♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: steve coll is here, the dean of columbia journalism school, also a staff writer for the new yorker magazine. his latest piece in this week's issue is called rex , tillerson still acting like a ceo. it looks at tillerson's relationship with the press, the secretary's trip to asia last week became a subject of controversy when tillerson announced that he would not be traveling with the diplomatic press corps. he has also come under fire for his media silence, neglecting what many view as an integral part of his secretary of state. his 2012 book, private empire,

exxon mobil and american power is the study of the oil giant and its role in world affairs. i am pleased to have steve coll back at this table, welcome. steve: thank you. charlie: i can imagine they said this, it is an exciting time, i cannot remember a more exciting time. to be looking at what is happening in the world, to be a journalist. steve: it is exciting to be at a journalism school, all these young reporters going out into this environment, trying to figure out how to do their job professionally. it is a time i think, when the attacks on the press has strengthened the press, made it clear what our role is, and also raised the bar on our performance, we have to earn it. in this environment of trying to delegitimize the press or divide the press. it is an exciting time to be in his profession. charlie: should we as journalists have learned

something from the campaign? steve: yes. in theere lots of misses run-up to the election by journalism. we have lots of journalists in this country. that is part of the story our , media is fragmented. but there was an overreliance on prediction and data science. we have lost a lot of professional reporting in the heartland of the country where a lot of the election was decided. it is to be 20 years ago that there were very healthy newspaper newsrooms and all of these cities and they were feeding through wire services and syndication services into the networks, the two coasts. i do not think we would have been quite so surprised in new york, california. charlie: if we had access to what they were saying? steve: a lot of reporting in ohio, michigan, wisconsin, that was done by major news organizations was parachute

reporting, it was not coming out of the states, newsrooms, with the same kind of pulsing power that it used to have. i also think, at journalism school, we wrestled with the role of a data in this world and the way journalism now requires computational skills and data science skills. that is all true, but there is an overreliance on data science prediction in this election. reliance onan under knocking on doors and going into key districts. i remember the washington post when, 15, 20 years ago, there is -- was a ritual in the general election, guys which is 12 swing districts and they would go out and stand in front lawns and knocking people's doors and say, what is on your mind, what issues are driving you? it would not predict the result, but when you read their 3000 omnibus reports on all these , they would take

advantage of their experience going back to these places. you had a sense of where was going. at least it was an authentic role of journalism. it was not trying to give you a mathematical number of the likelihood of an outcome. it was going into these communities and letting voters be heard. i think we missed doing some of that this time around. charlie: the person i can remember, which even though they may have felt it, candidates said that the press was the enemy. steve: one candidate is now the president of the united states. always hadu have among politicians the feeling they did not get a fair shake. steve: yes. charlie: here you had someone who took on the press in the campaign as the enemy. steve: that was part of a strategy of populism. and delegitimization of critics that has extended to the judiciary, the federal bureaucracy. when you have the president of the united states in its first

day of office telephoning someone at the parks service to complain about a photograph he did not like of his inauguration crowds you know you're in a new world of conduct. i think overall, my sense is that the press is used to being attacked. if you're a reporter and you have not been yelled at by your subjects a few times, you are not doing your job. [laughter] i do not think the press has been shaken by those kinds of assaults. i worry about the delegitimization of our constitutional design by all this incendiary speech that seeks to personalize or delegitimize the functions of judges and professional reporters and people at the national park service, who are serving the taxpayers. i worry about a strategy of trying to change the contours of how our system is supposed to work. as to the press being called out, we are used to that. we should shoulder it and get on with our job. charlie: that's what i say. when people ask me that i say we

