Talking Back | Andrea Mitchell | Talks at Google

Okay. So it's my great privilege and honor to introduce someone who, judging by the applause, doesn't really need an introduction. I was quite confident that applause wasn't for me. So. Andrea Mitchell is NBC News Chief foreign affairs correspondent, a position she's had since 1994. That's 16. Which in Google time is a long time. She is the lead correspondent for all of the NBC properties, NBC Nightly News, the Today show, cnbc, msnbc, and she reports on all of the foreign policy issues of our time. In addition, in 2004, she covered the presidential election and I believe was the first person to let us know that John Edwards was going to be the running mate. Yes, broke that story. I think you broke another story. Another running mate story as well. Dan Quayle. There's a story. Sorry, political leanings aside, before that job, Andrea was the White House correspondent for NBC at Google. Obviously, our mission is the provision of information and information that we want to be clean and pure and get to the world. I don't think we could have a speaker whose career and whose life and whose passions would be more aligned with our mission than Andrea. Andrea has stood her entire career for the responsibility of the media, to tell the truth, to tell the whole story to the people all over the world. She's also broken many glass ceilings, which we are all happy to see in her career. And she's here to talk to us about her book, which I loved. Talking back to presidents, dictators, and assorted scoundrels. So very big welcome to Andrea Mitchell.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Cheryl. And it's wonderful to be here. This is another world. First of all, we rely so heavily on you. I cannot tell you how many times a day we are Googling this, that or the other. But I think we all share a common challenge, which is to figure out what is fact, what is not, what are the appropriate filters, how are we going to adjust? And as we at NBC spread to new platforms and we have a huge push on digital platforms right now, we have to figure this thing out as we go along as well. And we make errors just in trying to sort through what the thresholds are. So I think we in different ways have some of the same challenges right now. I was just having lunch with a couple of people, some of your colleagues, and someone asked me, you know, when did we first start doing live shots? Which somehow evolved into a conversation about how do we used to file our stories? When I first went to the White House in 1981, I had covered Jimmy Carter's White House as sort of a junior, junior backup correspondent when I first came to NBC. But I was assigned full time in 1981, partly by accident, and that's one of the subtexts of the book, because I had screwed up badly, not getting a fact wrong, but really messing up on the Today show. One morning, I was assigned to go down to a place called Haynes Point and watch John Hinckley being transferred from a helicopter to a motorcade to go to federal court for his arraignment. And no one had seen this, you know, suspected assassin, attempted assassin of President Reagan. And I was told, go down there. The Today show wants a picture of this. It'll be about 8:30 in the morning, east coast time. And, you know, we just need to have a correspondent there protectively in case something happens. Well, Haynes Point was, you know, hundreds and hundreds of yards away from where this was taking place. And the deal was that the camera with the telephoto lens used for space shots, frankly, first developed for space shots and then eventually perfected to get those fuzzy pictures of Ronald Reagan on horseback at the ranch, which was across a valley from where we were positioned on his long vacations in Santa Barbara. But so one of these cameras was going to be capturing this alleged picture of someone purported to be John Hinckley. And I was told, well, just stand next to the cameraman, but hook yourself up. And of course, not prepared in any fashion. 1981, Tom Brokaw, then anchoring the Today show, comes to me and says, andrea, what do you see? And instead of making it up, I completely flubbed it. The cameraman could see through his lens, something I could see nothing with the naked eye. And it was, according to the then president of NBC News, the worst single performance by a correspondent. There's got to be a category for that. Worst live shot by a correspondent in the field. Nowadays, with cable, you know, and every other crazy way that we're trying to broadcast and send broadcasts up on cell phones and everything else that we do, going live is automatic. But in those days, it really wasn't. And so I got busted, badly. And I didn't know it, because that's another feature of our business. I don't know about yours, but you don't know when you've had it. So the next Monday morning, I came in for work and my name wasn't on the assignment sheet, which is a big hint. And I went into the business office and I said, you know, my name isn't on the assignment sheet. And the business manager said, didn't you know, you've been banned from television, you've been reassigned to radio. I guess they thought I could do less damage. And so I had been, frankly, a fairly successful, very visible NBC correspondent up until then. I was before Reagan was shot, I was full time the energy correspondent, a position I had talked