hit, I knew what was happening. | ||
| Yeah, first plane, I thought, I don't know, maybe somebody had a heart attack. | ||
| I mean, I'd come into LaGuardia hundreds of times, and you would come up the river, and you'd go past the Trade Center, and I thought, well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, crazy stuff happens. | ||
| Somebody crashed into the building. | ||
| When the second plane hit, Then there was no question anymore. | ||
| I said, this is an attack on the country. | ||
| This is al Qaeda. | ||
| No one else has the wherewithal to pull off something like this. | ||
| There was no war on terror as such, but this is the war on terror beginning. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's it like being in a newsroom in those moments when something truly horrific is happening? | ||
| You should ask someone who's in the newsroom. | ||
| Well, they're funneling information to you. | ||
| I know that, for example, I mean, I was on the roof of a building, of our building on 38th, And it wasn't a studio. | ||
| They were trying to throw up lights, and just crazy stuff was going on. | ||
| I'm afraid of heights, and guys are on scaffolding, so I'm afraid someone's going to fall off. | ||
| And it was nuts. | ||
| And the control room, I was pretty sure it was crazy, because I've been in control rooms. | ||
| But the control room's job, in case you don't know, you probably do know this, Yeah, right. | ||
| However crazy they are at any given moment, they do not transmit that insanity to you. | ||
| Because what you need to know is information, and that everything is under control. | ||
| It's not And there's some part of you that knows it's not, that things that were supposed to work aren't working, that someone who was supposed to be ready isn't, that somebody says something stupid you're going to have to correct. | ||
| All those things are going on and they're yelling at each other. | ||
| I remember I was doing the weekend show at ABC and I brought my daughter and she was probably seven or eight years old, maybe a little older. | ||
| And she was in the control room and after the show, She came down and she was a seven, eight-year-old who watched a TV show. | ||
| Not that she cared that her dad was doing the TV show. | ||
| It was just the magic of it. | ||
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And she said, Dad, do you know they say the F word up there? | |
| So I think there are two different places. | ||
| There's the place I occupied, which I owned. | ||
| I owned that space. | ||
| The people there were reflective of my emotional state and supported my emotional state, which was calm. | ||
| And there's that other world, the newsroom, which is crazy, the control room, which is insane. | ||
| Everybody who's making, there's Atlanta, which is wanting control of the show. | ||
| There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on, none of which has to do with the fact that 3,000 of my countrymen So, despite your calm demeanor and the professionalism, did you ever have moments where you thought you were going to just break up while on air? | ||
| I mean, I remember there were moments in days and weeks after where people would just be crying on the street. | ||
| You know, I was playing basketball near Gracie Mansion a couple weeks later. | ||
| A bunch of us finally went out to run around and then one guy just started crying on the basketball court. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| No is the short answer. | ||
| When the day was over, which was about 1.30 in the morning, Wednesday morning, so we had done about 18 hours of television, whatever it was. | ||
| I was tired and I was spent. | ||
| I desperately had to pee. | ||
| And I just sat down. | ||
| They helped me sit down. | ||
| They were worried about me. | ||
| Which I thought was crazy and I wept because I knew what you knew, what we all knew, which was that our world had changed. | ||
| That our world was not going to be the same. | ||
| I knew that my daughter's life was going to be different. | ||
| I didn't, I don't mean any of that in a personal way, which weirdly is also true, but that There was life before 9-11, and there's life after 9-11. | ||
| And life after 9-11 is actually quite different. | ||
| I mean, we have come to make it normal. | ||
| It's normal to walk through airports and look around and go through security and this and that and another thing. | ||
| It's normal to go into all these buildings and have them check your bags. | ||
| All this crazy stuff is normal. | ||
| It's normal to hear that someone died in Afghanistan. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That happened the other day. | ||
| They're still dying in Afghanistan. | ||
| All this stuff has become normal to us. | ||
| But it wasn't normal on the 10th of September 2001. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you very quickly realize how much was going to change? | ||
| No. | ||
| I wish. | ||
| I wish I was as smart as people somehow think I am. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm a... No. | ||
| I thought... I knew... By the end of the day, I mean, I'd talked to a lot of people. | ||
| I'd interviewed a lot of people. | ||
| People... I mean, I knew we were going to war. | ||
