Radio Host Bob Garfield on Trump and Telemarketing

as the election looms. I, like many, am disappointed and bewildered by the constant noise of twenty four hour cable news channels, paid opinion writers, and social media feeds. But there is a short list of writers and broadcasters that managed to cut through the clutter, and that I listened to regularly. Kurt Anderson on Studio three sixty, Brian Lair on w n y C Radio, and my guest today Bob Garfield, the co host of On the Media with

Brooke Gladstone. Garfield's trenchant interviews hold not just politicians and newsmakers accountable, but also the journalists who cover them. He's truly as fair and balanced as they come. Maybe that's because he's always found himself in the middle. I was the middle child in a middle of the middle class household and where in western suburbs of Philadelphia, the affluent Jewey suburbs of Philadelphia, and it was kind of a

upper middle class ghetto called ballet Kinwood. And my parents were active, civically active, and they talked about the news mainly through the prism of complaining about various political figures. And as I go back and reconstruct there, they were progressive because the people they were bad mouthing now that I think about it, were Republicans. But we didn't have We didn't sit down at the table and discuss political

issues or anything like that. What did he do for a living, Well, obviously, he was the general manager of a factory that made paper plates and duh. And but what's fabulous about it is the brand of paper plates was artist crat fantastic and you know it was not false advertising. I mean they were the most aristocratic paper plates so that I've ever used. They even handled baked beans. I'm just saying. Yeah. So he was in the He also had a kind of moon landed. He had a

creative side. He moonlighted as the vice president of a company that made corrugated cartons, So he was a diverse man. He certainly was her renaissance made what about her? My mom was a housewife. He was in the plastic utensil fortune inherited would that she had. We actually we kept a kind of Potempkin village of affluence. But we really struggled, uh to keep up with the you know, the mantel bounds. And it was but it was fine. I mean, we

didn't we didn't really know. Again this I've reconstructed an adult life how my parents struggled at the time. But um, you know it was it was really unremarkable childhood. And you know, I wasn't miserable, I wasn't happy. I don't have a whole lot of fodder for writing now because my parents didn't abuse me and my father wasn't a drunk. And it was in the high school years. Were you involved in any kind of media radio writing. I was the I was the president of the tetracycling squad. My

high school was entirely defined by ACNE. It was absolutely the defining aspect of my high school life. And it was politically in just did I was part of an fledgling organization called something like concerns, students for concern, and we were for a number of things and against a number of things. Precisely which ones I don't recall, but it was in the middle of Watergate, and it was at the more or less it had just followed at the point in our history where college students were occupying

administration buildings and so forth. So I was playing at being politically active. But when it came down to go to college, where'd you go? Uh? Father died dropped my plans. Fortunately, to go to an etsy bitsy little school in Vermont called Marlborough College, which had like two hundred people on the campus, all in I'm that students. Half it was staff. Half of his staff, I think, all dressed in black leotard tops, writing a lot of poetry. I think there

were bongos involved. I'm not sure. But it was expensive and we didn't have money. I can go there here, So I went to Oxford. No, I'm sorry, it's Penn State. I want to Penn State, where I got involved in the newspaper as the world's worst nineteen year old columnist. I found I didn't quite found a humor magazine, but there had been a humor magazine at Penn State called Froth that I took up and essentially ran single handed.

So I graduated. And what was the inclination in you to do that, to want to share information with people, opening about things. If you hadn't been doing that in high school when you got to college, what do they opened up for you? What I think opened up was my genome. I came from a long line of unbelievably opinionated people, and I'm the first one ever, you know, to make a nickel at it. There may have been a desert of facts in my growing up, but there

was absolutely an abundance of opinions. And when you left Penn State, you went right into that. As a career. I became a newspaper reporter in Reading Pennsylvania, part of Pennsylvania, Dutch Land. I actually had an internship while I was still in college. And it's just was one of those epiphany moments. First day in the newsroom, slovenly dressed people saying fuck out loud, Well, this is for me, this is where I want to spend my life. And you know,

