July 31, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I hired an opposition research company to go in and pull the voter registration records of the White House press corps. | ||
| These are public records. | ||
| Anybody can do it. | ||
| And they discovered that by a ratio of 12 to one, the seats of the White House are occupied | ||
| by registered Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
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♪♪ I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today | |
| is a former White House press secretary, a Fox News contributor, | ||
| and author of the new book I've got in my hand right now, | ||
| Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias, why the press gets so much wrong and just doesn't care. | ||
| Ari Fleischer, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, thank you for having me. | ||
| Ari, I feel like you wrote this book for me personally, because this basically gets to the heart of everything that I do, every hour that I spend working on this show, that the media is sort of a bigger problem than almost anything else at the moment. | ||
| But before we dive into the book, you have a really interesting backstory and all that stuff. | ||
| How'd you get involved in politics? | ||
| What eventually got you to the White House? | ||
| And then we'll get into all this stuff. | ||
| Well, to put it in a nutshell, it was totally an accident. | ||
| I graduated from college. | ||
| I moved home to play baseball, and a friend of mine had a brother who was managing a congressional race. | ||
| They needed a press secretary. | ||
| I knew nothing, and I got the job, which tells you how little you need to know to be a press secretary. | ||
| And I fell in love with politics. | ||
| We lost. | ||
| It was 1982. | ||
| Reagan stayed the course. | ||
| Only one Republican challenger won that cycle. | ||
| But I got the bug. | ||
| I moved to Washington. | ||
| I was unemployed, and I got a job as a press secretary to a New York congressman, and that began a 16-year career on Capitol Hill, followed by the Bush campaign, where I moved to Texas in 1999, and then the White House. | ||
| Do you miss being in the thick of the political madness? | ||
| No. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Is there nothing you miss about it? | ||
| I spent 21 wonderful years in Washington, and I loved every one of the days I was there, and especially at the White House and when I was Communications Director of the Ways and Means Committee after Republicans took control of the House. | ||
| Tremendous excitement and satisfaction. | ||
| But I was never a Washington for life type. | ||
| So one day, you just know your day has come, it's time to go. | ||
| And it hit me after 21 long years. | ||
| So I loved it. | ||
| I loved standing at that podium, Dave, at the White House. | ||
| I loved taking heat. | ||
| I loved catching the curveballs, the fastballs, and standing my ground on behalf of a president and a person who I really believe in. | ||
| And that's what it's about. | ||
| If you believe deeply, Washington is the town to be in. | ||
| And then go back home. | ||
| Believe it or not, I watched many, many, many of those press conferences that you were doing back then. | ||
| They were sort of must-see TV, and this will sort of segue us a little bit to the book. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, the media treats Republican press secretaries and Republican administrations a little bit different than Democrat press secretaries and administrations. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I just call it friendly. | ||
| Softballs from the White House press for you. | ||
| They love conservatives. | ||
| They love Bush. | ||
| Look, the truth is, as much as things have changed since I was press secretary 20 years ago, and they have changed a lot, they've gotten a lot worse and nastier. | ||
| Fact is, right now, Peter Doocy is really, from Fox News, the only one of those 49 seats asking hard questions to the Biden press secretary. | ||
| When I was press secretary, there were 49 seats asking me hard questions. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| The press takes sides and They did back then. | ||
| But back then, David, it was more just your liberal, conservative bias. | ||
| Reporters still thought their job at the end of the day was be objective and tell the news fair and not give their opinions on the air. | ||
| Today, you watch CNN, you watch almost every show, and they think their job is to give opinions. | ||
| And that's what they do, and it's killing journalism. | ||
| So when do you think that started? | ||
| Because I think anyone watching this, they get it. | ||
| That's what I spend most of my show doing at this point, is debunking a lot of the nonsense that CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, that they're putting out as fact, when if you just read the headline with a little more precision, you will see that it actually is opinion. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely right. | ||
| Look, it started because of two reasons. | ||
| One is technology. | ||
| The internet led to the decline of advertising for print newspapers, and it changed how you can watch the news as we had a proliferation of outlets. | ||
| So you had conservatives watching conservative media, you had liberals watching liberal media, and newspapers had no more money. | ||
| The only way they got money was from their subscribers. | ||
| And so they didn't want to alienate their subscribers, unlike an advertiser who wanted you to appeal broadly to the entire country, so you have to be mindful of staying somewhat sensible and accurate. | ||
| Now you can let it rip. | ||
| And along came more social media, Twitter and other places where reporters felt really good giving their opinions. | ||
| They didn't value objectivity anymore. | ||
| They wanted more Twitter followers. | ||
| They wanted the praise of Hollywood actors and actresses when they let their opinion rip. | ||
| Hence Jim Acosta at CNN, John Harwood at CNN. | ||
| Daytime reporters who don't report, they opine, and always from a far-left point of view, anti-Trump, anti-Republican. | ||
| And then the other factor was Trump. | ||
| When Trump emerged, the press somehow made the decision to save the Republic. | ||
| They decided that the American people erred in 2016 by not electing Hillary, and the press was going to fix the mistake. | ||
| So these snobs put themselves in a position superior to the people and said, collusion is probably how come Trump won. | ||
| The Steele dossier is credible, and we're going to put Trump in the country through years of misery to make the case against him. | ||