, should just do our job. not worry about anything else, do our job. but when you look now at the idea of fake news and not an acceptance of what facts are, that seems to portend something different. steve: this term fake news has now hijacked to mean news i do , not like. it started out to describe something more specific and more worrisome, which was the manufacturing of deliberately false information, sometimes for commercial purposes in offshore businesses. then distributing that across social media platforms and making money off of the advertising available. because it clicked. some of this manufactured news, which was not done for ideological reasons, in some cases it was done to make money, it did focus on trump because people clicked on those stories. then you have another category disinformations

or heavily ideological news, very difficult to determine. it is an eye of the beholder question as to when something is so distorted, deliberately constructed to mislead, that it crosses from just being a hard opinion into being an active disinformation campaign. there is quite a lot of flow across social media of partially invented stories that mislead for ideological or political purposes. the social media platforms are the story here, i think. not because they are solely responsible for this problem, but they represent a profound change in the way news is just distributed in our democracy. newspapers used to control their distribution system down to the driveway where the paper boy tossed the paper. networks had a clear pathway from their newsrooms to their audiences. now the people who create news have lost control of its

distribution, because the most important way it is distributed through facebook and other social media platforms. those companies see themselves as a neutral. they do not see themselves as editors or gatekeepers. a platform for free exchange. it is difficult for them to accept responsibility for policing a public square of sorts that they have a created, which is quite profitable for them. i do not think we have gotten very far in resolving the challenge that this election has presented to us. i feel pretty sure that it is going to get worse next time around. charlie: in the next election? steve: yes. people have learned how to do this. the power of social media platforms as a distribution arm for news will not go away between now and 2020. i think that companies, facebook is trying to figure out what it

can do, what it should do. it is at least stepping forward to engage these questions. i am not sure they're going to be in a position to prevent this kind of campaigning in the future, or that it is in their business interest to do so. this is not just something in the rearview mirror, this is something that will shape our democracy. charlie: how can you define the use of twitter by this president has done? steve: the media of course and politicsof media in has changed when technology has changed. remember when president reagan came to town, he was a master of television, he and mike beaver modeled this presidency of going over the heads of the working press by stage managing the president's speech and appearances and his power and so forth. everyone remarked on how successfully he had done on

enron around the press using television. president trump has done the same thing using twitter, he has managed to break out of constraints that presidents either choose to impose on their communication, because they want more elegance and a more restrained tone. charlie: he has done it to his own detriment. many would argue, including people within his own close advisers, who, because it takes them off message and creates a whole distraction. that does not allow for what may have been after that speech, a positive message. steve: i think every political consultant in the country would agree with that. i am struck it is disconcerting , that the power of that platform, the way he uses it to reach into your pocket, you wake up in the morning, you flick your phone on there , is the president of the united states saying, look what he is done again!

it is that populist strategy of being able to speak directly to the people in the name of the people without gatekeepers, without advisers, without consultants. that has been his conceit throughout. he is a professional entertainer. he knows how to control a stage and a live set, he knows how to use confrontation to create drama. that may be no way to run a country, but it is his instinct about how to communicate. i am not sure he will be able to relinquish it, judging by the pattern so far. there seems to be certain hours of the day where he must react. [laughter] charlie: are there discussions among deans of journalism schools and editors of papers about, where are we and what do we do, other than the basic thing, we do our job? steve: we had a convening at the school a few weeks ago with editors from the mainstream press. we had an editor from breitbart covering the trump presidency. i think in the end, everyone circles around to what you said,

which is that we do not need to lose confidence in our role under the first amendment. we know through experience and our professional lives what to do. we know what the questions are. this is a remarkable constitutional scenario, just on the admissions made in the congress yesterday, where the fbi director says that members of the president's campaign team are under active investigation because of concerns about their contacts with russia. collusion, we know according to 17, 18 intelligence agencies, that russian intelligence services carried out a deliberate effort to disrupt the 2016 election. charlie: the argument is made they have evidence it was intended to benefit one candidate more than the other? steve: step back in american history. tell me where in the

first 100 days of a new presidency you've had a situation where the fbi is investigating people close to the president for colluding with a foreign government that is taking hostile action against the united states to affect the outcome of its election. it is been a while since we've had the constitutional scenario like this, nevermind the travel ban, the courts trying to intervene in the president's immigration policy, the president calling them so-called judges. we cannot normalize the situation. this is a real series of departures in our postwar experience. charlie: then there is secretary of state, rex tillerson. you wrote the book about exxon mobil, he is not going to the nato conference, i assume because he is going to be in florida where the president of china is visiting the president of the united states. how do you balance that? where should he be?