| I knew that. | ||
| But the small stuff, I mean, there's the big stuff. | ||
| We're going to war. | ||
| That's big. | ||
| There's the little stuff that post 9-11 is our lives that we, none of us thought about, I don't think, but became I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you were in New York, you know? | ||
| Yeah, what do you remember about when you were off camera being in New York? | ||
| That's kind of normal. | ||
| Except on September 12th, it is totally terrifying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you remember about just life in New York when you were off camera? | ||
| I don't remember being off camera. | ||
| Um, I, I, I, I wasn't necessarily a happy New Yorker before 9/11. | ||
| Um. | ||
| It's where I worked. | ||
| I was honored to have the jobs I had, for sure, but I'm kind of a small-town guy. | ||
| Post-9-11, I thought I started to understand New York better, that it didn't seem quite as balkanized to me, that I did see a sense of community that I hadn't seen I felt more a part of it. | ||
| I felt better about it. | ||
| I was proud of my fellow New Yorkers and I was proud of how the country took New Yorkers into their bosom and tried to help them heal. | ||
| Those of us who lived through it know, I mean, I drove up to go home when that finally became part of my life. | ||
| I would drive up 8th Avenue past the Port Authority and there's a fire station on 46th, I think. | ||
| And I would periodically stop in there because they had had a terribly They had taken a terrible loss. | ||
| And I would bring them stuff to sit around and shoot crap and this and that. | ||
| And I thought, no one will ever hear a fire engine the same again. | ||
| No one will ever see a fireman in New York the same again. | ||
| I mean, that's what I meant by all the little things that change, you know? | ||
| And if you live there and you know this, you live there. | ||
| that it is the little things that those people stole from us. | ||
| And they stole 3,000 lives and they did a lot of things, but they also stole the comfort of day-to-day living. | ||
| And sometimes I think that's the most unforgivable part. | ||
| Yeah, it was in a weird way. | ||
| I mean, it's almost twisted to think about it this way, but there was sort of a magical period in New York for a certain time after 9-11 because of the way we all kind of treated each other and cars were honking less and people were nicer. | ||
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I absolutely agree with that. | |
| I think there was a magical time in America that started on 9-11 and ended probably You know, March 19th, 2003, when we went to war in Iraq, I thought that period in between, we understood way better our common connections. | ||
| And then, you know, the disagreements over Iraq and Split us again, and we have not, and I'm not quite sure how we will recover from that. | ||
| That seemed to be the beginning of this kind of polarizing period. | ||
| So speaking of the polarizing period, despite your calm demeanor, can you talk a little bit about when you're live on air and something's happening, the level of 9-11 or far less significant, what it's like when news is rushing in and you've got the IFB in and the control room guys are telling you things on the fly. | ||
| Just making sure that what you're saying is actually accurate as we live in this time of fake news where nobody trusts anything and anchors botch things constantly and news reports are wrong all the time or slightly misleading or whatever, or the headline is seemingly different than the article itself. | ||
| Just the type of pressure it is to just be getting information from the control room and actually making sure you're accurately representing it. | ||
| Well, first of all, I'm going to answer the question, but I'm going to answer the question without agreeing to all of the characterizations. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't, that's not how I see the news business today. | ||
| How do you see it today? | ||
| Let me talk about that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't, you know, that's not a problem for me, but let me answer the specific question first. | ||
| I trust. | ||
| I trust the people I work with. | ||
| The people at ABC and the people at CNN busted their asses every second of every day to get it right. | ||
| And I knew that because I did it too. | ||
| And I trust myself. | ||
| I trust myself in part because I learned my lessons from Peter really well. | ||
| Don't get ahead of the story. | ||
| The story's the story. | ||
| Don't speculate. | ||
| Don't get ahead of it. | ||
| But I also trust that I know the difference between someone's excitement and someone has verified something. | ||
| No one who's done breaking news has gotten through it. | ||
| No one ever in the history of humans has gone through breaking news and gotten everything right. | ||
| You can't do 17 hours of television live And get every word right. | ||
| What you can do is correct it when you don't. | ||
| I remember that we reported, we reported the State Department had been evacuated, which turned out not to be true. | ||
| But someone reported that. | ||
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And you fix it. | |