myself into because nobody else was covering it. And we then had the gas lines and the crisis and, you know, 78, 79, and then Three Mile Island. So all of a sudden, with Three Mile Island, I was covering a possible nuclear meltdown. And it was so I had really been on the air a lot more than the White House correspondent. So, so all of a sudden, having done this little field job, I was totally messed up. And they offered me a job doing radio during the week at the White House, covering Reagan as the backup number four correspondent and then working the weekends on tv. And sort of the nice part of the story is that my senior television colleagues were a wonderful man named John Palmer and Judy Woodruff, then went to, you know, Jim Lehrer's NewsHour and then went to CNN and is now back doing documentaries with the Pew foundation at the NewsHour Productions, and is going to be doing some very interesting things in coming months. So Judy and John devised every excuse to get me back on television in this highly competitive world. They were, you know, looking for any reason to say, that's a story Andrea can do. Why don't we let Andrea have a shot at this? And I found that if I worked seven days a week and made myself indispensable to the weekend Nightly News, that I could eventually get back on the Today show and outlasted that former president of NBC News by many decades. So there are a number of lessons in all of that. It was launching me into the White House beat full time covering Ronald Reagan. Fascinating. I don't mean to sound nostalgic for the Cold War, but the stakes were huge. We used to ask Reagan, why aren't you meeting with your Soviet counterparts, this fierce anti Communist Ronald Reagan? And he would say, there was Brezhnev and then there was Andropov and Chernenko and finally Gorbachev. And he would say, well, they keep dying on me. And finally he had an interlocutor who was a youngish intellectual, active, very ideological leader of the Soviet Union and those summits starting in Geneva in 1985 and going through Reykjavik and all just fascinating period. And I learned a tremendous amount about, not just about politics, but about, well, partly about how much we don't know as White House correspondents, because we in this post Watergate age thought we inherited the mantle of Woodward and Bernstein. And. And there were so many leaks coming out of the Reagan White House in sharp contrast to this White House. People have compared George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan in terms of being a very good retail politician who has sort of a personality and a Persona, an optimistic personality in the face of a lot of negative stuff. But one of the enormous differences is that there were constant leaks coming out of the Reagan White House because you had different parts of the Republican Party, the moderates and the conservatives, the Ed Mises and Jim Bakers and Mike Deavers all merged together into this one White House and everybody leaking about things. And it was just terrific for correspondence. But this in contrast to now, where everyone is a Texan who came up loyally through, you know, the Bush years, ascended with this president through the governor's office, and now would barely tell you if your pants were on fire, no less leak information that was in any way inimical to the interests of this president. So it's been a very contentious time and a difficult time for reporters. We can talk more about that and some of the threats and subpoenas, to say nothing of the jailing of reporters, in contrast to every standard that the Justice Department has ever held about not subpoenaing reporters unless absolutely necessary in almost a life and death situation. That said, we did not know about Iran Contra. So we found out about it when Ed Meese, the Attorney General, walked into the press room and said, I have to tell you something. We're about to announce that there has been this slightly illegal operation in the basement of the National Security Council. And so it does. It's such a shock to the system to think that you're covering something 247 and had no idea that all this was going on. Which brings us to today and a lot of questions that I've asked, some I ask in the book, in having gone back to the transcripts from 2002 and 2003 from my coverage of the United nations presentations of Colin Powell, and asking, you know, why didn't the media know about the weapons of mass destruction, in other words, the absence of weapons of mass destruction, and how much did we contribute to the really dreadfully inadequate debate that took place in this country, particularly because Democrats in the Senate didn't want to do what they did, you know, back in the first Gulf War, which is have a really important historically charged debate for days about whether or not to go to war with Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee opposing it and real internal arguments, deep arguments about those issues. In this case, the Democrats wanted to avoid it because they were trying to burnish their conservative credentials, I think in a post 911 context and trying to not be accused of being weak on foreign policy. Some who want to run for President in 08 and the media to a certain extent, I think were sort of captive of our lack of sources, the lack of variety in our sources. You know, you go to the intelligence community, you're going to get the