Countdown

Home > Interviews > Mary Matalin

Mary Matalin

Mary Matalin, a Republican political consultant, was an assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. She was a host of CNN’s Crossfire and of CNBC’s Equal Time. Matalin worked on Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign and was deputy campaign manager of Bush’s 1992 reelection effort. She is married to James Carville.

Jules Witcover interviewed Matalin on April 25, 2007.

Why don’t you start by talking about the state of the campaign-finance [laws]. They have created a program; now [tell us] whether it can survive this cycle, and what happens to these second- and third-tier candidates, whether they can even make it into Iowa and New Hampshire.

Let me stipulate that I’m an expert on neither fundraising nor information-age tactics and the use of the Internet, which have become a magnifying force; obviously, as it has done everything else, it’s increased the productivity of these campaigns. It’s also increased, I can see, the influence of less money to candidates if they have something penetrating to say. So we’re really at a nexus of the information age and industrial-age tactics. They have to be married up. You just saw what [Joe] Trippi said when they harnessed, for the first time for fundraising, the Internet in the last cycle. But they didn’t quite figure out how to connect activism, or even money or hits to activism. I’m trying to remember his number, something like 650,000 E-activists, but only 2,500 of them were in Iowa. So you know that it doesn’t matter. You have to get the resources to the right place.

The converse of that is you can spread a message, which is what the essence of what money is used for in a campaign. I think, what, 70 percent of budget is media, communications. You can do that more cheaply with the information-age technology. So I don’t know what James [Carville] said, but I have no doubt that second- and third-tier candidates can have an impact in different states, with different messages, and may even end up being a — James is a big theorist on this — third- or fourth-party candidacy.

But we’re talking about technology. Are we talking about just for fundraising, or the Internet, or what?

Well, they are inextricably intertwined, because they are using the new technology for an old-fashioned purpose — to raise money — and doing it with great success. But they are also using the information-age technology for spreading the message, which is the same thing you would do if you had money. That’s what you are spending your money on at this point. They can use the technology in far cheaper ways to organize events, to do the groundwork, to turn out people.

I can’t tell you how many E-events I did in the last cycle where I would call into a party or something. I think it’s more than one where there would be yard parties everywhere. And they would all tee up at the same time, some big speakerphone, or a camera or something. And the candidate and I would beam in from different locations. That’s what you do. It’s what the organizers on the ground do.

What is interesting for you and me to watch is what the [Howard] Dean people found out had to happen. And I don’t know if [Barack] Obama can even do this. They had to take the potential activists they were getting, like in New Hampshire and Iowa, and they would have to marry them up with human beings. You remember that? When they were going door to door, which is a version of the old door-to-door stuff, except that they were more tapped into them in a way that my “MyFace,” as Hillary [Clinton] now calls it, and conflating MySpace and Facebook. They had more information. They knew who these people were. But they still had to touch them as human beings. So all of that is by way of saying that what we spend money on we can accomplish in different ways through the same technology. But we don’t know all of those ways yet. We are not proficient yet. All I can do is pull down my e-mail. My kids can publish stuff and all that.

All of these campaigns don’t just have a site. You have to have stuff going on. And none of the geezers know that. And now the youngsters, if you will, they don’t have the kind of instinct, and experience, and DNA of the kind of politicking. It’s still the same. That’s still the same. So it’s just an interesting cycle. But in this cycle we are applying our same thoughts that, somehow, I still think there is an underlying premise sometimes spoken and unspoken that money is corrupting in politics. And sometimes it is, but not necessarily, and far less it isn’t.

And everything is relative anyways. As [columnist] George Will said, as much as money as we are going to raise and spend, these candidates in this cycle still [spend] the equivalent of what [we] spend on Easter-egg candy a year. And the cycle before that it was yogurt. So relative to what is anachronistic, it’s just insane, really, and we are still tied to the same limits that we were in ’76 and ’80. Something is going to have to give on that.

Well, the amount you can give has been raised.

Not individually.

Twenty-three hundred [dollars].

As opposed to what?

A thousand [dollars], so it’s not that much.

Well, it’s not in the scheme of things. So the influences don’t go away; they just find other vehicles. So obviously, the last invented vehicle to get around that was the 527s, which are less transparent. We always just sort of concede that people want to, and groups want to, and interests want to affect the system. And they have the economy of scale through pooling their money in whatever form. We have all of these fake rules. It’s not the problem; the problem is the transparency issue. Who is influencing you? And what are they getting in return? So why don’t we work on that problem, which we keep trying to fake our way around?

Well, how do you do that?

James and I disagree on this. Anybody in any group can give as much as they want. And you can spend as much as you want. You just have to instantly indicate and record from whom you are getting money and on what you are spending it. And the penalty for any lapse of transparency is a huge penalty. It’s huge. Now, how many do it, mostly it’s just an administrative screwup on your fundraising stuff, and you get three years after the fact.

Look at the FEC [Federal Election Commission]. Three or four years later they give you a tap on the wrist.