he just returned from a trip to the far east. i think you could argue that they may be better off down there, the crucial relationship, than at nato. sounds like they messed up the scheduling about that. i'm not worried about that. take note however, that the secretary of state, he does not have any undersecretaries nominated, no assistant secretaries nominated. he has endorsed a 30% reduction in the budget of the state department. he basically does not have a team. he does not have a relationship with the white house. it is normal for secretaries of state without a tight relationship with the president's aides and his campaign team. you remember when secretary clinton came in having run a very bitter campaign against president obama. it took her team a while and obama's team a while to communicate, make nice with one another. she succeeded because she understood how to use the bully pulpit of the state department to make

herself felt. secretary of state is the second most important spokesperson of the government after the president. it is your opportunity, job, to get out there and talk about america's place in the world, about foreign policy. one of the tricks that the last five secretaries of state have modeled is how you use that speech, that bully pulpit to , gain influence inside the cabinet, white house. you make yourself a force by her -- your opportunity to speak almost distinctively on behalf of the united states. think about the last five secretaries we have had. john kerry, a professional politician, almost president of the united states. hillary clinton, candidate for president, a battle-scarred senator. condoleezza rice, formidable public figure who had vast experience at the white house before she took over secretary of state. most powell, one of the

influential of his generation. madeleine albright, first woman to hold the seat and who rose to the opportunity to speak about big ideas all around the world. it doesn't really matter about which party or what the ideological profile the administration is, that is a model of how you do the job effectively, overall. the irony of secretary tillerson is that when he does talk, you can see he is still learning what the difference is between running a giant corporation and speaking on behalf of the united states and foreign policy. he is comfortable in conversation. he knows a lot of these issues. he is perfectly capable of taking the heat, of dealing with freewheeling russians. i chased him around like johnny reporter because he would not sit down across table. i would go to his public speeches and stand in the audience and raise my hand. i watched him. the typical format is he would read a prepared speech, but he would take questions from the audience. they were not generally

professional journalists who were as knowledgeable as he was about northeast asia. which is what would happen if he had the diplomatic press upon his plane. but they were smart people, sometimes questions will be challenging, but he can handle this stuff. he was the chief executive of the company for 10 years. of course he can handle it. charlie: any company. steve: he travels around the world, he knows the leadership. and that byuld definition give him the tools to be a good secretary of state? job has think the several components. one involves negotiating and private. super well qualified do that, of course. that gritty usually includes leaders or foreign ministers. charlie: most negotiation is in private. steve: in american diplomacy? semi-private. charlie: i do not think john kerry was telling us what was going on in iran. steve: yes, but he was out

talking to foreign press, foreign legislatures all the , time that he was talking privately with russians and syrians. you have to play at all those levels. we are an open society, a democracy. you need to be accountable to your own public. all of our allies are also democracies. their decision-making about whether or not they will go into, for example, more confrontational risky posture about north korea, that decision will be a function of domestic politics in japan, south korea, australia, the european union. where is that politics shaped? by opposition parties and the press in those countries. if you think you are going to change a construct of regional policy in asia without speaking aloud to all those parliaments and publics that are your allies, i think you are not going to get there. there are a few kinds of negotiations like preparing for a secret opening with cuba or nixon to china or closed doors, let's try to get the middle east

solved kind of negotiation you can do entirely like a deal negotiation. but most diplomacy does double dimensions of the same time. it must involve public communication. charlie: and you need a full team to do it. steve: it would be natural for someone coming in as an outsider. even someone with a rich corporate experience to complement himself with a deputy that knows the system, knows diplomatic service how the ,embassies are administered how , the national security council works. he had someone, elliott abrams, who he selected for that position with exactly that kind of character. he was turned down by the trump white house, apparently because they thought he was not loyal. seems dangers of being influenced greatly by factions within the white house. steve: it's a small group of people who seem to be in every