same, the same information that's going to Colin Powell and going to everybody else. It's all boiled down it's group think. We didn't have people on the ground. We couldn't do better than the inspectors did. We would call our colleagues in France and Russia and in London, in other capitals, and they were all hearing the same thing, as were my diplomatic sources from their intelligence services. Because even war critics in other countries felt that there had to be chemical and biological weapons. I refer to this partly because this week I did a two part series on Nightly News on a very interesting book called Cobra 2 by Michael Gordon, the chief military correspondent of the New York Times, and General Bernard Traynor, a former syndicated New York Times columnist and Marine General, retired Marine general. And they had gained access to classified documents, including the product of interrogations of Iraqi prisoners, generals and the like. And for the first time we learn that Saddam was misjudging us just as we were misjudging him. And that his own generals, according to this documentation, went to a meeting with him in December of 02, three months before the start of the war, which is now the anniversary, the third anniversary is next week. And he told his generals at that meeting, when he was under pressure, the UN resolution required that by December 12 of 02 he disclose everything that he had. And he produced this enormous document which the UN deemed was not responsive. Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei and the other inspectors who believed that containment and inspections should continue and that we should not go to war, still said that Saddam had not met the terms of the resolution. And he sat down with his generals and he said, there is no wmd. And the general said, what do you mean there's no wmd? How are we going to fight the Americans without chemical weapons? And they were as fooled as everyone else by the fact that he had, contrary to any understanding of his psychology, he had permitted the UN sanctions to continue, which he could have gotten rid of and had $300 billion over a decade of Oil revenue for his people. If he had simply come clean, said there is no WMD, that after 1995 and 96, when he was caught with biological weapons, after his sons in law had defected and briefly and Jordan told the CIA what was going on on this place called the chicken farm, that he had actually destroyed everything. And what they've learned now is that he viewed his real threat as being Iran and a Shia rebellion. And so he wanted to scare. He wanted to scare the potential rebellion by establishing the Fedayeen, which has now become the roots of the insurgency. And he wanted to scare Iran, deter Iran by letting the world think he did have chemical weapons. And you know, we know that he had used them before against his own people and others. So this was his real motivation. He did not think this President Bush was going to attack and come to Baghdad. He thought that this president would do what his father had done, Bush 41, and not try to occupy this country. And when you think of the miscalculations on our part, the book reveals how General Wallace, the Army field commander, was almost fired in the march toward Baghdad because he said, we really need to pause and we're not facing the enemy we thought we would face. The insurgents are much more widespread than we had imagined. And General Franks at CENTCOM and Rumsfeld in the Pentagon practically fired the guy because they didn't want to hear anything that would contradict their notion that if you took Baghdad, you had the country. So if they had, with this small, relatively small force, enough troops to march to Baghdad and do it successfully in three weeks, the war was over. And General Franks, actually, a week after they took Baghdad, went to his commanders and said, give me a game plan for withdrawing all but one division, all but 30,000 troops by September of 03. Well, today we are in, as we sit here today, we are in the largest assault since the invasion with a huge American force on the attack against insurgents. Just yesterday there was a, a terrible military incident which left a lot of civilians dead. I mean, we are as deeply involved in this war now as ever. And in the polling that we have, the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll yesterday and the Pew polled today, the President is for the first time really at risk of losing his Republican base because of the war. When people in the Pew poll asked, were asked, what is the word you would use to describe Iraq? The first word that came back was a mess. And I think the second word was chaos. And for the first time, when they asked about George W. Bush, one of the words that comes back is Incompetent. And this is post Katrina, post Dubai, but mostly Iraq. So going into the midterm election, the President is under enormous pressure from his own Republicans on the Hill. They are running scared. In our poll for the first time, 50% of the people questioned now favor Democrats rather than Republicans in terms of Congress, that is a very dangerous number. So even though there's been an enormous amount of gerrymandering and the conventional wisdom is that only 30 House seats were at all at risk for the Republicans and they would require a 15 seat switchover for the Democrats to retake the House, we're getting to that