And so I have never been in a campaign where there was any discussion about let’s purposely [avoid reporting]; it is nickel-and-dime stuff. But there should be a serious enforcement mechanism. There should be some tribunal that makes you get in the middle of a football field and stones you. They pull the American equivalent of that for lack of transparency. And then that’s it. 

How do you do that? I mean, the FEC is supposed to be doing that.

They are not doing it, though. They are not doing that.

They are not doing it? Why? Because they are split by party?

You know what? It’s so frustrating to me. I don’t even follow it. But it’s just clearly they either didn’t understand, or didn’t enforce, or had different interpretations for what was the meaning of a 527. McCain-Feingold doesn’t work. It was completely corrupted, if you will, by the 527s. And I am not saying this as a partisan, but the Republican 527s are Ben Ginsberg [a Republican elections and campaign-finance lawyer]; there is a big hoo-ha about the Republican 527s and the coordination. Ben had no coordination whatsoever when he was doing it. But there was a presumption that we are corrupt. And all of those Democrats are trying to get around every which way in the last cycle.

You did sort of the schematic of it, [and it] would have looked like Hillary [Clinton]’s health care, maybe one piece, because we are complaining about it in The [New York] Times. But there is unequal treatment. There is incoherent treatment. It exacerbates and magnifies the concept that money is corrupt. The money that came back into the system was corrupted because of the uneven capricious and only media-enforced look at it or illustration of it. The FEC didn’t do that. The FEC still doesn’t know, as far as I have read, what constitutes a violation of the 527 rules.

So how would you do it? You would just have to scrap everything we have. And you would have to say parties and candidates can, at any level to whatever is their capacity, raise anything you want. And then if you have a big sugar daddy, like [financier and philanthropist George] Soros is a big sugar daddy now. We just don’t know what he’s got all his tentacles into. So now he has to say: “I am George Soros. I am funding Media Matters [for America]. I am funding MoveOn.org. I am funding all of these things that are moving the war policy over the cliff.” [Note: Media Matters for America has repeatedly said that it has received no money from Soros or Soros-connected organizations.] Why not let people make the decision? Or I am a big corporation, or I am oil, or whatever. And then let the sun shine in.

Well, do you think the voters care? Is this a voting issue [— for example,] “I am not going to support you because you have taken money from this, that, or the other guy?”

No. I think here is what they care about. Let me back up. You will remember in — what cycle was it when [Ross] Perot got in? Was that ’92? It was ’92, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

So we operated under the premise that people would resent rich people so well-heeled that they could fund their own campaign. When we finally tested it, we were shocked. How often do you do a poll and you are shocked by something in it? But we were shocked to find out that was a positive for him.

Spending his own money?

That he did not belong to anybody. So they don’t care about money in politics. What they care about is sneakiness, or lying, or sanctimony, or phoniness. They just want to know what it is.

Don’t you think they are also concerned about whether access buys specific benefits?

Well, the presumption there is that only rich people can get access. I just got off the phone with a group that shall remain unnamed, who as individuals have no money. But collectively they pool their resources. It’s called PACs or grass-roots action or whatever. This is a democracy. You can petition by virtue of an economy of scale and have just as great an impact. As you well know from covering these guys, they are now immune to what you would do with money, sort of robo-letters. But they are not immune to people really calling their office, or really coming to town-hall meetings, or really writing letters to the editors. We have a very clear sense of what is just automated and what is real stuff.

So I say, in that regard, it would be even more democratizing, because it would force people into the system to bring together for their common interest. And it would also allow people to say, in ways they can’t see now, and therefore be able to object to: “I don’t like that — pick a cause, any cause — has this much influence,” or “I do like it.” I love how we get to decide, by some arbitrary and capricious manner, that one guy’s special interest is another guy’s heroism. AARP has huge influence. Why are they somehow cooler than big oil or big PhRMA [Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America]? Because they have a better communications thing?

Well, maybe because their base is a more diverse. I mean, anybody can be in AARP. The Democrats, liberals, conservatives, long, tall, short, anybody rural. AARP has a wide base that’s not identified as, for instance, the oil industry is.

But the oil industry, for whatever reason, for lots of reasons, [is] wrongly maligned. I think a lot of these guys, rather than defend themselves, they just go along with why they are being attacked. That’s crazy. Hydrocarbons are the engine of this economy, the global economy, as a matter of fact. Hydrocarbon production is so much cleaner, so much better than it was even 10 years ago. So it creates lots of jobs, and not just jobs related to the industry. Trucking jobs, mounting the trucks, it’s just as diverse and just as widespread as AARP.

What this would require of industries that are now maligned is they would spend more time telling their stories. Or PhRMA: Our quality of life is so much greater because of PhRMA. I am not a lobbyist for anything, let me make it clear. But it just kills me when these guys roll over because they think that it’s easier and cheaper than fighting back on this stuff.

Or the whole green thing now. We have just gone completely nuts on all of this, whether or not it’s true. So I take your point. I understand what you are saying. But it would give people more exposure to these arguments. And it would force them to band together in some way that would be more democratizing. I don’t think they would just say, “I don’t have any money, I don’t have any power.”