I did some really solid reporting on agricultural economics. I literally there a four part series about milk marketing as an intern and then you know, chase some real news. How many years were you there? Intern for a few months and then I immediately got a job out of schools as a reporter and reading four years four years, So you weren't reading for four years. And so we're talking the late seventies probably correct, h correct? What is journalism in your mind? Is it? Has that changed when

you were doing that back then? What was journalism to you? To me, it was finding out about the ship that happens and getting it back to the folks. It matters too, I mean, that's what it comes down to, I think ultimately, you know, and then there's plus a big part of it that it's just looking for phenomenal, phenomenological stuff, the stuff that's going on. It isn't necessarily news. You're not watch dogging government figures and taxpayer dollars. You're just kind

of letters trends. Yeah, yeah, And the key for me always has been to report it fairly neutrally. Now that that has changed, not only in the general practice of journalism but in my heart of hearts. But the idea was, even if you have a point of view, just to make damn sure that you're intellectually honest about the exercise and that you're being fair minded. And that was by and large the rules of the game in the world when you began. I think so now, I was not trained.

I didn't go to j school. I was an English major. But I happily blundered into journalism. Knew literally from the first morning that that's just what I wanted to do. And but I was I wasn't even trained in basic journalism ethics. So on the one hand, that hurt you. I did some things as a young journalist that we're firing offenses. Nobody would ever today countenance some of the things I did that were encouraged by my own newspapers.

Give example, you know, I would needed tires from my car in my city editor, who was corrupt, sent me to one of his pals and said, you know, tell him I sent you, and you'll get a discount. I took a discount of my tires. I mean, that's a

firing offense right there. I was doing some investigative reporting, chasing the connections between some drug dealers and local officials, and I went along with a county detective who was proceeding along similar lines and went to talk to some people, and I didn't happen to mention that I was a reporter. I didn't say I was a policeman, but I was with a policeman, and I certainly wouldn't have objected if the people we were talking to thought I was a policeman.

Crossly unethical. And later I did something even worse. I actually cooperated with the police while trying to track down physical evidence from someone we both thought was a murderer. This is actually a story that I'm going to body with because it's it's horrifying. Poor woman murdered in her home. It happens on the other papers cycle. So I'm doing the second day story, which means knock your neighbors doors, and getting to say that, oh, this is so horrible.

And we thought this just a safe community. Now we're afraid. So the guy next door goes through this whole song and dance about he's going to put up lights, and he's he's going to buy double locks, triple locks, dead bolts, barricades, and I walked away thinking I think he was play acting. I think he was overdoing it a little bit, you know. So when I was talking to the cops later in the day, I said, does the next door neighbor have

an alibi? Said, oh yeah, yeah, checks out. Okay, So I wrote my little story and the next day the police chief calls me. He says, why did you ask about the neighbors alibi? I said, well, you know, I thought he was I thought he was just overdoing a little I sensed play acting. I thought he was playing to the mezzanine and uh. He said, that's that's interesting. Because his albuy broke down. He lied to us and

they pieced together this scenario. The victim had had had foot surgery and he was helping her out and take her out the trash. But that he had been obsessing over for years, decades, and came this opportunity when his wife was out and she was home recuperating. He goes in. He has a key because he's been helping her. She's in the basement. She comes upstairs with a bar and she sees, oh, it's him. She puts the bar down, He makes an advance, she spurns it. Next thing you know,

she's raped and murdered. It sounded good to me, but he had hired a lawyer and fantastic, and the murder is horrendous. But the profile just totally was in sync with my vision of what might have taken place. So but the guy hired a lawyer. When the question got a little more rigorous, the guy hired a lawyer, and they wouldn't let him surrender fingerprints, hair samples, anything you wanted to get a search warrant otherwise, leave my client alone.