point in the polling, if the polling is to be believed, where the President has to worry about his base and he has to worry about the midterm elections. And what are the policy implications of that? The policy implications are what might the White House do in the next couple of months on sort of red meat issues to try to shore up the base and make sure that they don't lose the House? And how much, if you saw the New York Times today, how much is Russ Feingold censure motion helping to give them a weapon to rally the troops? You know, don't elect the Democrats or you might face the impeachment of George W. Bush. Not a likely scenario, but certainly something that they can raise as a, as a bloody political flag. So all of these things are happening now. It's a very, very contentious time. Very hard to be a reporter in Washington. I'm not here to defend Judy Miller or the kind of reporting on wmd because I think we all fell down on the job to one extent or another, wittingly and unwittingly. But whatever you think of the reporting that led to it, I have very strong feelings against reporters being thrown in jail. And I have to tell you it has had a chilling effect on what I do every day. People now do not want to take calls from reporters. Intelligence officials are afraid to talk to anyone outside. Whistleblowers have been completely frightened almost into submission. I was interested to see that the Goldsmith Prize at Harvard for investigative reporting last night was awarded to James Risen of the New York Times for his revelation of the NSA eavesdropping because it is a way of at least rewarding through public recognition reporting that is now under attack from investigations, many investigations that are now being launched by the administration and subpoenas that are flying around Washington against Risen and others. Dana Priest, the of Washington Post was a runner up. She had revealed the secret CIA prison camps in Eastern Europe. So at least the academic community and the journalistic community is at least taking note of some of the rather brave reporting that has taken place in recent months. But these reporters are in considerable jeopardy. And this is all in the aftermath of the other investigations that are taking place in Washington. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do serious reporting. And one of the things that I was also asked about earlier today was, you know, how much real reporting goes on. And I think there was a Pew study that Tom Rosenstiel led at Columbia University last week which said that for all that we now see 24. 7 on cable, on the Net, all of the blogging, everything else that happens, there is less and less real reporting that goes on, at least on the major beats in Washington. When I think back about it, when I first came to Washington in 1976 to work for a CBS station, having worked in Philadelphia for a dozen years before, or rather for a decade before, at an NBC local station, I would occasionally be assigned to Capitol Hill. We did a lot of national reporting for this local CBS station. It was owned by the Washington Post, Newsweek Company. And then. And when I went to NBC in 1978, if you covered a hearing, you went to the hearing and you would grab witnesses on their way to the bathroom. And you would talk to press secretaries and talk to House members and senators as they would take breaks. And, you know, the only way to cover the hearing was to go there, because it was before C SPAN and before video feeds and before computers in our business. And if you covered a Senate floor debate, you would go and sit in the gallery with an artist as though you were in a federal courtroom. And the artist would paint a drawing. And I would say, take a shot of this senator or that senator. And I'm going to need to cut back and forth visually between these two because they're the lead actors in this debate. And then I would go and type up on an old Royal or Olivetti typewriter if I were on the road. But we had these old portable typewriters. And you'd type up your script and then fax it in. It was a rather primitive fax machine. I'm trying to think of what it was called. We would Type everything on 5 ply paper with carbon. Just. I guess some of you may have seen this stuff in museums. And then wait for it to be Xeroxed in New York in the Nightly News fishbowl. And every editor, producer would read your script, weigh in, make sure that what I was reporting was in sync with what we were reporting from our Paris bureau or one of the other bureaus and fact check and then go through style points, grammar, and then dictate it back to me. And I would then record my voice back to our bureau from, let's say, the White House booth, and then they would start editing it together. Now, in the really early days when I was working in local television, we used film. And we would have to get our job done early enough in the day, stop shooting a story so that we could process the film, put it in the soup, as it were. Then we would. This sounds so silly, but we would hang strips of film, of processed film, and then literally splice together scenes with a razor blade and a splicing machine and make these little mini movies for the nightly news. Early live shots. I was covering for local news, the bribery and corruption, mail fraud, bribery trial of the governor of Maryland in Baltimore City. And our station was in Washington, DC. So I