What about the financial demands on a campaign from the growth of your business of electing candidates, All of the different things now that are farmed out to different people to make up the whole campaign industry, if you want to call it that. How much has that driven up the cost of campaigns, and do you think that’s healthy or not?

What do you mean? 

Well, instead of in the old days, [when] you had one campaign manager who did everything; he had a personal relationship with the candidate. That’s why he was there. He wasn’t there to make a living and didn’t make a living. If his candidate won he might go into the administration, or if he lost he’d go back and do whatever he did before. You don’t have a full-time, around-the-clock campaign industry that does all of the things that are required now to get a candidate elected.

Is that bad or good? Is that the question?

Yeah. And is it a major factor in driving up the cost of campaigns? I mean, we know about television and how much they suck out of the other campaigns.

Let’s say that it has, but what’s driven up the cost of campaigns is the cost of raising money, and the cost of media and grass-roots operations. The labor factor can be excessive, as you’ve seen in these first quarterly reports. But it doesn’t need to be. And I still contend that the majority of people at the upper echelons in campaigns could make a lot more money doing something else than one campaign. Typically, if you are doing a presidential campaign you are not doing a bunch of other stuff. I mean, you get a focus. Some of them are. But the candidates aren’t letting them overcharge. And those who command a big fee deserve it. I mean, sometimes these guys really do deliver.

I think there is just such an obvious market force here. The only time labor is excessive is if you are trying to buy people so they don’t go somewhere else. It’s your own campaign. If you look at these campaigns, most of [those] running them are still, you and I recognize this, the old time. They are the inner circle, close to the candidates. They are doing it for free or peanuts. They could be making a lot more outside.

Some of these campaigns have taken not just in this cycle, but in previous cycles, and also at the Senate level, have not paid the 15 percent on the media. So the candidates are taking it upon themselves to get in line the cost of doing business. And really, that is not the moneymaker for guys who do this for a living. The moneymaker is having volume, many campaigns, or it’s to get in some kind of business related to the victory of your candidate, lobbying. There is no money in campaigns, unless you do a bunch of them.

Is that healthy to have somebody who is running a campaign doing other things, including the lobbying?

No. I am saying you don’t do politics to make money, like some people have these firms where they make their money. I don’t know anybody who ever got rich doing presidential campaigns. They do what we do. We went off and we wrote a book. And we stay interested in the topic. And we talked about it. We don’t lobby. Or people who do lobby, to say that that’s improper, or unethical, or presume that everybody is corrupt. I cannot tell you how many people tried to get in to see [Vice President Dick] Cheney who thought they should automatically get in because they had worked and contributed on the campaign. And he didn’t see them. And the people that he did see, relative to getting policy advice, he took their advice [or] he didn’t take their advice on their merits.

But the presumption that all access is unethical, that’s just not right. And the process that all lobbyists are somehow corrupt or unethical, everything is so much more complicated. The compliance with it, and trying to wend your way through the bureaucracy, the market force has created this guide, if you will, for lack of a better term. This is the same way that big medicine has created guides. Now my dad has cancer; he needed some advocate to get through the Medicare in the cancer process. It’s just gotten more complicated. So I think they are as much guides as anything else. I think there is a much greater presumption, and I say this about both sides, that they are all creatures of special interests.

So, if that’s the case, what is the problem of money and politics?

I go back to my original point: I don’t think money in politics is a bad thing. I think we are continuing to suggest that it is a bad thing. Our ascribing of corruption to it is a bad thing. We should say that this is the way, in a post-industrial age, or in any age, that when you actually have a job to do everybody can’t stop and go petition their government. But they can join organizations, or support organizations, and through that economy of scale, can petition their government. AARP is a good example, or Common Cause is a good example, in that there is a way for people to do that. It just requires initiative. And men are not angels. If they were, as [James] Madison said, we wouldn’t need government. So if there is a possibility of corruption temptation, the solution to that is complete transparency on behalf of the giver and the receiver.

Would it enforce without an enforcer . . .

With a really severe enforcement, up to and including you get kicked out of the race. I am sure that would be unconstitutional, but something that akin to the equivalent of shunning. And there certainly are forces to bear to do that.

What do you think about James’s idea, in these congressional elections, of members of Congress taking nothing from anybody? Absolute no money for watches or anything else, just take money completely out of the equation.

For incumbents? What’s the rest of his idea? And then for any money they do take, the government has to co-fund . . .

Yeah. That a non-incumbent raises ‘X’ money; the incumbent, if he is running, say a member of Congress is going to run for president, gets paid a high percentage of what the challenger has raised.

Like all things Carville, it’s clever. And it’s ironically conservative, because it is all premised on the concept that you should be able to win on the power of your ideas, which I think of as a distinctly conservative approach to campaigning. But it’s impractical. And it also goes to the suggestion that money and politics is corrupt. Now I kind of like the part that says you can’t take money in any form from anybody that has pending legislation or something in front of you. But that still suggests that you are corrupt or the money is corrupt, that you are only pursuing that legislation because they are giving you money to do it.