| You correct it. | ||
| No one was being malicious in reporting it. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| Live TV is walking on a tightrope without a net. | ||
| And in those moments, in the big moments, that rope is really small. | ||
| I want you to address the way I frame the question, though, but very quickly, for people that don't know, the Peter that you're referring to, obviously, is Peter Jennings, who is the legendary ABC News anchor for decades. | ||
| I've worked for Peter. | ||
| Peter was important to me. | ||
| Peter was the best anchor I ever saw. | ||
| I remember I was pretty new at ABC, and he was doing a special report, and I was sitting in the newsroom watching him. | ||
| I was just this schmo from Seattle, been hired by ABC to do the overnight news. | ||
| And I watched Peter and I thought, oh my God, he is so much better than I am. | ||
| He was an unbelievable talent. | ||
| And his passing is something that I think about all the time. | ||
| Yeah, so wait, let's back up to the way I framed that question. | ||
| There seems to be, at least, I'm on the online side of this, and there's definitely a feeling that mainstream news is not as reliable as it once was, or that it's become very sensationalistic, or that the cable news specifically, they're constantly competing for ratings, so it's more over the top, and more over the top, and more over the top. | ||
| Do you not agree with that premise? | ||
| Do you not see it that way? | ||
| Well, I think there are, I mean, if I could break down every sentence, I'd say, well, I agree with that and I disagree with that. | ||
| For example, do cable networks compete? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the Times competes with the Post and the Dodgers compete with the Yankees. | ||
| I mean, competition is at the core of much of what we do. | ||
| But the fact that we compete in whatever it is we compete in, Doesn't necessarily mean it is not by definition some terrible thing. | ||
| In many cases, I think, it makes us better. | ||
| I thought one of the things about network TV, about ABC, CBS and ABC, competing against those people, and I thought, my God, these people. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| Bad ones are really good. | ||
| I was so out of my league, I thought at first it was crazy. | ||
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I wanted to beat them. | |
| I wanted to be first. | ||
| I wanted to be better. | ||
| I wanted to write better. | ||
| I wanted to produce better. | ||
| No differently than you wanted to ask better questions than whoever it is you compete with. | ||
| So the fact that we compete, it's just the fact that we compete, it doesn't, I think, I don't want to go on endlessly on this, but I do want, there's a couple of things I'd like to say. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| One is if I look at my 35 years, I would identify two things that I think are significantly different beyond The one thing that is totally different, which is technology. | ||
| Technology is hugely different. | ||
| And I won't say it doesn't change things. | ||
| It changes everything. | ||
| But I don't think it changes substance in quite the way other people might. | ||
| So let me say the two things that I see. | ||
| One is, when I started doing this, we had a shared set of facts. | ||
| We all agreed That the earth was round. | ||
| There wasn't a flat earth channel. | ||
| Today, it seems to me that we don't have a shared set of facts. | ||
| You get to have your facts. | ||
| And I don't understand that. | ||
| But that just seems to be the way it shakes is people don't like these facts. | ||
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Well, I'll come up with my own facts, okay? | |
| I like those better. | ||
| The storm does go to Alabama. | ||
| Well, actually, we can spend a week talking about something that's stupid. | ||
| So that's number one. | ||
| And the significance of that to me is, when we agreed on the facts, we still fought. | ||
| But we fought a kind of substantive, fight about how to deal with poverty. | ||
| What's the best way? | ||
| We didn't argue about whether there was. | ||
| There were conservative ideas and liberal ideas and moderate ideas on how to deal with it. | ||
| And we would fight about which of those ideas would get us to where we wanted to go. | ||
| But we understood where we wanted to go. | ||
| I see this in the healthcare debate. | ||
| I have a friend, he's a friend of mine, he's crazy. | ||
| He is crazy. | ||
| He was a doctor and he said, well, in the old days, everybody got treatment. | ||
| And I'm thinking, no, they didn't. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You were a doctor. | ||
| You weren't an orthopedic surgeon. | ||
| You weren't putting artificial shoulder replacements in poor people. | ||
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You weren't doing that just for fun. | |
| But he's convinced himself of his set of facts. | ||
| The other thing that's different and that I think is really dangerous is | ||
| too many of us Americans or whatever, too many of us only want to hear that which we already | ||
| believe is true. And I don't, I... | ||