| And, you know, as I write in the book, they didn't put just their finger on the scale. | ||
| They put their writing hand on the scale, and many of them put their entire bodies on the scale. | ||
| And this is the mainstream media today. | ||
| And that's why I wrote the book, Dave. | ||
| This is why I blow the whistle on the press. | ||
| I try to be fair. | ||
| I will always call the balls and strikes. | ||
| I supported President Trump on policy pretty much all the time. | ||
| I regularly tweeted that I objected to his behavior. | ||
| When he tweeted something I thought went too far and was offensive, I called him on it. | ||
| But when I saw the coverage of Donald Trump, how biased, unfair, get Trump, if it was anti-Trump, it got a bump coverage, I said, I'm going to write about this. | ||
| It's not good for the country. | ||
| It's not good for democracy. | ||
| It's not good for journalism when reporters are in the tank. | ||
| Do you think that they would have done the same thing to your guy, George W. Bush, had social media been as big back then? | ||
| Because I remember very specifically one day, I used to live on the Upper West, which is, you know, bastion of liberalism, Columbia U. And I remember during the Bush presidency, and it was during the Iraq war, when the media was going crazy all the time, and you were doing the press junkets and all that stuff, I remember walking out and there was a guy with a table with books. | ||
| And I remember every single book Basically was George W. Bush is the devil like every single book and they were all being bought of course and Had social media existed at the time. | ||
| My guess is they would have done the exact same thing. | ||
| It just would have happened earlier Yeah, I know you're right about that. | ||
| And I think one of the points I make in the book is Regardless of what President Trump decides to do whether he runs or doesn't run they're gonna do it to Ron DeSantis Yeah, they're gonna do it to Kirstie. | ||
| No, they're gonna do it to Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton and here's where I I have some sympathy for President Trump. | ||
| What he would tell you is Republicans don't fight hard enough, and that's why he does what he does. | ||
| And I think there's some merit to that, because he recognized the mainstream media is in the tank, they're out to get him, they're not fair, they're not objective, and so it made him fight twice as hard, three times as hard. | ||
| I wish sometimes he had just gotten it with a little more subtlety or nuance, but that's not his nature. | ||
| He let it rip. | ||
| Everywhere he went, he was a bull in a china shop, and he took a new china shop with him everywhere he went. | ||
| And so, it's a calibration issue, but yeah, Republicans and conservatives need to fight, because my conclusion writing this book is that the media has turned to activists. | ||
| The mainstream media, and by that I mean the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, They are activists for a cause, and it's a liberal cause. | ||
| My first chapter is called Original Sin, and I go into how many reporters are Democrats. | ||
| I hired an opposition research company to go in and pull the voter registration records of the White House press corps. | ||
| These are public records, anybody can do it. | ||
| And they discovered that by a ratio of 12 to one, the seats of the White House are occupied by registered Democrats. | ||
| Now, Dave, why isn't it one to one? | ||
| Why isn't it 12 to 1 Republican to Democrat? | ||
| The news would be different if it was 12 to 1 Democrat, Republican to Democrat. | ||
| But the White House, press corps, journalism schools throughout America, newsrooms pretty much throughout America, but especially in Washington and New York, overwhelmingly cut from the same cloth, think alike, act alike, dress alike, tweet alike, Democrats. | ||
| And there's another study I found in here. | ||
| It's a Pew Research study. | ||
| The only group of Americans who say the press understands them are college-educated Democrats. | ||
| If you're a Democrat with a high school degree, you say the press doesn't understand me. | ||
| Independents, regardless of degree, press doesn't understand me, and certainly all Republicans say that. | ||
| The press has dug itself into a cul-de-sac. | ||
| There are college-educated Democrats who know how to write and think only for fellow college-educated Democrats. | ||
| And if you own a gun, if your grandfather taught you how to hunt, If you think life begins at conception, if you pray every day, the press doesn't understand you. | ||
| And that's a huge problem with journalism. | ||
| Do you think that they know that they're biased? | ||
| I mean, I think you're right. | ||
| When you said the Twitter thing before, Twitter sort of unmasked it because then every minute of every day, they were sharing their opinions. | ||
| And then over time, you know, you could aggregate it and go, okay, you guys obviously have a certain point of view. | ||
| But I look at a guy like, you know, I hit CNN all the time on my show. | ||
| Jake Tapper is always thought of as the one non-insane guy there, but it's obvious he's a Democrat. | ||
| Like, do you think that they know what they're doing, or do you think they honestly believe they're pulling the wool over our eyes? | ||
| They know it, and I've talked to them about it. | ||
| They know it. | ||
| A lot of them privately acknowledge it. | ||
| But they won't do anything about it. | ||
| And this is the problem because they're too like-minded. | ||
| They're in denial and they're in decline. | ||
| They're watching their viewership go down. | ||
| They're watching their ratings go down. | ||
| They're watching the trust from the American people go down. | ||
| But unlike any corporation who would say when they have a trend like that, What's wrong with us? | ||
| What do we need to do differently? | ||
| Reporters tend to say, what's wrong with America? | ||
| What do the Americans need to do differently? | ||
| So what do we do about that? | ||
| What do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, is it that, you know, basically the new guy at CNN just has to fire everybody? | ||
| I mean, is it as simple as that? | ||
| Does it even matter anymore? | ||
| I mean, should any of us care? | ||
| We know that the ratings are going down. | ||
| Should we just let them die? | ||
| Let them just go extinct? | ||
| No, and here's where I think, and I hope my book is a little bit different. | ||
| I point these things out because I lament them. | ||
| I want the press to be fair. | ||
| I want them to be objective. | ||