It’s like the concept of whores, as opposed to the concept of Madonnas. I think more of these people will come to town because they are idealistic. And they support a certain way of thinking, or they support legislation. And this is the process by which our policies affect the way we live. I don’t think being funded to be able to do that is a whorish thing. I’ll say it again: I think it’s a Madonna thing. Because the government’s crazy. I mean, the government can do crazy things.

I was talking to some guys this morning about the whole trans-fat issue. Ten years ago the government made them put trans-fats in to replace saturated fats. And now they are making them take it out. And in 10 years they are going to do something else. Or the [MBTE, methyl tertiary-butyl ether], whatever this is, this nonpollutant energy additive in California; now they have determined that it’s polluting groundwater.

Well, there should be some public way to be able to affect the government, which requires money. You have to hire people to do it. You have to hire people who can think to make the argument. You have to bring outside pressure to bear. Look at the piece in The [Washington] Post about the Kurds. I mean, to get people to participate in the process and to bring the pressure that it takes to change things requires communicating with them. And that costs money. I don’t think that’s corrupt. Petitioning the government is not a corrupt thing. So rather than to continue enforcing that presumption, we ought to figure out ways to stop what could be corrupt. And I keep coming back to transparency.

So again, James’s stuff is clever. But it presumes either the receiver or the giver is corrupt, as opposed to having a premise for petitioning your government, that everybody has an interest. And to the extent that you can get organized, you can petition, in a democracy, your government and have your voice be heard. Does it take more work for people, in some instances, to pull together? Yes. Is it impossible? No. Is it pretty easy once you get your arms around it? Yes. One of the industries that has grown up in our tenure here has been the explosion of initiatives and referenda and all that, which a lot of guys are making money off of that, but it’s been a democratizing force. I mean, it’s a counterbalance to forces that could have inordinate influence by virtue of already being organized.

Now I’m just thinking in a democracy, people are a market force. And they can figure it out if the cause is strong enough. And now I come full circle back to the information age. Particularly in the information age, it costs less. And the Internet is providing an economy of scale. And you can do it faster, cheaper, and anybody can do it, for good or bad. I mean, look at the stuff they have done, in just the last cycle from Dubai Ports, to Harriet Miers, to Dan Rather. Pick a thing, any thing. And there is this power, and none of that costs anything. Now what is costing something is George Soros funding these crazy Media Matters guys who could not be more vile.

MoveOn, and that kind of thing?

Well, I think there is a market force there. I not only respect but applaud their funding, or their ability to get funded, and what they are doing. And there will be a market force here. What they are managing to do so far is take otherwise reasonable candidates and move them to the fringe for the purposes of their 10 percent activity in the primaries. Well, which gets them far afield of the 30 percent of the general election is going to make the difference. So it all comes out in the wash. I am just saying, however much this costs, it is far cheaper than it would be if you didn’t have the Internet to make it happen.

Well, what is making campaigns more negative — the amounts of money that are poured into campaigns or the emergence of these kinds of groups?

I don’t think it’s money. I think what is making them feel more negative, the last time I looked at this data, which is [done by] Kathleen Hall Jamieson [the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania] and Thomas Patterson [a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government], it was that the reports of negativity exceeded by two or three times what was actually occurring as negative stuff. You report on one bad spot and 98 percent of the activity in the mail or the other spots are positive, but there is a feeling of greater negativity because that gets reported on more. I followed Thomas Patterson for a long time and [in] his data, that trend was current, at least up until ’04.

Now I think the other thing that makes it feel like it’s more negative, and I hope James spoke to this, because he’s pretty eloquent on it, is it’s not more negative [or] more stupid because there is so much at stake. People don’t listen to it as much; it’s wallpaper when there is nothing going on. But now we are at war. We are in a global economy. We are in uncertain times. We are going through this cataclysmic change. So what would normally pass as political blather is now aggravating people. And it’s feeling negative to them.

But also because of cable television, you have repetition.

Well, yeah.

It doesn’t just go on the evening news at seven p.m. and then it’s gone. It’s going on, and on, and on.

That’s right. The third thing is the information age. It’s another paradox of the information age. The Columbia University School of Journalism just did a study that said we have an explosion of outlets and fewer stories. There’s a greater herd mentality. It’s your repetition thing. So it’s not just repetition; it’s repetition to the exclusion and the suffocation of other stories. And here is a great example: Do you think that Don Imus would have been fired if the [Virginia] Tech thing had happened a week earlier? No. We really don’t have our arms around this, the larger paradox of the information age. I say it in all my speeches, and people look at me cross-eyed: more knowledge, less wisdom. Our wisdom is not commensurate with our ability or the capacity that the Internet or the information-age technology gives us.

How much blame does the press have in that circumstance?

It’s become such a hobbyhorse for people. I come from your age, where you taught me the rules, and my press friends were friends. I mean, we knew what the limits of our friendship were and all of that stuff. But they were good people trying to do a job. So I can’t get out of my DNA the time that was and the people like you who are still doing it. I think that’s less true today. I have fewer relationships, and certainly far fewer that I actually trust.

Why is that happening, do you think?