would drive 45 minutes to Baltimore and go to federal court with an artist, and we would cover the story, leave in time to drive back down I95 to our studio for the local news at 6 o'. Clock. And she would often be finishing the artwork in the back seat and waving it out the window so that it would dry in time to get it back to the studio. I'd sit next to the anchorman, we'd put it on easels and have two cameras cutting back and forth between the scenes as I would live narrate my script. We're now in such a different world covering the war with all of these flyaways and sat phones and the extraordinary video that we had from the war with the late David Bloom, who personally engineered the equipment that we uniquely put into an M1, sort of a tank recovery vehicle that rode alongside the tank in which David was. And we were transmitting all of this. And with, of course, terrible, tragic, fatal results for David, for spending so much time in this vehicle and for the viewer. We saw the war in real time, in a real sense. It was a fraction of the war, as was everyone else who was embedded, but it was real video. Now, does that better explain the war to the viewer? I mean, this is an issue that you all face every day. We augmented that with armchair generals and people giving what. Now, if you read David Brooks column today in the New York Times, in those early weeks, what the generals were saying on television was very accurate, as I refer back to Cobra 2. They were questioning the game plan. And we are now seeing the results of many mistakes that were made in those early weeks. But was the video so Powerful that it overwhelmed the other voices that were being heard? Well, we thought of that at the time. And so we tried to balance the power of these images against the other commentary in the studio so that people didn't get swept away with the gee whiz aspects of what, until Najaf at least, was extraordinarily successful campaign and had very, very little bloodshed for blood loss by American troops. So these are issues that we face, and I think you face them in your own, with your own technology as to what is real and what is too, too heavily weighted. You know, how do you balance fact from more dramatic images that may actually distort the reality, may not present the reality if they are not put in the right context. When I think back in terms of the way we've covered wars and other crises over the years, the visual is still for us. I mean, the word pictures that are painted by the greatest writers in television. And I hold David Brinkley and a few of my other Tom Pettit, the late Tom Pettit at NBC, several of the other really fine writers. Bob Schieffer at cbs, Brian Williams, word pictures from Katrina. We still can do something uniquely, despite the fact that we're not living in an Ozzie and Harriet world and people aren't sitting around their kitchen tables at 6:30 or 5:30 or 7:00 clock watching the evening news, we still can present things that other people cannot. And you know, it moves policy. Bill Clinton has said that one of his greatest regrets was not focusing on Rwanda until the BBC presented the images to the world. Right now, we're all ignoring Darfur. My colleague Ann Curry did a story from the Chad border the other day. But it is so difficult to get in and it is so dangerous. And with all of our resources tied down in Iraq and with the losses that we have sustained, extraordinary losses in covering the Iraq war, there is a reluctance to send teams into Africa. And without the visual element, the American people are not becoming awakened to the tragedy that is still unfolding and the genocide there. So these are some of the, these are some of the challenges that we face. How do we do it all? How do we communicate it? How do we adapt as you create new forms of communication? How do we, you know, upgrade ourselves from the days when I typed on a royal typewriter to the days when we are communicating and filing our stories via our laptops, doing our voice tracks now through our laptops, I mean, doing new things that we have never learned before. We're now carrying our own little cameras when Wherever we go, we're not traveling in all places with as many, you know, with tiny teams of producers as we used to. This is the whole new world of your technologies, and it's the world that we're trying to engineer as well. And the questions now that we have are not just technological. They're questions of content, as they always have been, of what is the role of the citizen journalists and the other the bloggers? And how do we determine fact from fiction? And what do we do about things that we find online that are just not true, but that are impossible to eliminate sometimes from our own biographies? So with those thoughts out there, I'd love to take your questions and find out what your concerns are and how you think that we can better serve our publics and what relationship you see between what we do as reporters for a living and what you do here at Google. Thank you all very much. You had your hand up there.

So I heard you say you are not supporting what people like Judith Nar said about it and did. But in terms of the way the whole media kind of reacted to the Iraq situation, what do you think the lessons learned from that are? And how do you see it applied today, say, with allegations, say, Bush administration may be making about other countries?