| To do the kind of show you do, you have to read a lot. | ||
| You can't just read the little things that support what you believe is true. | ||
| You have to have some sense of what other people believe. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I've done it all my life. | ||
| I can't all die reading some crazy thing, because that's what I do. | ||
| I want to know what the Wall Street Journal says in this editorial page, in the same way I want to know what the Times editorial page says. | ||
| I want to know what National Review Online says. | ||
| Some really interesting ideas have come out of the conservative press and the neocons, which I find an interesting group of people. | ||
| And I also find the progressive press interesting. | ||
| It's a little more tedious, but nevertheless interesting. | ||
| And most people—I'm going to use the Fox word now—if those are your politics, You turn Fox on. | ||
| And I've seen the ratings. | ||
| I know this is actually true. | ||
| If you're competing against those guys, it's a bitch. | ||
| That's how they work. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| How do we get out of that? | ||
| That funneling of self-imposed prison, basically. | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And honestly, you have to book someone way smarter than me. | ||
| I'm just a guy that wrote the news and reported stories. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| Maybe the first part of the answer is we have to understand better how we got into it. | ||
| At some point, if you don't understand why you got lost, you'll never get out of the forest. | ||
| My concern is And I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| I'm not pretending to know the answer to that. | ||
| I can pick spots where I thought, wow, that person is just upset with me because we reported something that is factually true. | ||
| They're not disputing the facts. | ||
| But they don't like the facts. | ||
| And And I would try and answer 50 emails a day. | ||
| And mostly you're just saying thanks, or I'm sorry we disagree. | ||
| And sometimes people would write about, they say, I can't believe that you reported this story. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it happened. | ||
| But you didn't have to report it. | ||
| It makes us look bad. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Don't you feel better having been in a society where people know everything as opposed to just little bits of things? | ||
| You're doing this amazing to me. | ||
| We talked a little before about the fact I've never done anything quite like this. | ||
| You're working a technology that didn't exist a generation ago. | ||
| We carry around, I have my little phone here, we carry around in our pockets the sum total of knowledge of the human race if we want it, you know, if we're connected to the internet. | ||
| We have all of this knowledge and information available to us, but we only want to hear the stuff that makes us feel good. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I mean, that actually is basically why I'm doing this show and why I try to get on people from the left and the right and pretty much everywhere else, because, yeah, we're catering it to ourselves. | ||
| And then we wonder why we're polarized. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I, you know, I don't, I wish, Dave, honestly, I wish I had an answer. | ||
| I wish I could snap my fingers and make people read the editorial of the op-eds of this or that or another thing. | ||
| I wish I could say to them, instead of watching this channel today, watch that channel today. | ||
| And I spent some time working for the Mayo Foundation doing work about health care and health care reform. | ||
| I didn't know anything really about it, but I learned a lot. | ||
| And one of the things I learned is really a lot of good ideas that don't Progressives have a lot of good ideas, and conservatives have a lot of good ideas, and none of them seem to be perfect ideas, but if we're only listening to one set of ideas, we're missing another set of ideas that may help us get there. | ||
| I mean, if we have a shared goal, of making sure that every one of our fellow citizens has health, affordable health care, then why wouldn't we listen to every responsible idea to make that happen? | ||
| And traveling around the country for Mayo helped me understand that there were lots of ways to do it. | ||
| And some of them work, some of them don't, some of them have big-time flaws, frankly. | ||
| To me, you might not think they're flaws, but I think they're flaws. | ||
| You know, someone else might not think they're flaws, but I think they're flaws. | ||
| And this is the way it's supposed to be. | ||
| We're supposed to have a set of values that we think are important, and then we find ideas that help us achieve those things. | ||
| Like, here's a crazy one. | ||
| I think every American child should have a good school. | ||
| I'm embarrassed at our mediocrity. | ||
| How can the United States of America have mediocre public schools? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| So that's a value of mine. | ||
| Or I'm truly embarrassed that a child born today in Havana, Cuba, is more likely to reach her first birthday That's crazy. | ||