photograph. the degree of the leaking from this presidency is certainly on the top end of any washington transition that i've experienced. usually this does not happen quite so fast. it suggests that there are a lot of conflicting individuals and groupings within the white house. maybe also, you look back at the president's business history and you see one where there are a lot of transactions. a lot of people in it for themselves. this is not a family candy company that he ran. he seems to cultivate a little bit of combat amongst his advisers. one way to play that conflict is through the press. charlie: do i hear you saying in the end that he was not a good choice? steve: tillerson? i do not know. i feel he has not demonstrated

yet whether he can rise to the occasion. he said in an interview he took one interview -- one person. charlie: why did he take her? steve: i do not know. she did a decent job in the interview and pressed him on the press access question. she does not know northeast asia as well as the diplomatic press corps. she works for a digital website whose chief executive was a former communications specialist for the republican party. there is a general privileging of partisan media in the white house, so be it. but she did a professional job. he said toe thing her when she asked him about press access i have only been on , the job six weeks, be patient. fair enough but this cannot go , on for six months. i do not think it is effective, either within the state department, the cabinet, or as a strategy of carrying out diplomacy. herlie: he also told her, understood that as secretary of

state he is accountable to the american public. he added he was determined to do things his way because that exxon mobil he had been successful diplomatically over 25 years for staying quiet and letting the government just governments he negotiated with manage their own to mr. politics. this is a narrow conception of diplomacy. when bargains are struck on a basis of private interests, that was said by you in your article. steve: that is my argument. you can take the other view which is that we could go back to a kind of 19th century diplomacy where the secretary of state is out there negotiating, a special envoy role. america's place in the world and the diplomatic services place in the world -- he is the leader of the diplomatic service. all these embassies, consulates, human rights programs, democracy promotion, public health programs, you know what it is like out there. all these authoritarian countries where, some human rights activists in chad or angola, they get into trouble.

the american embassy is part of the way that american values are transmitted and implemented in these countries. the person that meets that department at least in my , memory, it is been someone in touch with that position. charlie: going back to a broader a spokesperson for it. charlie: going back to a broader view about the press, do you think that because of criticism, that the press is more sensitive to being tougher on themselves and more rigorous, and at the same time, tougher on the president and what he says and does? steve: i hope so. we have a diverse media all over the map. it is hard to generalize, but i do think, i hear certainly, a lot of self scrutiny after the election, being surprised by the election. i also hope the thing he said about increasing rigor in

response to the attacks, not just toughening up and doing the job, but getting better at it. i hear that, i hope that is what we see. charlie: thank you for coming, great to have you here. coll, staff writer for the new yorker magazine. ♪ ♪

thompson isiele

here, a french film maker whose new film is called " cezanne et ," about the two schoolboys who met at a province and were friends for 40 years. it delves into the parisian art world and offers a glimpse into the minds of its most critical -- most radical thinkers. here is a look at the film's trailer. ♪ [speaking french]

charlie: i am pleased to have daniele thompson back at this table, welcome. it is good to see you. daniele: thank you. charlie: they are allowing you to make a film that is not a comedy. daniele: at first. when i was a screenwriter i wrote a lot of films that were not comedies. this time i felt, i will try to really dig into this incredible relationship. charlie: what was it that intrigue you? daniele: the first thing that intrigue me was that i never heard of it. like anybody else who stepped into a museum and saw paintings by cezanne. in school in france we had to read zola as part of our culture. but i never knew they actually had known each other. suddenly reading an article in a

magazine, i found out that not only did they know each other but they met as children in a tiny little town in the south of france. the idea that these two little boys had become monumental figures. charlie: very different little boys in terms of their own background. daniele: exactly. but a very come a very strong and passionate friendships as children build. friendshipy long that survived a lot of problems. this is basically the story of the film. they eventually broke up. the breaking up was the thing that intrigued me the most. i started research. charlie: that was what in 1886? in 1839 they were born cezanne, and 1840, zola. they were the same age in 1860. this is when the group of young new artists all went to paris,

the thing to do was to go to paris for something to happen because nothing was happening in the rest of the country. this is where it was happening. they were a fabulous group. you always see today these sort of the bearded old men. you were old when you are 45 at the time, anyway. but there were young and starving and loving, sleeping with the models, it was a little bit like what happened 100 years later in the 1960's. what we call the in the 1960's 20th century. it was this revolution of young people rebelling against the establishment, the bourgeoisie, throwing away all the rules. charlie: as you said they were different. one came from the upper class. that was cezanne. daniele: which i discovered, i