| It's so good for America if we can pick up one source of news and say, yep, I believe it, I trust it, now here's what I think needs to be done about it, without the media telling us what we're supposed to think. | ||
| My solution to it is, number one, young people, conservatives, need to get into journalism. | ||
| It's healthy. | ||
| Number two, journalism schools Newsrooms need to actively recruit people who think differently. | ||
| Journalism needs a booster shot of independent thought. | ||
| And that's not going to come from the same old people, it will come from more conservative thinking people. | ||
| So if I'm a journalism school, if I'm the Columbia School of Journalism, when I interview somebody, I would say, tell me what your habits are, what are your favorite hobbies? | ||
| And if somebody says, I like to hunt, I like to fish, I enjoy going to church, To me, that is a sign of ideological diversity that I want in my newsroom. | ||
| These people are so hung up on sexual orientation or gender or race, as opposed to the most powerful diversity of all, which is diversity of the mind, the way you think. | ||
| So that's number one. | ||
| Journalism schools need to change. | ||
| Conservatives need to go into J school. | ||
| And then newsrooms. | ||
| And this is where the CNN experiment is gonna be fascinating. | ||
| The new leadership of CNN says they wanna return to objectivity. | ||
| I'm gonna watch them. | ||
| I wanna see what they do. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| So on the first point on the schools, I mean, I agree with you, but do you think there's honestly any chance in high hell that anyone at Columbia University that's been completely infected by this woke thing is gonna do it? | ||
| I mean, do you think any professor of journalism is gonna put their butt on the line to do what you just said right there? | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| And again, I lament it, but that's the solution. | ||
| Because what's the alternative? | ||
| The alternative is we continue the trend we're on. | ||
| And here's what that trend looks like. | ||
| Conservative media is booming. | ||
| Conservative viewership continues to go up. | ||
| Liberal media, it goes down. | ||
| But it's not healthy for democracy. | ||
| Again, I want to be able to pick up one source of news and say, I'm done for the day. | ||
| It took me 10 minutes. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| I accept it. | ||
| And here's what we need to do now. | ||
| And then you debate it in the political sphere and you actually go to vote and whoever wins, wins the election and moves the country. | ||
| But we shouldn't have to, as a people, read five sources of news to figure out what is right and what is wrong and weigh it and balance it. | ||
| And I get that question all the time. | ||
| Where can I go? | ||
| And frankly, I'll tell you this too, Dave. | ||
| The best show on the news, in my opinion, is the 6 o'clock evening show on Fox with Bret Baier. | ||
| It is old-fashioned, straight down the middle, good reporting. | ||
| It's not cut from the same liberal cloth, but it's not, you know, an ideological conservative show either. | ||
| It's just straight reporting, and I miss that. | ||
| I like watching that show. | ||
| So speaking of Fox, since you're a Fox contributor, and I go on Fox a couple times a week, I find Fox, they never tell me what to say. | ||
| I say whatever I want. | ||
| Often things that are against, say, the general conservative line, I'm guessing that they let you say whatever you want, but feel free to correct that if not. | ||
| But there's a constant move to take them out. | ||
| I mean, there is a constant move to make sure that Tucker, who is the number one cable news host in the history of television, cannot get advertisers. | ||
| How does all that fit into the situation we're in right now? | ||
| Remember where that started? | ||
| Remember when Barack Obama tried to take out Rush Limbaugh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He went after Rush by name. | ||
| It was a deliberate White House effort to take down Rush. | ||
| And then they tried to do it to Fox. | ||
| And this is why I kind of do doubt that the mainstream media is capable of fixing itself. | ||
| They lost their customers. | ||
| The only reason Fox found a home was because people voted to leave the liberal mainstream media because they were no longer being served. | ||
| They recognized how liberal the media became. | ||
| And it's kind of like China with Taiwan. | ||
| The mainstream media does not like the fact that there's a breakaway. | ||
| one group that thinks independently, that thinks differently, that recognizes that the ways of the | ||
| liberal mainstream media are not the ways of most Americans. | ||
| And so they need to take down Fox, just like China wants to reabsorb Taiwan. And again, look | ||
| at the ratings. | ||
| The American people have rejected what the mainstream media is doing. | ||
| That's why Fox is so popular. | ||
| They struck a niche. | ||
| They found a home with an independent, different thought. | ||
| And it can't be stopped. | ||
| But Fox is really alone. | ||
| You have Fox, you have talk radio, you do podcasts, you do now have a new type of electronic front, the Federalist, the Daily Examiner, things of that nature, the Daily Wire. | ||
| But again, it's the balkanization of American information and I read left, right, and center, but man, I have to work hard to figure things out. | ||
| Again, I think it'd be easier for the American people if we had faith in one as opposed to have this balkanization. | ||
| How much of this do you think is connected to sort of the progressive takeover of the Democrat Party? | ||
| That, say, when you were press secretary, and as you said, there was a little more of a blend of reporters in there, okay, the answer is different, but we can basically agree on the facts, that now, you know, basically the modern left, the Democrat Party, they don't believe America's fundamentally decent, they don't seem to believe in our founding documents, or separation of powers, or all of these things. | ||
| So that, of course, is then gonna leak into the people who are translating The news to the average guy. | ||
| And it's even worse than that, Dave, because you have a young generation of reporters who think their job is to be subjective, not objective. | ||
| They think there's something wrong with objectivity. | ||
| There was a study that came out just last week. | ||
| It was a Pew study of journalists, and it reported that the majority of journalists don't believe in telling two sides of the news anymore. | ||
| That they view one side as misinformation, it shouldn't be told. | ||
| Well, whose opinion is it if it's information or misinformation? | ||