| I'm an American. | ||
| That's not supposed to happen. | ||
| That's a value of mine. | ||
| So I would put money in there. | ||
| I'd fix that. | ||
| I don't know how I'd fix it. | ||
| I mean, I'm not that smart, but other people would look at other things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you remember when cable news sort of, like a moment or a period of time when it started getting more sensationalistic? | ||
| Because I do remember when you were on CNN and Larry King was on CNN. | ||
| There was a sense, one of the things when I was doing a little research on you, the phrase cerebral came up a couple times. | ||
| And it's like when, I think there was a time when you watch cable news and you actually felt that you were gonna learn something, you were gonna get a little smarter. | ||
| And now, and we don't have to pick a network, I won't pick on anybody. | ||
| But generally, I find when I watch cable news, I don't feel smarter. | ||
| I got a partisan talking point. | ||
| Why do I watch? | ||
| Well, I don't watch that much, to be quite honest, but I watch, you know, little bites here and there that I usually get through Twitter. | ||
| Do you not watch? | ||
| I don't watch much. | ||
| No, I don't watch much TV. | ||
| Part of it is, I've seen Sausage get maimed. | ||
| I mean, there's some element of that. | ||
| Part of it is, it's hard to watch as a civilian. | ||
| I did it for 35 years, and it's hard not to say, well, I'd have done this, or why would you? | ||
| There's some of that, but it's also just stunningly inefficient. | ||
| I'm just an old, retired guy. | ||
| It's not like I'm that busy or anything, but if I want to see something, I just Google it, and I can see it. | ||
| And if I want to read something, I know how to find the stuff I want to read, and here, there, and everywhere. | ||
| So in a weird way, I find modern television inefficient for someone like me. | ||
| I'll agree with I'm not much of a food fight person. | ||
| I'm grateful to CNN. | ||
| I wouldn't have the life I have if it were not CNN. | ||
| I don't know why they gave me that much money, but God bless them. | ||
| So I can sit here in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the summer and have this conversation. | ||
| I'm grateful for that. | ||
| They have these panels of like a thousand people, and the goal seems to be if they can get 500 of them to talk at once. | ||
| And I don't find that interesting. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I didn't interview that way. | ||
| Occasionally I'd have two, but I liked one. | ||
| And sometimes producers would say, you know, it'd be kind of fun if we did this, let me try it. | ||
| And it's probably why, you know, I wasn't that successful. | ||
| Because I didn't appreciate the food fight. | ||
| I was trying to elicit serious answers about serious questions. | ||
| And if I spotted a serious hypocrisy, I was certainly going to go at that. | ||
| I liked that. | ||
| I didn't mind confrontation on TV at all. | ||
| But I just find this, and I think everybody does it, kind of a staged confrontation I'm not crazy about. | ||
| Yeah, I have to back you up. | ||
| So you just said that's probably why you weren't that successful. | ||
| I mean, you were incredibly successful. | ||
| But do you mean that if you had done that more that maybe CNN, you know, doesn't bring in Anderson Cooper and, you know, Newsnight with Aaron Brown is still on 15 years later? | ||
| You know, maybe. | ||
| I mean, things happen because they're supposed to happen. | ||
| And that was OK. | ||
| I was pretty ready. | ||
| I actually, the decision, it's funny, I was thinking about this today. | ||
| I thought, I didn't know if this was the direction we'd go, but there was a genre of stories in my era. | ||
| Maybe there still is, but it doesn't seem like it. | ||
| Now all stories are Trump stories. | ||
| All Trump, all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He did this, he is not, he's this, he's that. | ||
| In one of the stories of my era, it was the missing white girl story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little white girl of some, usually cute. | |
| Well, the big one right before 9-11 was Chandra Levy, which I'm sure you remember. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That was like the story until 9-11. | ||
| Yes, and she wasn't a blonde, but she was missing. | ||
| And that had some, that had elements, you know, it had a congressman, it was, you know, And I remember thinking when I was doing the Santa deal, are you really prepared to do this night after night? | ||
| And it turned out I didn't have to. | ||
|
unidentified
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So there is a God. | |
| But there was a young woman. | ||
| It's a horrible story. | ||
| It's a tragic, terrible, but not national story, named Natalie Holloway. | ||
| I think from Alabama or something. | ||
| And she went on a senior trip, and she disappeared, and she got killed, and it was horrible. | ||
| It was not a national story. | ||
| There was no larger issue. | ||
| There wasn't an epidemic of missing white girls. | ||
| But viewers like those stories, like weather stories. | ||