I think it has something, also, to do with the information age. It wasn’t like you weren’t competitive. And let me just use an example of you. You told me, “Here is how it works.” You tell me: “Here is what’s on background. Here is off-the-record. Here’s what deep [background] is.” You told me what all the rules are. For the first time, when I said whatever, you said: “How are you saying it? Here’s what the rules were, I’ll let that one slip.” The next time I said something stupid to you, and I didn’t go through the rules, you printed it. And you said, “I told you the rules.” Remember this? And it became Hotline’s quote of the day or something. So you were completely fair and straight in trying to help me.

“Bimbo eruptions?”

No. It was earlier than that. It was 1986 or ’87. So with exceptions, the people who I feel like I can talk to and trust in the press are my friends from the old days. There is a handful of guys from this last go-around that I don’t have to say at the top of every conversation, “This is off the record.” I know they are not going to burn me. I think it’s either the competition that’s exacerbated by the information age, which also makes people crazier on TV and stuff. But it might be that there is something about the nature of the business that you can flush through your sources faster. You don’t care. I mean, there was a reason that reporters didn’t want to burn their sources, because they had to go back to them. I don’t know. I defer to you on this. Is it your ethics that stops you from burning me? Or is it your number of sources? You could go talk to 1,000 other people today, I guess.

But I wonder if this may be oversimplified. The fact that when you are essentially in a print environment, it was much more important as a reporter to have an understanding of a candidate or a campaign manager, in the way they think and the way they thought, or why he did what he did, than to have a quick hit. And now in the era of cable television, the quick hit is what the reporters are looking for. They have to be constantly feeding this very hungry monster. And the way that they do it is to come up with something that will get on CNN or whatever. And because there is a constant cycle, there is no such thing as a stagnant deadline.

There is a reduced span of concentration, that’s true, because of what you have just suggested. And I would add to it there is no accountability. You can go out and say all of this stuff. And you can get Don Imus fired. And there is no accountability; they just move on to the next story. I also say there is a reduced span of concentration on the reporters on the beat. I don’t even know how many books you wrote. I have read all of your books. People used to stay, and even some on the tube, far less today, they would stay on this beat. Your greatest aspiration was to get the White House beat or to become the historian of campaigns, from The Boys on the Bus to all of your books.

Isn’t it also true that a lot of print reporters will never think of putting in print what they say on some of these talk shows, because the premium in print journalism is accuracy and preciseness. The premium on these talk shows is speed and glibness. They are diametrically opposed.

And the accountability is greater for print. Because once it’s in print, you can be held. It vaporizes on TV. There is less accountability because you literally can’t — you could Google it out, but it’s a couple or three steps there.

But I think there is something in the DNA of people who go into print. I mean, that’s a specialization that you choose. And you get those kinds of ethics if you are a real journalist. Some of them are sanctimonious, muckraking, and saving the world, and all of that kind of stuff. But there is a different compulsion to television. This is a reality. I am not making a judgment on this. Some of what is good on TV has nothing to do with your skill level; it has to do with something that’s beyond your control, like good-looking women. You notice in the last couple of years more cleavage, better-looking. I am not saying they are dumb, or even men. But that’s sort of out of your control. I don’t even know why I am going down that path. It’s just I am taking your point. And I haven’t really completely thought through it, other than what you have already observed.

Well, do you think that, from your side, it’s easier to deal with the press, or harder, In terms of getting across what you want to get across?

Let me finish [with] a positive on this, because I am sounding so negative. There is more accountability in print, but there is greater impact on the visual medium — a more immediate impact, certainly. And if you can do it, it’s really valuable, a unique skill. And the people who can do it well are more likely to be able to push their causes further faster. You can get a good spokesman that’s an indispensable person. So there is a positive side for it. But there is more tolerance for not-good representatives there than there is in print.

Now is my job harder? It’s more frustrating in that I think we both profess to serve the public. And I think in the old days, where everybody had more trust, you could go talk to me, or Cheney, and you could really have these long conversations. You could write a better textured story. And the cycle of this now, we feel so burnt because you all think that we are tight-assed, or tightlipped, or whatever you say. Don’t give an answer. We don’t tell you anything. We feel like every time we do we get burned. That’s a very oversimplification of it. But the upshot of it is that — not you, literally — the stories are less textured, which means the readers are getting less of what you want them to get. And they are getting less of what we want them to get. We would like to be able, from our side, to tell a more textured, nuanced, better version of what it is we are trying to do. And it’s a chicken or an egg — who knows where it started? But I am saying there is less nuanced reporting now than there was before. And I find that more frustrating.

Do you think that Watergate was an element in that? And also maybe Lyndon Johnson’s dealings in the Vietnam War made the press more skeptical or even cynical?

Yeah. I am not saying the press is without cause for thinking that stuff was being withheld from them, but I think there is something in both of our cultures that is increasingly zero-tolerance. So even after Watergate and all of that, where there became an adversary relationship, all of this [was] well-chronicled. Ten years later, I could still talk to you. I never didn’t trust you and 20 other guys like you. Now my last run through the White House, I probably had some guys who I felt like I could really, really, really trust. And they got better stories.

Because of the ‘got you’ climate?