| And it said that news outlets whose audiences lean left by two to one don't think they should be telling both sides of a story. | ||
| And then it surveyed journalists who worked at news outlets whose audience leans right. | ||
| And by then, 60-40, it was said they should cover two sides of the story. | ||
| So who's being fair? | ||
| Who is being objective? | ||
| And who is being lopsided? | ||
| And it's the takeover of journalism by these young social warriors, which is what they are, is killing journalism. | ||
| And it happened at the New York Times. | ||
| One of my favorite parts of the book is what happened when Senator Tom Cotton wrote that online for the New York Times, that the New York Times headline, send in the troops. | ||
| And it was in the summer of 2020 after the George Floyd murder and riots were everywhere. | ||
| 150 federal buildings were damaged. | ||
| And Tom Cotton said, send in the troops. | ||
| A meltdown in the New York Times newsroom. | ||
| Young reporters, one after another after another, tweeted that this was violence to them. | ||
| The violence was in the streets. | ||
| The violence was with the poor people who ran mom-and-pop shops that were being torn down and looted and destroyed. | ||
| But it was these people sitting in a cubicle in Manhattan who said, this is violence. | ||
| And they forced the New York Times to tuck its tail, to retract the op-ed, to say it never should have been run in the first place. | ||
| to fire their editorial page editor, reassign the deputy editorial page editor. | ||
| It was a purge. | ||
| It was like a college campus broke out inside the New York Times where the young people demanded the administration's silence of voice with which they disagree. | ||
| It was one of the worst, most embarrassing episodes to be a media organization dedicated to free speech. | ||
| But free speech didn't stand a chance against the young social warriors of journalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's also why, for me personally, to me, these things have been infected. | ||
| I don't think CNN can come back. | ||
| You know, when I give talks at college campuses, if I say CNN, I used to say CNN and then I would make a joke. | ||
| Now, if I just say CNN, they laugh. | ||
| CNN is already to the punchline. | ||
| Just saying those three letters is already the punchline. | ||
| So something like the New York Times. | ||
| I mean, Barry Weiss is not liberal enough for the New York Times. | ||
| They got a real problem on their hands. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| And all newsrooms do. | ||
| Because I interviewed one journalism professor at the Cronkite School in Arizona, and she was telling me that many of her students really do ardently believe that the reason you go into journalism is to bring your point of view to the people. | ||
| as opposed to bring facts and the truth to the people and let the people tell you what their point of view is. | ||
| And Dave, that's the fundamental point. | ||
| Newspapers have analyses. | ||
| Newspapers have commentary. | ||
| If it's on the editorial page, if it's on the nightly part of the Fox News Hour with Sean Hannity or with Tucker or with Don Lemon at CNN, that's an opinion and we get it. | ||
| But when the news itself is twisted, to represent a point of view. | ||
| We have a real problem. | ||
| And that's been the case for decades at the New York Times. | ||
| And infection is a good word. | ||
| It's infected the mainstream media all over the place. | ||
| That's why I keep blowing a whistle throughout this book. | ||
| You know, one of the favorite things I do in here is I put pictures up of how the New York Times covered the exact same thing. | ||
| When Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, front page headline, this was the Washington Post, but the front page headline was Pioneer for Equality. | ||
| dies. | ||
| When Antonin Scalia passed away, the same headline, Washington Post, banner headline, was something along the lines of, champion of liberal taunting. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| One was a pioneer for rights, the other taunted the left. | ||
| How is this fair? | ||
| How is this neutral? | ||
| How is it objective, but it's a point of view? | ||
| And it's in the papers every day. | ||
| Does that also explain why we sort of seemingly have like a mass mental health problem right now that so many people have bought into this framework that is dishonest and it doesn't connect with what they see in real life, but it's constantly pushed on them. | ||
| So everyone starts feeling crazy about politics. | ||
| One of the other points I really make in here that I think is different is we all know what it's like to be a conservative and have them look down on us and think that treat us with disdain for our habits or views or traditions. | ||
| But the group that I also argue is really hurt are liberals. | ||
| Because if everything you see, if everything you're told, and if all the people you're surrounded with say to you, Hillary's going to win. | ||
| It's going to be a landslide. | ||
| Of course she's going to win. | ||
| Trump has zero chance. | ||
| And then Trump wins? | ||
| You either have to say, how come you misinformed me, which they don't do, or how did Trump do it? | ||
| It had to be another reason. | ||
| It had to be collusion. | ||
| So you then are susceptible to people giving you the misinformation that Trump colluded. | ||
| And then when you hear Mueller is investigating and you watch MSNBC, you're told every night the walls are closing in, another shoe dropped, more questions than answers. | ||
| And you've reached the conclusion Trump's on his way out. | ||
| You do it now with the January 6th committee. | ||
| Trump's going to get indicted, isn't he? | ||
| These people keep fooling themselves into going down a criminal cul-de-sac that says the people I don't like in politics are criminals and somebody's about to get rid of them. | ||
| And when it doesn't happen, You can't understand it because everybody thinks the same way you do. | ||
| And I do think that contributes to this feeling that people have of bitterness, of animosity, of mental breakdowns in some cases, because what they were told to expect doesn't match reality. | ||
| And that's the problem with the liberal media. | ||
| It's hurting the liberal base of our country, too. | ||
| So I think most people watching this get sort of the young journalist, quote unquote journalist, I always have to put air quotes with journalists, but the young kid part of it, that they come in and infect these things. | ||
| But what do you think at the corporate level? | ||