| Viewers like those stories, and I did not like them. | ||
| And part of it was just stubborn. | ||
| I can be very stubborn. | ||
| And I thought, this is stupid, and it's pandering. | ||
| And would we do this if it was a missing black girl? | ||
| And the answer is no. | ||
| And Greta, God bless her, was all over it. | ||
| I mean, all over it. | ||
| All, Natalie, all the time. | ||
| And I refused to do it. | ||
| And I had bosses who said, "You should do this story." | ||
| And I wanted to do the story. | ||
| I just, I have to, I have the contractual right to make this decision and I'm making | ||
| it and the Newsnight with Aaron Braun is not going to do the story. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| So then you don't do that story, and then I assume that hurts ratings, and is that really ultimately what kind of burnt you out? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, absolutely. | |
| I think it's what lawyers call an adverse interest. | ||
| Well, it's an interesting question. | ||
| There's an argument that the show would have done better. | ||
| The counter-argument, which is the one I comfortably live with, is that I couldn't pull it off. | ||
| The viewers would know. | ||
| The viewers would know, this is not Aaron Brown. | ||
| This is not who he is. | ||
| He's more tedious than that. | ||
| He's more boring than that. | ||
| He's more serious than that. | ||
| He's more cerebral, if that's the word. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whatever it is, they wouldn't have bought it from me. | |
| And I felt that pretty strongly. | ||
| And I also felt that I had one thing to sell. | ||
| And that was authenticity. | ||
| That I am an authentic person. | ||
| And if I lost that, I really had nothing. | ||
| I don't want anyone ever to think I was being a hero or that I was standing up for journalism with a capital J or any of that. | ||
| It was self-preservation. I... | ||
| And maybe selfishness, because I had people work for me. | ||
| That I had a reputation that I valued. | ||
| I earned it. | ||
| And I wasn't going to do anything that I thought would damage it. | ||
| Part of the reason I never really wanted to work after that was that I was very happy with how people thought of me. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You did a couple shows after that, but then you taught for seven years at Arizona State. | ||
| Yeah, and that was fun. | ||
| I never went to college, and so I would tell students, this is my college experience. | ||
| I'll get drunk later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to tell you a story. | |
| And you can cut this out, I'm cool. | ||
| We don't cut, go for it. | ||
| We never edit for content on this show. | ||
| That's one of my rules. | ||
| Feel free to break the rule if you want, because it's kind of a weird pat on the back story, but I don't quite mean it that way. | ||
| This happened about two weeks ago, three weeks ago I think. | ||
| And my wife and I were walking, we had had dinner, and we were leaving the restaurant. | ||
| She saw someone she knew, and she introduced me to this woman, and the woman introduced me to her husband, who was about my age, I would say. | ||
| And he said, I always wanted to meet you because, and I've had that conversation a billion times, and I know what comes next. | ||
| And he was gonna say, I was in Dublin on 9-11 and blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That's not what he said. | ||
| He said, the night that George Harrison died, you did the most amazing program. | ||
| And I've always wanted to just thank you for it. | ||
| I had no idea what we did. | ||
| But anyone who works in television or whatever We call television now, okay? | ||
| Whatever this thing is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Knows how ephemeral it all is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you do it, it's out there, it's gone, and on to the next thing. | |
| But a generation later that George Harrison died, I looked this up, November 30th, 2001. | ||
| So we're talking almost a generation later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He remembered what I did. | |
| And he actually quoted the first line of the show, which was really weird, okay? | ||
| I'll give you this word. | ||
| He said, you started the show by saying, I read the news today and the news was rather sad. | ||
| And he remembered a lot of it. | ||
| I ended up getting on the show, but I didn't remember any of it. | ||
| My point in the story of telling this story is not, aren't I wonderful? | ||
| Do I think that? | ||
| Is that I know that at various moments of my life, the work I did connected to people in ways I don't even appreciate. | ||
| And then 20 years later, I'm the most anonymous person on the planet. | ||
| I go out of my way to be just me. | ||
| It was not easy to track you down to do this, but I thank you for responding. | ||
| I appreciate whatever effort. | ||
| I wasn't trying to be difficult. | ||
| I didn't know you were looking. | ||
| I value... I don't think anyone ever says, you know, I remember the work you did on Natalie Holloway. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guess I just want to protect that. | ||