Yeah. I mean, call it whatever you want to call it. I am using Cheney as an example, because how a man who speaks with such precision is so sensationalized, and there is such little effort to go and put him in context. But there are still plenty of exceptions. But still these guys like: “What was he saying? What did he mean? How does this fit together?” I think their environment is changing. It’s not even being evenhanded. I hate the fake balance of everything. Some things aren’t two sides of the story.

But [any attempt] to make something more clear is jumped on by these outside pressure groups. I’ll give you a ridiculous example after Cheney’s hunting accident, which 55 percent of the Democrats didn’t care about, didn’t think it was a political issue, so it was not a political issue. Nobody cared about it. It was interesting. And all of the insiders delayed it forever. How did we handle it? Blah, blah, blah.

Well, Tim [Russert] that weekend had me, and Maureen Dowd [of The New York Times], and [David] Gregory [of NBC News], and [Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal] go on [Meet the Press]. So at the top of our panel, I went first and explained what had happened. Because the whole thing was “Did we mishandle it?” So I had to say how we handled it, and why we handled it. He had a bunch of hate mail from these outside groups because he let me explain. He didn’t take my side, and then, of course, it was three-to-one against me anyways.

So the very act of presenting the facts now has a pushback. And I’m not saying it’s a fact of his behavior. But when I go on shows, a lot of times I am not even on my own side. I am not one to smack my own guys. But slip in something, even when I am not being supportive of something, I would still get hate mail and vile mail. That goes for at large. So I think am getting off of your point, but we live in an environment where no good deed goes unpunished, particularly with reporters who are just as subjected to it. And we always were, but I don’t think you guys ever were to the extent that you now are. Unless you’re saying really mean things, you get the DailyKos treatment or that Arianna Huffington treatment. There is just more.

And I think our guys were, despite the characterization of me being mean-spirited, we still aren’t. They can be annoying on the Internet, but they are not this kind of vile, kind of threatening, kind of like what they did on the macaca thing, that guy’s stalker. He was a stalker. He stalked George Allen around. And [subsequent to the release of the video on YouTube, Allen received] death threats to his daughters. That never used to happen. And I think some version of it happens more with the press than it ever did, because a lot of reporters tell me about it. They are just stunned by it, they are stunned by it. Anyways, I am getting off of your thing. I don’t really blame the press. I just think it’s all part of this. We don’t know how to operate yet.

Would it be fair to say that, in earlier days, you knew who the press was, you knew what their rules were? And now there is a whole new universe of news dispensers who are not what I would call the press — the bloggers and all of the other groups that go on to the Internet. At least we have had editors who say, “You can’t do this and you can’t do that.” There are no rules now in this new universe of news dispensers and analysts.

Right. That’s why I say I am passing the multiple judgments on this. But I am also confident that there will be a market force that will rein this in, because in its current form it’s not usable. If you are a hateful person, you can go on and you can validate your views. But if you are trying to learn something, currently there is no mechanism to be able to trust what it is you are reading.

So I think to make it useful for its audience, I just read somewhere that some guy, I don’t know if it’s Google or somewhere, they are going to make up rules now. They can have an editorial screen; it was a fleeting thing I saw in The Wall Street Journal. I was like, thank God, because guess what, the demographic who really doesn’t get the information age — mine — I’ll use it. I’ll sit down with my laptop and I’ll go surf the net. But I don’t know what I can trust. And whatever this was in Google, or who is doing this, these big guys who are putting in some sort of rules will make it a more useful tool.
So I do believe in market force. In the end, we may be increasing our productivity, but we are not, in the end, more productive if we have to work twice as hard and increase productivity because we are creating a lot of bad information.

Well, you have this Wikipedia phenomenon, where there is now another group that is getting into that, which is kind of the anti-Wikipedia operation, to try to put into a similar product an editorial component.

But that really has to happen. This is a perfect example. I don’t use that, because I don’t trust it, because anybody can go into it. Now I didn’t know that until one day my oldest daughter said, “I didn’t know about you, blah, blah, blah.” And it was something horrible that had never happened. And I said: “Where did you [hear that?] That’s not true.” And she said: “Yes it is. I read it in Wikipedia or something.” Well, some rapist went in there and put that stuff in. Well, I don’t read it. And I guess there is some way to correct it. I am only now conscious of it because my kids find this crap out about their mother. So in a personal way I am concerned about it.

But you could do that; anybody could put anything into Wikipedia. I just heard something now — I don’t use them, because I don’t trust them because of that thing — but I just read on Wikipedia on somebody that had footnotes. But again, it’s the market force. These things swing. And I think the information age thing is swinging — really, really swing, like really bad, and then it comes back. And we just don’t know all of the tools to be able to shift it. But if it’s not reliable, then it’s a tool for American Idol-watchers.

Well, just as you say that in money you need not only transparency, but you need some enforcement mechanism. Is it the same way now in communication and business, that you need the . . .?

What’s the enforcement mechanism? Don’t read it. It can only be a market force.

There is no enforcement mechanism.

Right.

Are you suggesting that there could be an enforcement mechanism?