So incredibly, I, you know, journalist of whatever, fourteen months contrived to do a follow up story this guy, and I take my the ideas. I stand there with my pen, all right, and while I'm talking to him, I drop it. He picks it up. We have his fingerprints, we have his fingerprints. The police, you know, see if it matches the one partial that they have from the crime scene, and they get their man. Well it didn't quite play out that way. What happened was I stood at his

or and he's angry to see me there. He's angry to see me here. That's a guilty conscience. I dropped the pen. It falls, He stands and stares. He stares at the pen. I stared at the pen. I look at him, He looks at me. I look at the pen. I look back at him. He's not moving. I say, I got that, then check up the pen Anyway. For years and years and years, I thought that this guy had dodged the bullet of justice and the police had not done a good job, and this poor woman was dead,

and he eventually himself died. One year ago, the Pennsylvania State Police arrested a man for the murder of this woman. He was a serial killer. He had spent most of the previous fifteen years in prison for other murders. For whatever reason, he unburdened himself about this one. His DNA matched the samples where they didn't have DNA testing in those days, but they kept the evidence the DNA matched.

Not only did I grossly unethically cooperate with the police, so we're supposed to be reporting about not collaborating with I did it in the service of hounding an innocent man. So no, I didn't go to Jay score. You seem very burdened by that. I haven't done many really terrible things in my life. I mean, I did something to ask you to a girl in sixth grade. I was mean to her, and I still shiver and shutter when

I think about it. But now, when you're in that period of your life, you're in reading and you're in the beginning of your career, what news are you consuming? Are you an evening news network guy? Are you there there's nothing online? You can't read the Times? What are

you consuming? Well, first of all, I was at work when evening news was on, so I really didn't have access to what most people were saying to find out what was going on in the world, right, But I did have the AP wire right by my desk, so I read a lot of stuff in the wires. I read the Philadelphia Inquirer. I did not read the New York Times every day. I did not read the Washington Post. You know. My paper of record was the Inquirer. Our paper kind of sucked. There were a few talented people,

there were a lot of not very talented people. I had talent, but obviously I had no idea what the Hannenburgh's still owned the paper. I think it was Try and Go Publications. Yeah, and what did you think of the Inquirer was it was fantastic. They had all the money in the world. You know, the newspaper business used to be not only profitable, but obscenely profitable, I mean profit margins and on the order of thirty five. And it was, you know, it was the yes, absolutely, that's

all gone. And that is one of my current obsessions. But put that aside for the moment. So while I was in reading Pennsylvania covering the Sewage Treatment Authority, they were winning Pulletzer prizes for like going to Africa and doing four part series on the plight of the Rhino. And I'm sitting at the school board meeting trying to find out what part of the budget was going towards cafeteria lunches and what changes you leave reading and go were.

Then I went to a paper in Wilmington, Delaware, the Wilmington News Journal, which was even though it's a tiny little state and not that big a paper, was very professionally run and had a lot of talent. And how long there I was there for less than a year, and then well, Wilmington was owned by Gannette. Gannette started USA Today. This was in one they were getting that going. It launched on September fifteenth, two and I was kind of a friend and drinking buddy of my boss, the

managing editor. Oh I'm an abusive drinker, and I, uh, how could be others? And I was, you know, I have moderated in the last thirty or forty years, but I was an aspiring, abusive a drinker. Let me put it through that way. And my drinking buddy was the was the managing editor. He became the business editor at this new paper, USA Today. He dragged me down with him and overnight I was a business columnist. His name is Taylor Bucklet. Who was that guy that always have

to have his picture on USA Today in the early days. Yeah, he was the He was the chairman of Gannett and this was his three quarters of a billion dollar vanity project. And you know it worked for a while. They're not making money now, nobody it's a newspaper. Of course, they're not making money. But how does the USA? How does someone like USA Today stay in business? Now? Who's eating all that cost? The GETT is still making money, mainly