did not know that. charlie: what was your source material? was it the letters of cezanne? daniele: there were a lot of wonderful letters between the two of them. which have been published for the first time together a few months ago. you can get them now in paris. beautifully written letters, very intimate, almost love letters. charlie: like a bro-mance. daniele: yes, exactly. also a lot of biographies of one or the other but nothing about them, between them. this is my job. charlie: so they broke up. zola published a book called "the masterpiece." and cezanne took a great umbrage because he thought it was about him, a failed painter. not receive fame until he was dead, almost. daniele: he got a bit of recognition in the last few years of his life after zola died. zola died about four years before.

strange circumstances, a lot of zola people think was a fair because of the dreyfus affair. that's another story for another film. charlie: do you think you will make that, too? daniele: no. it is true that cezanne in his lifetime was ignored and really not only by the establishment but by his friends and his best friend. the things that was most painful for him because he admired zola's writings and books and read them all. when he received this book, he at the time was 48 years old. he started reading the book. when you have gone into research about their lives and read the god, iu think, oh my understand why he is so upset.

it is so intimately what they had been through as children. and the project of the hero of the book, in fact not a hero at all, very, very, very difficult person very much like cezanne in real life. and someone who is so desperate to find what he is looking for in painting, and up hanging himself in front of a painting. charlie: hanging himself in front of a painting? daniele: this is the end of the book. reads this and recognizes so many things about himself. he did not kill himself. very personal things they had been through together. this is a problem that a lot of writers have. writers are vampires, we all know that. the blood outsuck of everything. daniele: absolutely.

when i thought about this breakup i thought it was something else. you do not breakup for one reason. they love affairs, there are a lot of other things that have happened in between them. that is how i decided to look into it. where, these two people opposite all the time. andthey love each other they kept wanting to survive, to make this friendship survive because it is their youth. back tothe -- charlie: the first questioned -- question for you. this notion of how long you want to do this, people think of you as primarily doing comedies. when i discovered this relationship, not the story, because there was no story -- i built the story. this relationship, i thought maybe there was a story in this.

i thought maybe i would do a comedy and it would be successful and then i would do another. would finish a film i would think, maybe i should take the time because it is not like you suddenly write something that is happening today. you have really to spend a lot of time speculating that you might find something out of this. out of this, all the details. you find them and biographies. it gets very, very, intimate with the time, with the way people lived, what they had to eat, you have to feel completely comfortable in that other century to be able to start writing as if it was a movie in the streets of new york today. three years ago i thought well, this is the moment where i could -- maybe it is time for me to do

something else. i am getting old. [laughter] so if i want to do this, it is now. i will take the time. i did not know whether i would find enough dramatic energy in this to build a screenplay. after a few months, i decided i was ready to try to give my own point of view. charlie: you had a lot of stuff to build on, you had a lot of sources about the relationship, of their individual lives. i mean, books have been written about each of them. daniele: yes, there were a lot of things about each of them. you know more about zola anyway, of course, because first of all, you know more about a writer from his writing than from a painter. they are a mysterious figure behind the canvas. i knew very little about cezanne . even the fact that cezanne was so ignored during his life.

the cursed artist. cezanne was like that, too. he is on a list of bipolar people. a knowns not phenomenon, even though it existed at the time. he was always up and down. he had a rage in him, in himself. also he looked for something all , his life, something new that he was looking for. he had such a hard time finding it. then when you see the paintings of the last 10 years, he found it. he was this revolutionary artist that influenced -- charlie: cubism. daniele: yes, and abstraction. fact,fascinating that in his best friend in the meantime who actually was a journalist ,and a brilliant one.

charlie: very adroit about artists. daniele: and he defended the impressionists. the word impressionist was actually used to make fun of them. charlie: when does the movie from your? daniele: march 31 in new york, and then it goes all over. i hope to read charlie: it is -- i hope. charlie: it is a great, great story with two fascinating characters at the centerpiece. there is a touch of authenticity to it because they were real and had lives. and there were women involved. daniele: and how. aarlie: you could not have movie in france without women being involved. daniele: absolutely not. i love my actors. when did he married? charlie: when did he married -- marry?