I think the reason the good press has been good is because it has been self-policing. The temptation for corruption in money, in politics, is great. And there needs to be a severe penalty. In your business, everybody has their own standard of what fulfills them as a journalist. [For] some people it is fame. [For] some people it is money. [For] most of the reporters that I have known it’s been neither. It’s been doing a good job at what they do, really being the expert on what it is they are covering, that their reputations meant much to them. They hated to be lied to, and therefore they didn’t use lying sources. Or they hated to be corrected. There was a pride. There was a craftsmanship. And that’s self-policing. And that’s a personal ethic.

This is not my profession. Some of the people I like, and have remained friends in whatever walk of life, have that same personal integrity. Maybe there was a period in journalism school where that was less stressed and needs to be more stressed. One of the things I found sort of head-jerking was when we do work [with] the Iraqis and the Afghans, all of the young people want to go into journalism. And then you say, “Why?” And they [say], “Because we want to tell the truth.”

Really?

They have such a hunger for truth. And they are so earnest, and serious, and confident in the free press as a powerful tool for freedom that they bring really deep integrity into it. They don’t want to be wrong. But these are, again, young people. And I am in these mentioned programs and stuff. And all they want to learn is all of these rules. They want to learn the mechanical rules. But they are self-policing, because they want to be trusted. And I don’t know what’s going on in journalism schools. Some of the kids I talk to have that kind of sense. And they always [want] to be on TV. So it’s your business. A lot of the kids have said to me, when I go teach these classes, “How do I get on TV?” I said, “Well, by accident or cleavage.” No, that’s not fair, either. Because I’ll say again, it’s hard to be good on TV. It’s easy to be bad, but it’s hard to be good.

Carole Simpson once told me, when we were doing that Equal Time show [on CNBC], that she had thought of running for Congress. She’s always been politically active. And she said, “I realized how much more power I would have, for what I wanted to change or have an influence on, being on television.” And she is right about that, to draw attention to issues and whatnot. So you know all of these things, the entertainment news, and the infotainment and all that jazz. But TV people tell me: I have been saying for 10 years that there’s got to be a place for smart TV. I am a visual person. I read a lot. But I can understand arguments, if they are well presented, in short form. But where do you go to get that? Why do people watch the History Channel or Discovery Channel? There has to be a place in politics for smart TV without being boring, boring, boring. I am not saying all politics on TV is stupid. I think the Sunday shows still have a pretty good standard.

But don’t you think that the mix of entertainment and news is kind of a difficult thing to sort out? Well, the Imus show is an example. How many reporters, print or TV, would go on the Imus show? And now when this thing happened, they are all either, in my view, in a phony way defending going on the show or being critical of anybody who did go on the show, because it’s not exactly oil and water. But the news is one thing and entertainment is another thing. And when you throw them together, the identity is . . .

I think your people did not distinguish themselves in the Imus affair. I am proud to say that it didn’t take me three seconds to go out and say this is how crazy this whole thing was, how disproportionate it was. What a poor teaching moment it was for these Rutgers girls. I tell my own girls: “No boy tells you. No boss is going to tell you. How could this wrinkled-up old guy [tell you?]” Or the other bad lesson was, you make a mistake, it’s the end of your life. You teach your kids, “You make a mistake, you have to learn from it.” All kinds of bad lessons, and it denied these Rutgers girls an opportunity to have a moment of gracious forgiveness. And they could be a Rosa Parks.

Plus, all the phoniness of it. And, “I didn’t hear it.” Or, “I didn’t listen to that part of the show.” I don’t think the problem is the reporters trying to not dignify themselves, again, by the reaction to this, or the analysis of it. You can’t have entertainment and information. That’s not the right analysis for the problem. The bigger problem is, for news in general, we have not figured out a way to report on water-cooler issues or cultural issues. We kind of think you have to do it in an entertaining kind of [way]. There are just a lot of cultural issues that we don’t know how to do it yet. And Imus is a good illustration, in the sense that the conversation on race is something we report on in ways that are not addressing how people think about this issue anymore.

As a for instance, when I was in the Imus slot, David Gregory was filling in and I did a call-in and said a longer version of what I said to you. I have never received as much e-mail. And 60 percent of it was, “I am an African-American woman,” or “I am a Democratic liberal,” or “I hated you for 20 years, I hate Dick Cheney, I hate everything you stand for.” But every single one of them went on to say, “Right on — that’s what I tell my kids,” or “Al Sharpton doesn’t speak for me.” I mean, it really hit a chord. I got more e-mails than anything, and across the spectrum. And a lot of it was phony-baloneys: “Thank you for defending Imus. I don’t even like him. But this is not right that people could be so phony about this.” There is some way, and I think he was doing it better than anyplace else, despite his vaudevillian comedy DNA, where he would speak the way people think, or how they discuss issues, or [about] what’s culturally important to them.