because of its television properties. The products themselves have been reduced to almost nothing. I mean, it's a shame. This is how is in des Moines is one of their papers. And picked up the Des Moines Register and it's you know, it's kind of like this. It's it's been physically shrunken so much it's like opening a little dollhouse. Its Azoka show. Comic newspapers are thin, thin, thin there. The newsrooms have

been decimated. The newspaper business is unsustainable. This is one of the great crises of the economy, but mainly of our democracy. We the media economy is in such a vortex of ruins for themselves. With the online edition, they said coming out of them, they're they're more generally profitable, but they're still they're you know, they're looking at the trend lines and they're still figuring out ways to cut, cut, cut, while looking for the you know, these this magic revenue

bullet that's somehow going to solve everybody's problem. I have spent the last twelve years in deep think and also deep anxiety about this situation. You know, I can say, unfortunately, pretty unequivocally, that magic bullet has not appeared. Do you think that that this has happened? Will use the Times? Obviously there is the best model. Do you think this has happened because those people have gone elsewhere for their news or they're just consuming less news, period of both. No,

it's not news consumption that's gone down. On the contrary, there we we are a wash in news because there we can access any news organization in the world instantaneously on our telephones, right, so we've got no problem getting news. We have problems locating rigorous news covering the nuts and bolts of government. I mean, try to find some state

legislative coverage in any state in the Union. It's hard to do because nobody can afford to have a state house reporter anymore, much less the smaller cogs in the wheel of government. I mean, they're just completely completely neglected because nobody can afford to put the human beings at the meetings with the notepads, like I said, got shut down at CBS, Yes, exactly, they've They've cut deep into the bone and there's there's really nothing on the horizon

to solve the problem. The problem is there's the Internet has given us an absolute glut of content. The barriers of entry to be a news organization used to be a billion dollars for you know, printing presses and buildings and employees and trucks and ink and paper, and that kept all but a handful of oligarchs out of the business. Well, now you can be a newspaper for the cost of an iPhone. You get free production, free distribution, So there's

a tremendous glut of content. Like Lauren Michaels is about do he said about YouTube, it would say broadcast yourself. And he said, you know, sometimes we realize that having executives who are in charge of networks and movie studios who decide who's ready to be broadcasting, it wasn't such a bad idea after all, And maybe broadcasting yourself isn't the best way for us to get the best content out there. But let me let me ask you this, when you you when you're done withnet Ganett is how

long the USA today is? How long? I was there for four years? And then where do you go? Well, then I'll be a slee I became a critic of advertising for twenty five years and made fun of TV commercials for a living at a trade magazine called Advertising Age. Did you make a lot of enemies doing that? I believe I did. Yeah. I have sat at a dinner table and a fancy restaurant in can and had an executive come across the dinner table. A hit been overserved,

but nonetheless trying to physically assault me. I mean that stuff happened because no human example. Why you were you were You were literally critiquing their creative output of the You were a column. It was a column for advertising age, in which you just comment commented about whatever the hell you wanted to do in the world of advertising. Yeah,

you know the commercials. It's a Pepsi commercial that's shot and you look at it like from the security camera of a seven eleven or whatever, and you see the coke vendor sneak to try to get a pepsi from the pepsi cooler instead of the coke one, and he's looking around all furtively and he goes to take this thing and he pulls it out and the whole every can tumbles out of the cooler and he's totally busted. Right.

It's a pretty famous commercial directed by one of the greatest TV commercial directors who ever lived, a guy named Joe Pitka. And I thought that what a great commercial. And I had a four star system. I gave it three and a half stars. Why because for whatever reason, they didn't record the sound of full soda cans falling out of a cooler and then layer it over the actual sound which we hear in the commercial, which is of empty cans prop cans falling out. So it was

there's really you see it. It's funny, but there's this any sound of empty cans, right, and you go, wait, what of all details to leave out? So I knocked him down. I didn't usually do this because I was worried about my key issues whether it would sell goods and services. But in this case it was an annoyance and I gave it three and a half stars. You would have thought that I had written that this guy was a Nazi, that he was a pedophile. No. I took off a half a star for sound effects, and

he wanted to kill me. Now twenty five years you do that, and during that time, do you just have your political gland removed? I took my shots. You know, having a column enables you to get any range in them, opinion in through the prism of whatever is you're nominally writing about. So I took my shots. You know. I wrote some op eds. You know, there were like eight Bob Garfields, and the ad Critic was just one of them.