| Because when we show clips of MSNBC on my show, which we do a couple times a week, I call it the televised mental institution of MSNBC because you would not be able to tell that it was not broadcasting from a mental institution when you listen to some of the crazy things that Joy Reid is saying. | ||
| I mean, it genuinely, it seems psychotic to me. | ||
| That would be my prescription on that. | ||
| But what do you think is happening at the corporate level? | ||
| Like, I get at the newsroom level, okay, maybe they've been all infected, but this is MSNBC, Microsoft NBC. | ||
| These are massive corporate powers. | ||
| As long as it appeals to a significant enough niche, they can make enough money on advertising revenue and subscribers. | ||
| That's all they need. | ||
| And so they've given up the notion of serving the country, serving all the people. | ||
| They just need to serve their niche. | ||
| And if their niche wants to hear That Trump colluded if their niche wants to hear that the election was Stacey Abrams actual election was stolen. | ||
| That's what they'll tell their niche. | ||
| So again, this is technology. | ||
| You know, when you in the older days, when you didn't really have all these niches that were so easily available to be found on the Internet, you had to tell the news in a broader, more fair sense. | ||
| They don't have to do that anymore. | ||
| So that's, again, reason for pessimism. | ||
| But here's how these things ultimately do fix. | ||
| You know, one of the reasons a Hispanic vote is increasingly voting Republican is because of all this woke stuff. | ||
| All this, you know, men can have babies. | ||
| If you have any bit of traditional in you, you just say, who are these people? | ||
| I can't be part of this thinking. | ||
| And Hispanics are increasingly turning Republican. | ||
| I think one of the solutions here is the Democrats start to lose their base of support and increasingly just remain, and MSNBC just remains, The tellers of tales for upper income liberal white people, and they've lost working class blue collar people, they start to lose Hispanic voters. | ||
| And if they start to lose the African Americans more than they already are, that's when they're going to start to realize this upper middle income white niche, the Upper West Side isn't big enough. | ||
| We need to change. | ||
| That's when it'll happen. | ||
| So since I have no doubt, you know, basically everyone in DC, although maybe some of them won't talk to you publicly. | ||
| Like, do you talk to any Democrats, old school Democrats, say guys that were across the aisle from you 20 years ago when you were in the administration that are going, we just lost control of this thing. | ||
| Like that, that the train is just completely out of control. | ||
| We don't know how to stop what's going on with the Democrats right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's a growing sense of that and it takes elections. | ||
| It really takes, When a group that you always had in your corner, like the Hispanic vote, does start to break 50-50. | ||
| These are the things that shock politicians into changing their behavior. | ||
| And I think Joe Manchin is on the front edge of that for the Democratic Party. | ||
| Kyrsten Sinema, interestingly as well, Senator from Arizona. | ||
| It's the Bernie Sanders, the Elizabeth Warrens that are killing the party. | ||
| And you'll notice it's the appeal to the upper income white liberal. | ||
| And that's just the wrong group to create any type of national consensus from. | ||
| And one of the great things about American politics is we have to create broad coalitions to govern. | ||
| We're not like Europe. | ||
| We don't have six major parties in our parliaments, each of which splits, and then you have to play coalition politics. | ||
| We have two big parties. | ||
| So I want to get a little more into that, but going a bit more on the media side, you've mentioned this Balkanization a couple of times and that there's a danger there. | ||
| Do you think in some ways that there's also a silver lining to it, which is that the more that we get Balkanized, Whether it's geographically, as you know, I moved from Cali to Florida, or through the information that we get, that people are really thinking about what they believe, that they are actually putting some of this stuff into practice, whether it's by moving or finding sources that make sense to them, and ignoring some of the old stuff, that we just are in a transition phase. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| And there are more choices now. | ||
| Yeah, and the fact is, the pendulum always swings in the United States. | ||
| And it goes in one direction for a while and goes back in another direction. | ||
| And it never swings that far. | ||
| And that's one of the great strengths of our country. | ||
| So I think there's something to that. | ||
| And I also look at the history of journalism. | ||
| We're back to the way we were in 1776 or 1789, when pamphlets really represented news. | ||
| And my side put out a pamphlet, the other side put out a pamphlet. | ||
| It was all advocacy. | ||
| This notion of objective reporting is a relatively newfound notion that began in the early to middle part of the 20th century. | ||
| Prior to that, you really had yellow journalism on the hearsts and scare everybody as much as you can and sell the paper for a penny every afternoon. | ||
| So things do swing and change, but eventually people get fed up and things go back to what is sensible. | ||
| And that's why I'm hoping it'll return to what's sensible. | ||
| It's why I wrote the book. | ||
| It's why I have my recommendations in there for how to change newsrooms and journalism schools. | ||
| And if it doesn't happen in the next five years or 10 years, I think it's still going to happen because eventually that pendulum always heads back to the sensible direction. | ||
| So a lot of people always ask me, was it always this bad? | ||
| And I try to, you know, think back. | ||
| I'm 46. | ||
| I remember the nightly news on, you know, ABC, CBS, NBC, and it was basically whether you liked Brokaw or Peter Jennings or, what's his name, Dan Rather. | ||
| But the structure of the show and what they covered was basically the same. | ||
| Well, protection over topics. | ||
| maybe the order was a little bit different, but they pretty much were covering the same things | ||
| or Walter Cronkite before that. | ||
| Do you think there was too much protection over topics that maybe they weren't talking about back then? | ||
| Well, protection over topics, what I would say is there was too much | ||
| of a one-sided nature of storytelling. | ||
| How often would you see on the news about a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy | ||
| with a gun and a killing? | ||