I am not even really able to articulate this, but what TV tends to do is either happy-talks it or tries to put it into the templates that fit it, hard news. The evening news is the worst. They have their cultural things. They are trying to discuss culture issues in the news format. I don’t know what the answer to it is. But I think the problem is not so much news is becoming entertainment, which it is. It’s how do we cover these things that speak to where people live and how they are thinking? The only thing I can compare it to is — this is when I was a teenager, or at college, but at some point it occurred to me that what I was watching on TV, sitcoms or shows, were no resemblance to any family or anything I knew. Now there is too much stuff you don’t want to know. But what’s the in-between? And I don’t think we know how to do that. It doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure out how to do it. And the opportunity for us to be able to do this with all of these niche places you can go to get it now, you couldn’t before. But maybe there is no way to do it. 

Well, my only argument is I felt uncomfortable to see some of the people who went on the Imus show to say: “Well, you really don’t know this guy. He’s such a nice guy.” That wasn’t the point whether he was a nice guy or not. He said a stupid thing. He picked a bad target. He picked a very bad target.

Really, but I never heard anybody who didn’t give that argument, except say, you have to measure a man in the context of his whole life. I didn’t hear anybody say, “This doesn’t count, because he’s done all of these good things.” Everybody said what he did was reprehensible and abhorrent. What I found reprehensible and abhorrent is your brethren who went on and said: “Oh, I didn’t know this; I never listened. Oh, I didn’t know they were doing that.” Or pretending like they didn’t know what was going on or not saying anything at all. And no one defended him saying, “This doesn’t count.” I didn’t hear it. Who said that?

Well, a couple of guys went on there. No, you are right. They all say it was a terrible thing to say. What I am saying is why should somebody who would go on that show for purposes of his self-promotion run into the studio, again, defending his own appearance there? I can accept why you went on there, but without naming anybody else . . .

Well, when I did my thing, I said, “Look, I said that.” Everybody went on there because they had a book to sell, or they had a show to sell. I went on there because he had no conservatives there, few. And the ones he did were all Bush-bashers. So I would regularly put up with the humiliation of being trashed to go on there to say what I had to say to that very deep audience. Because, I promise you this, when I travel around the country, even more than Meet the Press, “I heard what you said about Iraq.” He didn’t listen to me. He would talk while I was talking. He would go on after me, and before me, and trash me. He was not my audience. And I upfront said that, because all conservatives hate when I would go on there. The people in the press, Mark Halperin [the political director of ABC News] would say, “Why do you humiliate yourself like that?” Because I am not targeting him. I am talking to people out there who aren’t hearing these arguments.

But you would go on a show like that as a furtherance of your responsibility.

I am an advocate.

Yeah, [of] what you are doing. A newsman is not supposed to be in that position. And the reason the newsmen go on is, they like to be on television, they think it will help their career.

I take your point, but I think what I have objected to is — I don’t really care about all of the ethics in your business — but I take objection to would-be Jonathan Alter going on there and acting like an analyst. And he’s a raving lib. All right. And then an hour later, Imus would make me answer his things as if he’s a credible analyst. He’s not. He’s a liberal. He is making a liberal argument. When I go on there, I am a right-wing nut. I’m a Kool-Aid drinker. You know that’s what I am doing. So you can hear it. And you can respond to it in kind. And I don’t think Imus did enough of that. All of this stuff, I just think it’s phony-baloney. And people have to live with themselves.

Well, I am a Neanderthal the way I think now.

I mean, that’s why I love you. I think our ethics worked. And they are coming back. And they are going to come back.

I hope you are right.

Well, you have probably talked to more students. And I think there may be plenty that want to be on TV. But there is plenty, like my kids want to be, [who] get the power of the press for progress. They get to have the Jeffersonian concept of the press. And maybe that’s because I spoon-feed them this stuff. But I think if you guys can work through it faster than we can, what’s not working is this hostile thing. And it’s not the Bush versus the press people. The Clinton people were the same way. And the next White House, it’s going to be the same way. And guess who doesn’t get the right stories and get the right arguments? It’s really shocking. If you guys can’t fix it, or we can’t fix it collectively, what might fix it is these ethics or editorial whatever it is we were talking about, ways that allow you to trust what you are reading, the information age.

My business is very thin-skinned. We are in the business of criticizing everybody else. But we don’t like to be criticized.

I have never, ever, seen more thin-skinned people [who] can dish it out and can’t take it.

I know.

It is laughable. It is hilarious. It’s the Scooter Libby thing. Scooter is going to jail, and the press is like, “OK.” You say anything about their reporting is in any way contributory to the thing, and they freak out. Or that they all knew that it was Richard Armitage and nobody said. We are talking about real lives here — real lives, real families — being busted up over nothing. I am not going to say who it is, but the spouse of one of the reporters involved in it, when the Richard Armitage thing broke, and I said to this spouse, “What an asshole is this.” And this spouse completely bitched back to me, “Scooter Libby ruined my life.” I said: “Scooter Libby ruined your life? How did he? Scooter Libby is the only guy that’s caught up in this. We knew who the leaker was. And you wouldn’t have had to pay a penny or go through any of this stuff if Richard Armitage had stepped up or any of the people that Richard Armitage had talked to had stepped up.” You know, I am making your point in a different way. I think something bad is going on out there. And I liked it better when we were all dealing with each other.