But I also started working at almost the same time for NPR for all things considered as a roving feature correspondent going around looking for weird, quirky kinds of Americana. The guy who wanted to do a home cryonics experiment in his backyard and got a sears shed, and there was Grandpa on dry ice. You know, that's that sort of thing. And I did hundreds and hundreds of these for a DC over the same period of time. How did you connect with npr ah Okay? I wrote an

op ed about going hunting with my in laws. I'm a Jewish kid from the suburbs of Philadelphia. They were cast like family, much like yours. Actually it's they were the bald Ones, except from western Pennsylvania. And you know, they could all build a house with their bare hands, blindfolded, and they killed anything that moved with high powered rifles.

I remember once that Thanksgiving, my mother in law said to me, Bobby, would you handle hand me that cast role from the top of the refrigerator, And I said, you mean this one next to the bullets. So it's a different lifestyle. So I I did a piece of a fish out of water piece about going hunting with them, and sold us in the New York Times. It's gonna

be not bad page in the Times. They laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh left, and then at the very last minute they killed it because there were religion jokes in it and they said this is our only sacred cow. Well it wasn't. But in any event, with regret, they they said, we're not going to run this after all. And for whatever reason, I don't know why, I called all things considered. I wasn't even a regular listener to the show, and talked to the executive producer, guy named Art Silverman. He said,

we'll come in and read it. And I read it. It was on the air that night, so we have a great voice for radio. You never thought about that, that had never been pitched to you before. Well, in fact, thank you, but you speak so clearly. But I didn't. I was there. Here's where I was when I was first starting a radio and I taught myself to come back here. This is this is pretend. I don't know,

it's maybe it's natural, but I was here. In fact, the same guy on my second piece in the radio I recorded, and they I wasn't there for the actual mix of the thing, and I didn't hear it because I was at work. And I called him and said, Hey, Art, how did how did I sound? He said, um, sub human, early alive. But Bob Garfield has come alive in a major way over the last sixteen years as the co host on the Media Coming Up. We talked about where he gets his news today and what he thinks about

the election, Explore the Here's the Thing archives. Dick Cavitt made a career on television by getting stars to open up as real people, but it wasn't always that way. I was going through old envelopes of stuff. I found three report cards from third, fourth and fifth grade. Dick has learned to control his talking is on two of them, and Dick miss learned to let others talk occasionally. One of the wittier ones, Uh, put down. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin

and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Bob Garfield has been holding journalists and media makers accountable for decade, but as sources and outlets have proliferated, it's become no small task to keep tabs on everything that's out there. Garfield told me he's got one ace up his sleeve.

One of the best things about being a co host and on the media is we have a staff of six producers who are all better educated, smarter, have more scope and uh knowledge and understanding, and I ever had on my best day on Earth, they called to my attention stuff that I ordinarily Inaccadia diet wouldn't. They are my aggregators. So I'm in this situation where I have this most wonderful, rich inbox of stuff that has been curated by the smartest, most curious people in the world.

But my go to it's it's the New York Times. I'm sorry, but I think it's it's a daily Mirrornic was on our show and said, it's the weather. It was it's the weather. And I read the Washington Post I'm from. I live in Washington and that's my local paper. They're doing the best they can with their shrinking resources. The Times has cut way way way back on in many areas, including most recently just playing local coverage of stuff that happens, including fires and crimes. They're cut way back,

but they do just most remarkable reporting. It just like seems like every week they're breaking another series about something that you just can't believe they got the story on and whether it's whether it's the conditions at Riker's or the the cozy arrangements between think tanks and their funders, horrifying a couple of stories they did about I don't know, two or three months ago, or nail salons. They just