| I wanted to protect the sense that people respected the work I did. | ||
| I waited a long time for one of those jobs. | ||
| I wasn't the natural. | ||
| I didn't get that job until I was In my 50s, I had done a lot. | ||
| I had had a life. | ||
| I was what we call in golf, a grinder. | ||
| You couldn't kill me. | ||
| That was unkillable. | ||
| It's funny, I read a piece where you described it, you described anchors as leading men, as character actors, and it's so interesting to me because of that authenticity, which is just, it was obvious then and it was obvious now. | ||
| So it's almost like you did all this work and then almost stumbled into the anchor thing somehow. | ||
| I would, you know, the analogy, or the Description. | ||
| I mean, Peter was a leading man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Peter looked like he was born in a trench coat. | ||
| I saw him once. | ||
| I saw him. | ||
| I used to live on the Upper West Side by ABC News over there. | ||
| And I saw him walking down the street and he looked like a leading man. | ||
| I mean, everything about him, the way he stood, his hair, his face, everything. | ||
| That's who he was. | ||
| I was Peter Falk. | ||
| I wasn't supposed to have a leading man's job. | ||
| Except they didn't count on... I had a talent. | ||
| I can write and I can talk to people, I guess. | ||
| And I had determination that I could be that. | ||
| We can debate whether I was good at it or not good at it. | ||
| I don't even know sometimes. | ||
| But I know I wasn't a leading man. | ||
| That I know. | ||
| But I was a real guy. | ||
| I did have a kind of boy-next-door quality. | ||
| And when I settled that that's who I was going to be, that Aaron Brown on television was going to be Aaron Brown off television, good things happened to me. | ||
| Yeah, it's like you're giving me one-on-one advice right now, basically. | ||
| People watching. | ||
| Be yourselves. | ||
| It's all you can do. | ||
| You know, one of the questions I get most when I tour and I go to colleges and things, I find this really at colleges more than anywhere else, students will ask me who I trust. | ||
| Who do I trust in the media? | ||
| Who do you trust in the media these days? | ||
| How do you answer that? | ||
| Well, usually I tell them it's rare that I trust an institution anymore. | ||
| So I can't say that I trust CNN anymore, or I even trust the New York Times anymore. | ||
| There are some specific writers that I like. | ||
| There are a couple of online people that I really like that are off the beaten path. | ||
| But it's becoming increasingly harder and harder to find... | ||
| television personalities, I suppose, that I really trust. | ||
| Do you have a list? | ||
| Are there a couple people you can recommend for the college kids that are watching? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of people who write for both the Post and the Times, who I think as reporters and as someone who has, in some cases, competed against them, and in some cases, I'm glad I didn't compete against them, I think are terrific. | ||
| In this moment that you and I are talking, okay, it's a great little example of something. | ||
| Jodi Kantor and Megan Toohey are touring the country promoting their book on the Harvey Weinstein story, which is really a story of investigative journalism and how they came to write the story. | ||
| We can fuss about Me Too and that there's much we haven't settled in Me Too, which I think is true, but we can't argue the journalism of that story. | ||
| And Pharoah also deserves big pats on the back. | ||
| So, I look at the news environment differently, I think, than perhaps you do. | ||
| I see a lot of people whose work I admire, and part of it is there's so much out there. | ||
| It's like you go to a restaurant, You actually only eat like two things, but there's like 20 things on the menu. | ||
| You go to Cheesecake Factory, there's like 1,000 things on the menu. | ||
| That menu is too big. | ||
| It's like a book. | ||
| You know they can't do 1,000 things well. | ||
| You know that. | ||
| Nobody can do that. | ||
| No restaurant can do that. | ||
| I feel a little bit that way about the news, is that there's so much media out there. | ||
| Some of it's going to be bad. | ||
| Unhealthful. | ||
| Too caloric. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's going to be some of it that's great. | |
| And the challenge for the consumer, it seems to me, getting back to an earlier part of our conversation, is not to stop going to the Cheesecake Factory, though I'm, believe me, not recommending that to anyone. | ||
| To find the people who make sense to you. | ||
| And if Chris Cuomo is not one of those people, then don't watch him. | ||
| I had a friend who used to watch television and he hated it. | ||
| So he could get angry at it. | ||
| I said, life's too short. | ||
| I said, why, you know, don't do that. | ||
| Life's too short. | ||
| Watch stuff that actually makes you feel smarter. | ||
| Or better informed, or challenges you, or something. | ||
| But in a general way, unless maybe it's because I'm older, I'm way less cynical about modern media than you. | ||
| I hope you're right. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I genuinely mean that. | ||