| Because you need to gun control. | ||
| So if a citizen who had a concealed carry stopped a crime, They didn't tell you about that because that would have been the case for concealed carry. | ||
| The trial of Hermit Gosnell, which I talk about in my book, probably the greatest serial killer in American history, an abortion doctor who delivered thousands upon thousands of babies. | ||
| He snipped the spinal cords of babies about to be born. | ||
| Late term abortionist. | ||
| And his trial was suppressed. | ||
| There was hardly any news coverage of it. | ||
| America's greatest serial killer. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because if the network went wall to wall with the coverage of that trial, it actually made people think twice about being pro-life or pro-choice. | ||
| And in a newsroom? | ||
| That's yucky to have people who think pro-life be legitimized. | ||
| Nobody thinks like that inside a newsroom. | ||
| So there was an absence of coverage. | ||
| And again, this is what gave way to Fox News. | ||
| Fox said, you're only telling one side of a story. | ||
| You're leaving on the cutting room floor so much of American life. | ||
| So that's what was wrong with the three networks back in their heyday. | ||
| You know, when Reagan was president, some 50 or 60 million Americans watched ABC, NBC, CBS at 6.30 Eastern in the evening. | ||
| And now only 20 million do. | ||
| 30 to 35 million went elsewhere. | ||
| They went to Fox, and they went to the diversification of other outlets. | ||
| So when you were press secretary, and there was a little more honesty there, now when you watch, and it's so out of control, and you mentioned Peter Doocy, we show a lot of clips of him on the show, but it's not just that the press themselves are worse, it seems like the press secretaries have gotten much worse. | ||
| Let's say the last two, specifically. | ||
| That Saki, I mean, the woman simply, I don't think could say a true statement. | ||
| My line on her was always, if you asked her what her favorite color was, she would say four. | ||
| I mean, she just couldn't say anything true. | ||
| And now you got this Corinne Jean-Pierre, who actually seems worse. | ||
| I mean, completely unqualified. | ||
| Am I overstating it with these two? | ||
| Am I not giving enough credit to how difficult the job is? | ||
| Well, let me put it this way. | ||
| And here I am old school. | ||
| The job is hard enough, and I will not make fun or take on a fellow press secretary. | ||
| I just don't think it's fitting for me to do that. | ||
| I understand people make the criticisms. | ||
| I won't be one of those people doing it by name. | ||
| I just will say their problem is not a communications problem. | ||
| Their problem is a Joe Biden judgment decision policy problem, old age problem. | ||
| They have a lot of other things that they have to deal with. | ||
| Other people can take on their communication skills. | ||
| Okay, so putting aside the specifics of the two of them, generally, as far as the administration right now, it seems like so many things are wrong, and you just mentioned that the media doesn't cover certain things. | ||
| Finally, it looks like in the last two weeks, there are suddenly discussions about what's going on with Biden cognitively, and is he up to the job, and it's even leaking into CNN now. | ||
| A whole bunch of us were talking about it before the election, but is that another piece of this, that they just airlock certain things, and then we can all see it? | ||
| We all know something's not right. | ||
| He can't read off the prompter anymore, the rambling, the incoherent nonsense, not where am I, who's in charge, all of this stuff. | ||
| But now it's finally leaking, which means that eventually it will fully get through the airlock. | ||
| Yeah, and not only those stories, which appeared in the New York Times and the poll of Democrats saying they don't want Biden to run, which the New York Times made that lead story on the front page. | ||
| Look at the timeless coverage of Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| It was brutal for Joe Biden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's as if a flip has switched at the New York Times, where they've made the judgment that it's time for a younger, different Democrat to take Biden down, that we don't want Biden to run for re-election. | ||
| You almost get that sense that they have an editorial change in terms of the headlines on the front page. | ||
| Now, I'll predict to you, Dave, it's a passing stage. | ||
| They'll do this until it doesn't work. | ||
| And then if Biden declares for re-election, all of a sudden, the New York Times is going to say, look at the vigor he's got as an 82-year-old man. | ||
| Look at how strong he is. | ||
| And especially if the opponent is Donald Trump, they'll flip right back to their current mode. | ||
| But it is something to watch right now because it is interesting. | ||
| They're giving Biden a tough time recently. | ||
| I'd say to you also, the press was ridiculously easy on Biden throughout the entire campaign. | ||
| They had their whole body on the scale because they wanted Trump to be defeated. | ||
| They suppressed stories that would have hurt Biden, his failure to read off the teleprompter. | ||
| One of the examples I have in my book is he did a campaign event for the AFL-CIO. | ||
| A young woman said to him, threw him a softball and said, well, how do you get more people to join a union? | ||
| And his answer, this is all on TV, on a Biden video, his answer was, uh, uh, uh, move it up there. | ||
| And then he gave the answer. | ||
| The Q and the A preloaded on a teleprompter and until they put the teleprompter and made it run, he didn't know the answer to how do you get more people to join a union. | ||
| What would a normal press corps have done? | ||
| They'd have pounded the guy. | ||
| He's about to become possibly the oldest president in the United States history if he wins. | ||
| He can't even answer a question like that. | ||
| Did he have a teleprompter? | ||
| How did he get the answer written there if he didn't get the cue ahead of time? | ||
| Do you have the people providing you with friendly audiences giving you questions ahead of time? | ||
| Everything was all the ingredients for a feeding forensic. | ||
| Would you, if you were, if you were part of the administration, would you be trying, I mean, I know they've tried to hide him. | ||
| He doesn't really do long form interviews. | ||
| He always gets the notes with who he's allowed to call on. | ||
| And then if he rambles too long, he says that he's in trouble. | ||
| Like none of it makes any sense or is optically positive or any of that. | ||