blow me away all the time. Well, it's funny how you say that, because people in my life always laugh at me. I have two stacks, The New Yorker and the New York Times of back issues to read the long form articles. The New Yorker, as an institution, it has labeled itself variously is the great magazine that that ever was? And it is. Uh, there's not a week goes by that there isn't something in there that is unbelievably illuminating and sometimes validating in the way that we

shouldn't worry about. But oh yeah, that's I like this story because it's my worldview too, and I'm glad to see it reflected, which is one of the things that has destroyed journalism, certainly on cable, that notion of because there is an infinite amount of content, we can now terry pick what we want to consume, right, So, I mean, it's like watching porn online if your fetish is you know, whatever amputee uh Haitian lesbians you can, you can get

the whole thing right. And that's what that's what political journalism is. Now. If you look at the world a certain way, there is going to be this Corney cope of options where all you do is sit there and you get your worldview valid. There's nothing on television for you, no television news viewing, nothing, uh, no program Meet the Press. I sometimes watch parts of Meet the Press to see what happened when a newsmaker accidentally says something newsworthy, right,

and at least there's journalism taking place there. But there is no journalism taking place on cable news unless there's a war actually breaking out and they're showing pictures of of tracer fire. It is nothing but talk, not only to talk about the news, but it's talk by pundits hired because what they're going to say is preordained. But they certainly are, and so there's no way there to go, you know. But I, you know, I real a lot

of stuff in Slate. As it turns out another one of my eight or Amazon partnership with five thirty eight. My media diet is basically the New York Times, the Post in whatever post, Washington Post, I'm sorry, the real Post stir there. The Post is of a good sports department, but go ahead, and their headline writers are pretty good. And I was the Daily News. Whoever the person is who is the editor of the Daily News front page should get some sort of Nobel prize. I don't know

if there's a category for piff, but there should be. Um, you know, I went to George Washington University. I went there for three years full time. I was in a pre law program there. I mean, I was really really locked in loaded that I wanted to run for office. How have we arrived at this place where both parties this is the best we can offer right now? What

is your opinion of that? My opinion is that this this election represents the manifestation of the inevitable and because of that actually very phenomenon that I was describing before, where we can go cherry pick our media sources to match our worldview. The political rhetoric has vastly changed in this country, and we have we have been for the last years or so in an ongoing campaign. I mean,

this is this is not a notion novel to me. Uh, there is a perpetual campaign and everything that's about scoring political points and running down the opposition and um fighting cultural force, nullification, and it's turned out to be a very uh solid cottage industry for Rubert Murdoch and a

few others. But the problem is nobody actually does any governing, and governing is impossible, especially on the legislative level, because because every bill that comes to the floor is a battle, and you have to win the battle, and it doesn't matter what happens to the electorate the people do. We need to go to the mattresses over everything, over everything. And as a consequence, particularly in the Republican Party, the voices have gotten ever shriller, ever less tethered to reality.

I mean, for God's sakes, almost the entire roster of candidates who were seeking the Republican nomination are in one stage or another denial about global warming. Quite a number of from believe in creationism, you know, they think there was a Noah's Ark and a garden of Eden, Like, what the fuck? How has it come to be that

this has become the mainstream. Well, it's been incremental and as anti science as they are anti science, anti intellectual anti fact without getting into him and shooting fish in a barrel about Trump's demeanor, which is you know that that that's been done to a fairly well, what's what troubles you about her primarily, Well, what troubles me about her is more or less the same thing that's gonna make me for I mean, she's a technocrat wonk in the Clinton mold, right, she's one of them, you know,

That's why I feel safe casting my ballot for her. Let's just start what she doesn't appear to be insane. Whatever she's done in her past that was sleazy or had the appearance of being sleazy, it just doesn't begin to utter compared to what she's running against. Right, But there's you know, she's a professional politician. She has this history of lies, of some politically opportunistic, some done in the heat of a campaign against Obama, for example, And

the Bosnian runway is a little bit appalling. In fact, it's a lot of polly you know, it's really she's the best, but she's also a victim of She was, you know, really the first the proto victim, the her victim of the great right wing media conspiracy. They were out for nothing less than destroying the Clintons, and they used the Congress to do it. That was their tool. They're they're really good. I love Tuban's book on that subject.