Well, certainly Iran is a big issue right now, and we are all very mindful of the lessons from Iraq as we approach Iran. How do we know what Iran is doing and what tests do we follow? I have to tell you very frankly, in the old days, I used to feel that if I got calls returned by people in the CIA and other intelligence agencies that it was acceptable and appropriate for me to go on the air and say, you know, a senior intelligence official said today, blah, blah, blah. Well, now I have to worry about whether I'm attributing something to someone whose information I can't test. And when you get into the world of intelligence, it's very hard to, you know, obviously we cannot independently determine what is going on underground in Iran. Our government can't do that. And we're very, very careful now to test what our sources are saying and how to properly attribute it. We put many more qualifiers in, and we also, I think, have a responsibility to describe and you'll see this in some of the print stories post New York Times, post Jason Blair, you'll see in the Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or some of the other major media. Now, somebody, Steve Erlinger, wrote a story today in the New York Times about the problems of Palestinian funding in the aftermath of Hamas winning the election. And he had a budget document from the World bank which indicates four scenarios of what the impacts will be if the Europeans withdraw money, if the Americans withdraw money, if, you know, far less likely the Saudis withdraw money once Hamas takes over, if Israel continues its withholding of the tax revenues. And he had a little phrase, a useful phrase. It's just being consumer friendly to the smart consumer. His phrase was someone with an interest in distributing or in exposing this information or in seeing wider circulation for this information, you know, gave it to the New York Times. Well, that tells you that it was a World bank official or an advocate for the Palestinians who wanted this out to see for the world to see what the probable effects would be. And with that, I as a reader can say, okay, I sort of know what acts is being grinded here, but I probably, you know, and I know that this is a World bank document, and I know something about the people who work on this stuff for the World bank. So I kind of know what filter this is going through. That's the best you can do for your viewers. When I went to the UN having covered Colin Powell since the days when he was a deputy national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and then in the first Gulf War, I think as a correspondent covering the Secretary of state, knowing that he was one of the less hawkish members, to say, to put it mildly, of the administration had been marginalized by Rumsfeld and Cheney, that if he told us and his people told us that they had scrubbed the data in four or five days at Langley, I was predisposed to think, well, this is probably accurate because they've taken out all the really bad stuff. They told me what they'd taken out, the really outrageous stuff. And what I didn't know was that the stuff that they still had was misleading. And I don't think it was witting. I think it was unwitting. But that this was the evolution of people wanting to please their bosses and not willing to challenge the status quo and trying to put the best face on something that said it was wrong. And my script said, you know, colin Powell in a strong presentation today. Well, all of the adjectives used gave weight and credibility and impact. And I. The inspectors agreed with the conclusions. They didn't agree with the policies, but those were different choices. And that's where I think we have to be very, very careful in how we write a story. We have people looking over our shoulders. There are senior producers who will say to me, take another look at your script. You're Putting too much credibility in this. We're all chastened by what happened. And I don't think that any of us can say back then we would have done it differently because we didn't know. But now we are. And I don't think anyone is making any assumptions about Iran now. That said, some of our competitors have done stories recently, very big ballyhooed exclusive stories that Iran has done this and Iran has done that. And you know, you have to check, are these stories coming from Iranian exiles, are they coming from, from people in the administration that are now trying to make Iran a boogeyman or is there something really serious going on here and you know, what is the truth? So we have a very big obligation on that score right now. Yes.

Kind of thinking along that kind of similar vent. It's actually kind of a twofold question. How do you see the advent of the 24 hour news networks, CNN, Fox.

All of.

Changing journalism and in that, how the perspective or balance changes in that as well?

Those are all good questions. First of all, they change your life, my life because. And also with our website, we are 24 7. Ever since CNN went on the air, you could not hold a story for the 6:30 news because it might be broken by one of your by CNN earlier in the day. So we would start breaking our stories during the day, interrupting the network. Before we had cable, now we have cable on msnbc. And so it gives you a richer experience to get information out. I did a two hour interview with Michael Gordon and could only get four and a half minutes on the evening news. But I could put the transcript up on the website and other material and you know, that's something that we enjoy doing. I write columns and we blog in an attempt to be more transparent and try to engage people more in the behind the scenes process. Brian Williams on the Daily Nightly tells people, you know, how do we decide that this should be the lead or this should be the off lead? And how do we decide what we're doing each day? What do we do in our 2:30 afternoon conference where editors and producers compare notes and decide what should go