| But if you, if you were a press secretary or you were in the administration right now and you saw what was going on, what would you be, what would you be advising the president to do at this point? | ||
| Oh, there it's beyond advice. | ||
| Frankly, there's little to nothing they can do anymore because it's about policy. | ||
| It's about what's happened to the country. | ||
| It's about inflation, the cost of living, the cost of gas, energy, heating your home, air conditioning your home, buying food, buying coffee, the southern border, crime. | ||
| I mean, can you name more tangible things that are hurting the country? | ||
| No, it's not like Social Security is going to go bankrupt in seven years or the Medicare Trust Fund is going to go bankrupt in eight. | ||
| It's not these big, amorphous things. | ||
| It's the daily things you feel in life. | ||
| Am I going to get mugged walking home? | ||
| Can I afford the things I need to buy to feed my family? | ||
| This is what's happening to our country right now, and it's particularly hitting lower income and middle income people. | ||
| So it's beyond a speech. | ||
| It's beyond advice. | ||
| It's events. | ||
| And the public gets it. | ||
| The country gets it. | ||
| The only thing I could suggest for Joe Biden, if he really wants to change, is he should start going after liberal prosecutors throughout the country. | ||
| He should support the recall of L.A.' 's district attorney. | ||
| If he started to send a different note that he actually is the 1990s Joe Biden who wants to protect people's lives and get tough on crime, that could have a different impact. | ||
| Biden might be seen differently if he did that. | ||
| There's very little else he could do. | ||
| Well, actually, to that point, I mean, does this guy, Biden, strike you as someone very different than you knew of, say, 20 years ago? | ||
| I mean, it's almost like he's sort of the perfect candidate for the left because he doesn't know what he believes anymore, he reads anything, and he's just ushering in the destruction that I, personally, I think that the more radical people want. | ||
| I don't think he wants to destroy the country, I just don't think he knows what he's doing at this point. | ||
| Look, I've known Joe Biden for many decades. | ||
| I used to work for a different senator, Pete Domenici of New Mexico. | ||
| I got to know Joe Biden then. | ||
| I knew him when I was at the White House. | ||
| And I always knew Joe Biden was a blowhard. | ||
| He was just a talker and he didn't have much depth. | ||
| He didn't have much substance. | ||
| As Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense to George Bush and Barack Obama said, about every foreign policy decision over the last 30 years, Joe Biden has gotten wrong. | ||
| And now that's spread to domestic decisions, too. | ||
| I mean, one of the biggest reasons we have inflation is because Biden insists on that massive blowout government spending redistribution package when he first got elected that he was able to jam through on a party line vote. | ||
| And he doesn't think that contributed to inflation. | ||
| Biden just has terrible judgment. | ||
| Now he just wants to spend more money. | ||
| And he really has not shown the spine to stand up to the woke left. | ||
| He's really become Bernie Sanders' running mate as opposed to the nation's leader. | ||
| Yeah, I just don't think he has the cognitive ability to do it. | ||
| I think if he did, then maybe he would be a little, maybe he'd still be a blowhard, but maybe would be pushing back. | ||
| I just don't think he can. | ||
| But it's interesting because you said the thing about that it's not really about messaging, it's about policy. | ||
| But it's like the messaging has just been absolutely terrible. | ||
| I mean, on any given day, you can get him saying, hey, this is Putin's price hike. | ||
| And then the same day you can get his energy secretary or transportation secretary saying, no, this is because we're going through an energy transition and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. | ||
| So it's not just, I mean, it's not just the policies. | ||
| The messaging has made no, we're not going to have inflation. | ||
| Inflation's transitory. | ||
| I hope there's no inflation. | ||
| Like it's all of it kind of. | ||
| I'm not going to meet with a Saudi crown prince. | ||
| I've met with a Saudi crown prince. | ||
| It's really just about a fist bump as opposed to a handshake. | ||
| I imagine leaders around the world are laughing at Joe Biden, saying he is so weak he has to pretend he can't even shake a man's hand. | ||
| If you're going to go, go. | ||
| If you're not going to go, don't go. | ||
| But don't be right in the middle. | ||
| Have it both ways. | ||
| Biden's just weak. | ||
| I think that's a bigger part of it. | ||
| He's weak and he caved to the woke. | ||
| And that's defined as presidency, and it's created the bad policies that led to the bad results. | ||
| So the guy that you worked for, George W. Bush, he was known as a guy that would make a flub every now and again, or say a phrase slightly odd. | ||
| But when you see Biden doing it now, you must be like, man, I wish my guy would have got the long leash that they're giving this guy. | ||
| Yeah, George Bush used to joke that he had some issues with the English language. | ||
| I think they call it the American language. | ||
| But it was always convivial. | ||
| And he had inarticulate moments. | ||
| But I don't think anybody questions his leadership strength, or his decision making, or the toughness of his policies, or his integrity. | ||
| And that was a difference. | ||
| Are you still in touch with, I assume you're still in touch with President Bush. | ||
| Are you surprised that he went so apolitical? | ||
| I mean, I know most presidents do, but he really has just, he enjoys painting, it seems like, and living on the ranch, and just doesn't have much to do with public policy anymore. | ||
| You know, one of the things about him, he always understood that he was gonna go in and get out himself. | ||
| And I remember during the recount in 2000, when Al Gore was working the phones and trying to influence votes in Florida during the recount, George Bush was at his ranch cutting wood. | ||
| And people thought he was disengaged. | ||
| He wasn't disengaged. | ||
| He always had this healthy sense of removal. | ||
| He would go back to the mansion at night with his briefing book for the next day and watch ESPN. | ||
| You know, I do think he just had a healthy sense of who he was. | ||
| Criticism would roll off his back. | ||
| He was a strong leader who made big decisions. | ||
| But he didn't sweat the typical Washington insider nonsense. | ||