I thought Tuban's book was very good. And we talked about those Chicago law firms and the people, how much they were out to and how the tentacles, how far they went to that group that was out to get the Clintons. Yeah, it's not rhetoric. I mean it was an extremely well funded, actual conspiracy. Richard Mellon Scaife and uh, you know, I think I think it was a Pittsburgh

Pittsburgian Okay. Now with the thing they think about her though, was that I mean, with what I do for a living, were asked to look at the drama inside and the motivation inside the person. You know, why did they do what they do the public the membrane between the public and the private to in order to create the character. They're out there in the world doing this. But here's what's really going on. And with her, I always thought,

and I don't I don't fault her for this. With her, I always her whole life was about rewriting her repitaph. Her whole life in the last it's like. And then he was indicted, and he was impeached, and he was acquitted, and they wolf went off to Chappaquay together and she just took a pencil with not so fast. Then she went on to become a United States Senator from New

York and the Secretary of State and the first. But what I'm hopeful about, and this is, you know, this is the last vestige of my my passion for or my faith in some shard of what this country is about, is that she will get in there and she will help to reshape the court, and we'll get the citizens united. They taken care of once and for all, and sort we gotta get the money out of this game we need. I mean, the country has been run by Ivy League men.

Half the presidents since Kennedy had an Ivy League men have Kennedy went to Harvard, uh Johnson went to Texas State Teachers College, uh Nixon went to Whittier College, Ford went to Michigan, Carter was in the Naval Academy. Reagan went to Eureka College. And then we have Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama at four Ivy leaguers in a row. You know, the best and the brightest have been running this country for the last since nineteen and where's it gotten us?

I mean, no worse, no better than the non ivy leaguers. But the problem is the royal professional politicians, the roll people. You think any of these people lay in bed. Do you think for one minute, Hillary Clinton, forget about Trump. They lay in bed and their significant others saying to them, what's the matter, baby? I hear get tossed an in turn over. Wait, oh, I just gotta I gotta work out this whole social security just driving me. Actually, I gotta tell you, I do think I do think Clinton

does do that. I mean, that's what defines the Clintons, because their overwheming ambition is equally to fly in Air Force one and to change change public policy. They are

as ambitious as technocrats as they are politicians. And you know that's the deal, that's the that's the devil's deal when you when you get one of those and and really all politicians, I mean almost by definition, anyone who would seek public office and due to themselves and their family, the many many uh indignities that goes along with it, including the brothel that is campaign finance. You have to

assume that there's something just off there. I you know, I wouldn't mind if my daughter came home with a motorcycle mechanic. I would really be upset if she came back with some young guy in a white shirt and orange tire running for Congress. I'd really be upset. Where do you think we're gonna be? Do you think that

the network news? Because they have an edict apparently from the from the government, the fairness doctrine, and also what's the what's the law that they required to show the news the Well, there was there was a public service requirement that you had to maintain in exchange for having a broadcast license and to use the public airwaves. I don't think that has actually been lost since the Reagan administration.

I think the fairness doctrine is history. What happened, though, in almost exactly the same time as they no longer had to uh run public service content, is it became

enormously profitable. And back in the seventies, run Arledge, who had gone from ABC Sports to ABC News, figured out wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, there's gold in them our hills, And all of a sudden there's backwater that they were doing out of civic duty and certain amount of congressional impetus was making the money hand over fist and uh, and it was that way until you know, about ten years ago. In the network news is in exactly the same situation that every other news organization. It

is in this death spiral of the media economy. And now they're you know, they're cutting back and their audience is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and the people who watch them are not going to be around for much longer because the average viewer of the CBS evening News has been clinically dead since two thousand and six. So, uh, it's you know, they're facing they're facing the same kind of problem. Do you think that in the likelihood that she wins?