first and what should go second and what should not even be in the broadcast? So that's, that's part of what we do. But all news on cable has made it possible, you know, for us to do much more political coverage than we ever could on the network. With only a half hour of evening news, we can put updates on at any time. We always update for the west coast on nightly News. But after 9:30 we now have 9:30pm on the east Coast. We now have more options to update on cable. Now, that said, we get into the world of primetime cable talk shows on all the networks, which are occasionally screaming matches. And how does that help anyone understand the world around them, this complex world where we are not coming to grips with paying for our health care in the future, with paying for my retirement, to say nothing of your generation's retirement, with what to do about big issues, proliferation, Korea, Iran, Iraq. Any of these questions, which are such political dynamite for both political parties, are not debated in any national campaign. And instead what you see are personal attacks and food fights, verbal food fights on cable talk at night occasionally or more often than not at times on some of the networks. And I think it's when I think back in talking back, I described what it was like to leave the White House in 89 and go to the Hill. And at the time, I thought it was going to be sort of a backwater assignment. Why do I want to cover a Congress? And I write, there's a subtext here of many times in my career where I had what I thought were setbacks and turned out to be the best assignments I'd ever had, and Congress was one of them. But it was at the same time as cable news was starting and talk radio was becoming very powerful. And in 1989, I went there and ended up doing more stories, getting on the air more than I ever had before because we had the savings and loan crisis and the ouster of Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House, and the rise of Newt Gingrich and all of the other scandals. I call that chapter scandal on the Hill, the Clarence Thomas hearings. And it was largely fed by cable shows that evolved. And in the 92 campaign, you had the merging of tabloid and what we used to think of as mainstream journalism with the early scandals of Jennifer Flowers and the draft controversies in the Clinton campaign. I was on the road with Bill Clinton throughout and enjoyed frankly revisiting that, because I had covered Clinton on the road and in the White House, but got out before Monica Lewinsky's thing hit. So by the second term, I was covering foreign policy full time and didn't have to deal with what some of my colleagues did. But it was during that second Clinton term that the most provocative argumentative debate came to the fore. And you had people who said the most outrageous things, whether they be pundits or members of Congress. During the impeachment debate, were the people getting on the air more. And we were rewarding controversy And I think that diminished the hard news content of some of these talk shows. And it's one of the things we really have to worry about. It has diminished. It has fed into what I see as a decline in civility in Washington. And I don't mean to sound like an old fogey about this, but when you have people screaming at each other and significant members of Congress saying that they can't get questions answered from the White House and sort of an arrogance on all sides, nobody gets anything done. And I think that's what's contributing in the polls to this right track, wrong track number where, you know, this huge number of people, 62% now think that the country is going on the wrong track. That is dangerous for our country. That is a state of play where whether you like, you know, whether you're liberal or conservative, Republican, Democrat, Independent or agnostic on all of this, it's not healthy for our country that nobody is talking about how to pay for our future and how to stop congressional spending on crazy things when other stuff isn't even being addressed. So I think we fit into that. And I haven't quite figured out how we fit into it and how 247 news fits into it. But I think the velocity of information, the blogging, all of that is providing a wealth of information. It is a tremendous resource. And at the same time, people are overloaded and real issues are not being calmly discussed. Yes.

So the word of the day, the truthiness and the fact that, you know, that he said, she said is what we're getting on the news. And I think if you took a poll here, most of us would be getting our news from the Daily Show. And why is it that it's the Daily show that we feel like we're getting more facts from? Because the truth does exist.

I mean, we all love it. We watch the Daily show, we watch Colbert Report. And, you know, and if I miss it, it's on at 11 o' clock East Coast Time back home. So if I miss it, then I end up watching it at 1:00am I mean, because we have crazy hours too. Like probably a lot of you, but they would be the first to tell you that that's not, that truthiness is not, you know, hard facts. I actually think that on our evening newscasts that we, that Brian is following in Tom's tradition, was following in Chancellor and Brinkley's tradition, that Bob Schieffer is doing a very interesting show now on CBS and ABC has had, you know, these horrible personal tragedies that have been their own setbacks, but that the three evening newscasts are still doing a remarkable job of covering the world as best we can each night with important information on the war, on the Middle east, on health care, perhaps not the balance that any one person would want in any given night, but that is being confused in people's mind with the cable talk shows because they see us doing both roles, frankly, and we've blurred the differences. I write about how in 1992, Tim Russert, my bureau chief then and now, called me in Little Rock, and I'd been on the road for a year, and I was covering the