| And I think that kept him a lot better in touch with the country. | ||
| I'd like to finish up with something else because I've wanted to have you on for quite some time and we were trying to get you on last year for the 9-11 anniversary and you usually on 9-11 you do a full Twitter recap of what that day was like and being with the president and everything else. | ||
| I lived in New York City at the time, much of my family lived in New York City at the time and I remember you, I remember obviously George Bush and I remember Rudy Giuliani and all of those things, all of those people. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about that, and maybe I can get you back on in a couple weeks in September to do a bigger dive on that, but I just think it's important today. | ||
| Yeah, you know, Dave, when I look back, the thing that strikes me, having been at the President's side for much of that day and being on board Air Force One, was how unemotional it was for those of us with the President, which is, I think, in many ways remarkable, because it was probably the most emotional day anybody alive today has had. | ||
| And it had to be that way. | ||
| You know, everybody, the President, was kind of just steely like this. | ||
| The Secret Service around him, steely like that. | ||
| The military, like that. | ||
| It was such a seriousness, a steadiness. | ||
| And I was at the President's side when he said to the Vice President, we're at war. | ||
| And then he picked up, he called the Secretary of Defense and said to the Secretary of Defense, we're at war. | ||
| And it just sent a chill down my spine. | ||
| You know, looking back, some people might say, well, of course we'll be at war. | ||
| We were attacked. | ||
| Well, the next day in the cabinet room, when the president held a meeting with congressional leaders, all of whom were tremendously supportive. | ||
| One leader said to the president, the Democrat, I urge you to use caution in your rhetoric. | ||
| War is such a scary word. | ||
| And I just remember thinking to myself, if this isn't war, what is? | ||
| The decision of the president to tell people that they were at war sent the direction to everyone to start planning for what we were going to do. | ||
| And that was the right and necessary step to take. | ||
| And it reoriented everything we've done since then. | ||
| It put us on a much stronger ground against terrorism. | ||
| It's one of the reasons we haven't been hit again in a major attack. | ||
| It influenced our Thinking about drone strikes abroad, which have been carried out now, not only by George Bush, but by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. | ||
| It created a bipartisan template for how to protect this country, all of which came from the strength, I think, that he exhibited that day. | ||
| But it was a time of just the utmost seriousness, the utmost weight on our shoulders. | ||
| We were told by the CIA It's not a question of if, it's a question of when the second wave will be, and that permeated all our thinking. | ||
| Let's finish up flash-forwarding now 21 years into 2022, and as a conservative and as a media watchdog, or is that a fair phrase? | ||
| You're a media watchdog at this point? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| What do you want to happen with the Republicans right now? | ||
| I mean, obviously everyone's talking about this Trump-DeSantis situation. | ||
| As a new Floridian, I obviously love my governor, and it's partly why, he's partly why I moved here. | ||
| I think there's reasons to back Trump. | ||
| I think the machine, and he's willing to do all the stuff to fight it. | ||
| What do you think should happen here? | ||
| I mean, do you want a robust primary? | ||
| Do you want one of them to just get out of the way? | ||
| Is it somebody else? | ||
| What's your thought? | ||
| Well, one, I hope the president does not declare prior to the November election. | ||
| This election right now is random on Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing it badly. | ||
| If it becomes a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in an indirect fashion, it's only going to help the Democrats. | ||
| Looking to the future, I think there are three issues for President Trump. | ||
| One is he'll be 78 in 2024. | ||
| 78 in 2024, is he healthy enough to be a president at the age of 78 to 82? | ||
| Two is what do the polls show about his potential Democratic opponents and how much are they | ||
| beating Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg by? | ||
| If they're beating those guys by more than Trump, it's an important sign that Donald Trump, for all his strengths and weaknesses, may not be our strongest candidate. | ||
| Or maybe he is our strongest candidate. | ||
| That's why those polls will be important and primary voters will pay attention to it. | ||
| Three, how many people are running against President Trump? | ||
| If it's one or two, President Trump is being for a fair fight. | ||
| If it's 3-4-5, President Trump will win with the largest plurality. | ||
| So as an analyst, those are the three things I'm looking at. | ||
| The president's health, the polls against the Democrats, and the number of R's who run against Donald Trump. | ||
| That will determine whether Donald Trump wins or loses, potentially a primary for presidency. | ||
| By the way, to wrap this up in a nice little bow, have you seen the way the media has been treating DeSantis lately, where these big headlines are basically saying, he's Trump, but he's even worse because he's competent. | ||
| That's the new move, that they were going to treat anyone like this, right? | ||
| He's got all the bad stuff of Trump, plus he's competent, that's double Hitler. | ||
| Which takes me right back to my book. | ||
| I mean, I wrote Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias because I knew the press did it to Donald Trump and I blew the whistle on it. | ||
| But as we talked earlier, they're going to do it to the next Republican too, because they're activists for a cause. | ||
| And they're not neutral. | ||
| They're not objective. | ||
| They're not serving our country when they do that. | ||
| And they will do it to DeSantis. | ||
| They'll do it to whoever our nominee is. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if the Democrat is Biden, Harris, you name who, they're gonna do it again. | ||
| Ari, I've enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| The book is great. | ||
| We're gonna link to it right down below. | ||
| And can you stick around for one more thing we're gonna throw on our locals community? | ||
| Yes, I can. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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