| I feel right. | ||
| I wonder how people We'd look at, for example, the Post and the Times in this period, where I've seen a ton of fabulous journalism, and almost none of it has been questioned. | ||
| A lot of it, people go, because it's a phrase of the moment, well, it's fake news, but what they actually mean is, I didn't like it. | ||
| Not that it's wrong. | ||
| I mean, does anybody, any serious person believe that the Times writes stuff, it just makes it up? | ||
| I mean, honestly? | ||
| Do people really believe that? | ||
| I got one for you. | ||
| Did you happen to see about two months ago the cover of the Sunday Times? | ||
| It was the cover, the front page of the Sunday Times was a picture about how YouTubers are radicalizing people to the far right and the alt-right, and one of the pictures that they had in there was my picture. | ||
| I mean, I'm a liberal my whole life. | ||
| I have these types of conversations. | ||
| So they've done some strange things. | ||
| I would leave it at that. | ||
| But believe me, I hope you're right. | ||
| That would piss me off, okay? | ||
| I mean, that would totally piss me off. | ||
| I like that I live in a era where I can say pissed off on television. | ||
| You can say worse than that if you want. | ||
| I'm sure I can, but I don't really, you know, I have this reputation. | ||
| He's cerebral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He wouldn't say shit. | |
| Cerebral, cerebral, yeah. | ||
| Don't blow it right now. | ||
| You don't want to blow it on YouTube, you know? | ||
| No, no, I don't. | ||
| I'm the kind of person who would call the copy editor, would find the copy editor. | ||
| I mean, I just, I had a problem with DirecTV two weeks ago. | ||
| I called the president of AT&T because they just won't fix it. | ||
| And I figured, Oh, you want to get it fixed? | ||
| Call them. | ||
| I actually don't think that New York Times has a public editor anymore, but I did invite the author on the show many times and he declined, the author of the article. | ||
| My point is that if at any point, look, all of us who are public people have things said about us or written about us that we would Fine. | ||
| Troubling. | ||
| I have a friend who's in the middle of a Me Too mess. | ||
| And he's just, in one level, breaks my heart that he put himself in that situation. | ||
| On the other level, I know what it's like to have people beat you up in public. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| You've got to kind of It's like the yin and the yang. | ||
| You get to do this really cool job. | ||
| You could be, you know, putting doors on foreign focuses, but instead you get to interview anyone you want to interview. | ||
| I mean, it's really cool. | ||
| Um, so you take a little hit. | ||
| Um, but, but if that's the worst thing you've got on the times, if that's the worst thing you got on the times, I'm not saying it was right. | ||
| I'm not saying, that they should have done it. | ||
| I am not saying you shouldn't be pissed off about it. | ||
| I'm saying if that's the worst thing you got, a photo editor made a stupid decision, come on. | ||
| I can give you a couple others, but I'll spare you. | ||
| You also get to read Peter Baker or Maggie Haberman. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of, no institution is perfect. | ||
| None, not even yours. | ||
| No institution is perfect. | ||
| Some people say it was his first day on the job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, people screw up. | |
| Well, listen, on that note, I know that you're basically off the grid these days and you don't do social media or any of that stuff. | ||
| And I wanted to fly you out here to LA. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do a little Twitter. | |
| I've kind of gotten a little Twitter bug. | ||
| Are you doing a little Twitter? | ||
| I couldn't find you. | ||
| What's your Twitter handle? | ||
| Aaronbrown1110. | ||
| Aaron Brown 1110, we couldn't hunt that one down. | ||
| All right, I'm gonna follow you on Twitter, and I'll get you some Twitter followers. | ||
| I'll get you some Twitter followers, and then you're gonna be right back in the mess. | ||
| No, believe me, I am not gonna be in the mess. | ||
| You only get in the mess if you choose to be in the mess. | ||
| And you know I've chosen not to. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Well, listen. | ||
| I seriously appreciate the conversation. | ||
| And I thought that the questions were good, the pushbacks were fun, and maybe this won't make sense to you, but it does to me. | ||
| I'm glad I said yes. | ||
| I'm glad you said yes, too. | ||
| Listen, you walked America through a time that was crazy, and I think a little bit of that decency that resonated with me is what I've tried to bring to what I do here. | ||
| So I thank you. | ||
| I hope we can do this in person at some point. | ||
| I'll come to Santa Fe. | ||
| That's how we're gonna have to do it next time. | ||
| Santa Fe is fabulous. | ||
| It's a great place. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Aaron, thank you so much. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| You're very welcome. |
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