transition, and Tim called me and said, well, I've got good news and bad news. Good news is we're going to make you White House chief White House correspondent. Because I had been covering the Hill and then had been on the road with Clinton, and they were going to send me back to the White House where I'd covered Reagan. And the bad news was that he said, we're going to take you off the political analysis gig on the Today show, where I was going on with Russert and Al Hunt and before that, David Broder once or twice a week doing political analysis, because, said Tim, obviously we can't have you on the North Lawn of the White House giving straight news and also be on the Today show in the morning sounding off. And I said, right. And, you know, that was only November 1992, and it now seems quaint that those firewalls no longer exist. So in this election cycle, I found myself, you know, sitting with Joe Scarborough and Ron Reagan and Chris Matthews on a live set during the presidential debate with people, you know, screaming and shouting behind us, and at one point, Zell Mueller, you know, challenging Chris to a duel. And so you have to ask yourself, you know, how does the viewers sort this out? And how do they figure out whether what you're saying is a straight report or is analysis? And I try to walk a very fine line. I don't do commentary, I don't do editorials. I do analysis. I do context. But how do they sort out what happens in prime time at night on cable with what happens at 6:30 or 7:00 clock on the nightly newscast? And so in a way, we've contributed to our own problem, the decline in the credibility of what we do for a living. And the other thing is that, I mean, you're all watching the Colbert Report. You know, it's satire, but you do think that it is giving you the sort of the essence of what you either believe or want to believe about the administration because it fits your own, you know, attitude and it's fun and funny but at the same time, I'll bet you also go online and read the newspapers and have, you know, more information that you absorb. Most likely most days, you know, I still have this old fashioned need to. As much as I read online, I also like to have a newspaper. It's habit. And I'm sort of wedded to newspapers because there are things that you just can't find, believe it or not, online that you can find buried in the paper some places. But it's all generational and I know that that probably is changing rapidly.

Yeah, yeah. I have a question about the business of news. Do you think that the business of news will remain financially stable? I mean Google, I mean NBC are very much the same. We're supported by advertising. Do you think that will continue?

I do. It will evolve. I mean we're on cell phones and in all sorts of new digital platforms. And as I say, it's not going to be the broadcast, you know, my father's nightly news broadcast. But I think it will because we are able to link to an enormous depth of things through our network and provide information and context and experience. When we have Bob Bizzell evaluating a medical journal and some report that is a very, that is a unique service that we can provide because of his experience or Brian in Katrina who was inside the Superdome and watching it come apart. And you know, advertisers will still want to be identified with that. And the Today show is enormously successful financially. I mean CNBC for whatever ratings challenged challenges it has had is a big financial success. So Meet the Press is a huge asset to NBC. The numbers are probably three and a half to 4 million viewers for the first feed, although we repeat it on cable and now it's podcasted as well. But the numbers don't translate to the impact of the demographic that we get for that show and the high end people and the credibility attached to that broadcast. So it's a sold out broadcast for a reason, at premium prices and very, very cost efficient in terms of production compared to a half rather an hour of prime time television or drama. So there are economies of scale and I think just like you that it's a business model that works. I think more concerning is the future of my friends in newspapers and we see with the Knight Ritter sale. I worked for 10 years in Philadelphia and watched Knight Ridder come to the city and transform the Inquirer and the Daily News and they became Pulitzer Prize machines, the inquirer, and now McClatchy. A smaller chain has bought Knight Ridder because of one investor's pressure and immediately announced that they're going to sell off a dozen of the papers, including the Philadelphia papers, before they consummate the sale to some as yet unknown buyer. So, I mean, that's right now where I think the real vulnerability is in the news media. Yes.

Free press is one of the fundamental pillars of a democratic society, and America has served a series of experiments in democracy. I'm curious, what do you think will change in the legal system or other things that will make restore some of the things that the press.

Well, I think we became the question was about the freedom of press and how a free press is a pillar of democracy and what changes might take place that will restore the confidence and the viability of a free press. And actually, I'm not sure what will happen because the American people, we are so unpopular and for some reasons that are deserved and some that are not deserved that I think we don't have public support right now in our confrontations with the administration in particular over some of these investigations. So I think the American people have to care about the importance of a free press. I find it remarkable that we preach the importance of a free press in Iraq and Iran and in other totalitarian regimes and say that it is the cornerstone of a democracy, yet at the same time, it is very much under attack here in the United States, and it's seemingly without a great deal of public support to defend it. Thank you all so much. Thanks for coming today.