I mean, I'm not just saying this because I'm a supporter of hers, but do you think that considering the likelihood that she would win, and then he's gonna go wherever he goes? Um? Now we're here in Trump is the nominee? What happens in the next round, who they're going to run against? SOB me next time? What kind of person? Will they learn something from this? The only I mean I'm trying to think. I'm trying to follow

the trajectory. Remember a little while ago, I said this was an inevitability that we had to come to this because the party kept getting more the mainstream became more and more fringe, the fringe became more and more mainstream. And I suppose that Trump is the quintessence of that, the apotheosis of UH, of perversion of whatever it is the GP once stood for. But the correct you know that the trajectory presumably can only get worse. But what's worse?

I'm thinking, I don't know that that monster from Alien that comes out of his rib cage or hers, and I don't know. I the party rents previous is. I don't understand what's happening. How has he kept his job? I mystified, what are they you know, what are they going for? I guess it's all about of the Preme Court. And that is true because listen, with the Congress being in the state that it is, nobody's going to be

passing any stairs. Nothing is going to get through the converse, it is going to be in an absolute standstill, I suppose. And therefore, what you know, if there's no legislation. What's the president going to be the president of Well, she can start a war, you know, and she can appoint the judiciary, and probably, but not necessarily, probably the Senate will actually have to do its job and confirm or

not confirmed these these candidates. You know, there's already large backups, including the Supreme Court seat, because the Senate has not wanted to act on judiciary appointments. But presuming that can't last forever, that they got to offer their advice and consent. Uh, that's the president's the new president's influence, and that's what

it's all about. That's why evangelicals are are going to vote for this buffoon, this apparently immoral or immoral, childish, sleazy and I mean, you know, how did they Gosh, how do you how have you pulled the lever? If you're in Iowa evangelical, how do you go in and pull the lever for this person? He's like the worst person ever. And I want to say to people, I want to say, like, you're atridive her. I really don't

get it. She's not that hate herble. I mean, I have my reservations about her too, and I'm happy to voice those, but I don't hesitate the voice those but when I see people going you hate her that much that you're going to pull the lever for him as a as an expression of that wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,

it's the cookies, to tell you the truth. I think it goes back to her saying she's not going to sit around baking cookies, which was an insult to a lot of cookie baking women who really cherished their roles in what they perceived as the traditional American family. And it was it was a spike in the heart of

their values and they will never ever forget it. Um. My last question for you, and I want to phase this carefully, is um, you know Howard Stern when I would do Howard Sterns show, and most people who know Howard know this that off Mike, he's nothing like he is on mil on microphone. He's blown himself up to

use Jerry Seinfeld's term for his on stage sona. And and for you, I'm wondering you know on your show you are wonderfully so very angry and very bitter and very cynical inside the content of your show, almost so much so like sometimes I'll listen to you and I think this guy's gonna have a heart attack on the air while he's reporting this. A slow motion heart attack, but a heart attack nonetheless. Um, is that is an

an accurate depiction of you. I think it's fair to say that you and I are b I am, we're brothers in anger management issues, and uh that you know, what you hear is what you get. I mean, I get angry at telemarketers, now that is that's wasted anger. But I'm anger that they're interrupting me. I'm angry that they're lying to me, that they're criminals. It just makes me mad. And you know, you think I would have exorcised those demons long air. That's because they're not going away.

So why do I permit myself to get piste off a lot? Pick? Either I'm the most honorable man and I cannot separate the daily annoyances of life from actual issues of moral conduct in this world. Or I have a defect, and I'm not sure exactly what it is. I'm guessing it's a little bit of both. You can hear Bob Garfield and Brook Gladstone on the media on over four hundred radio stations nationwide and on demand and on the media dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to here's the Thing