when his son was seven years old. he never dared tell his father he was married, because he was not proud of his wife, she was not bourgeois. the opposite. -- yin andn and yang yang. the places i shot the films are real places. charlie: that would be a reason to make the film. daniele: yes, i was looking for locations, very touching. a place he rented for practically all his life. very hard to get permission to shoot there. it is a national park and they are terrified of fire. but we managed. we had permission to be exactly in those spaces. that was something that brought something very magic to me to

the film. charlie: do you know what you are going to do next? daniele: i will probably do a long project for television. charlie: because of the opportunities in television today? worked: i have always for television even when i was young and it was not a very good thing to do in france, most great writers despised it. but i did not because i have lived in this country. charlie: no longer here. daniele: no longer there anymore either. things are changing. i think i still might do that. i am still in my cezanne and zola story. but i will start thinking of something new soon. charlie: great to see you. daniele: thank you. ♪ live-stream your favorite sport

at the airport. binge dvr'd shows while painting your toes. on demand laughs during long bubble baths. tv everywhere is awesome.

the all-new xfinity stream app. xfinity. the future of awesome. you know what i am talking about. everyone has an opinion. i've heard people this week say they have set rules. are we going to talk about trump or not? jon stewart retired last year but he is back on the colbert show virtually every night, which is blowing away jimmy fallon's tonight show ratings. who do we really need back to guide us in this time? we lost writer christopher hitchens in 2011 to cancer. when he was alive, no presidents, monarch, politician, not even god was safe from his perfect cutting commentary, his historical wisdomising.

hitchens was unpredictable with a rapier wit, gravel and whiskey he was a 1960's socialist and an ardent supporter of the invasion of iraq. nobody wore the badge of contrarian more probably than christopher hitchens as he once explained to charlie rose. >> always against the step or stream. if you do feel that the consensus does not speak for you at something about you makes you think it would be worth being unpopular or marginal for the chance to lead your own life and have a life instead of a career or job than i can promise you it is worthwhile. would hitch say about america in the age of donald trump? n'sh me are many of hitche

friends and colleagues. widow, austin brinkley from texas, martin amos and journalist and author leslie cockburn. welcome to all of you. carroll, let me begin with you. you memorably told me that right up until his last moments, he was engaged in the news. we can absolutely predict he would've had something to say about what is going on right now. >> i think he probably would have had something today every time he wrote a column or game on tv. try to infere to what he might have said, really only he could have said it. >> influential forensic. at that is what we will call it. he'll ways had a historical reference and nobody else had that could create a parallel. he would findink as the most important or

significant historical reference that would describe this time of donald trump? . >> he probably would've turned back to george orwell, who he loved it so much. the fact of the matter is, orwell's book's are back in circulation. one consistency of this contrarian christopher hitchens, our friend was his disdain of any guise.ianism in whether it was henry kissinger or the catholic church, he did not care if he smelled authoritarianism. the move of donald trump to suppress journalists, would drive hitchens mad. he would also see this as a grand opportunity, living in hisington, d.c., to lampoon his speakers that are coming in, speakers on television. he would have loved to have warred with people like steve bannon, kellyanne conway. he knew he would have been able to devastate them. in ay could beat hitchens

debate. he would have picked up the cause of freedom of the press, anti-authoritarianism, he would've questioned all of trumps seeming fascist tendencies. >> because trump is an opportunity to lambaste traditional liberalism in washington, d.c., and because of the contempt for the clintons that christopher in the election, it is hard for me to know where he would've come down in this election. what you think? >> i think christopher would have been appalled by trump, but he also would've said, who gave us trump? hillary clinton. this differ was not, as you know a big supporter of hillary clinton. iseel he would have said it because he ran that campaign that we ended up with donald trump. he would have laid a lot of responsibility at her feet. aidederalism in fury

christopher, it seemed to me. liberalism of the intellectual elites drove him crazy. what do you think he would say about the people who support donald trump versus the people who have contempt for him? >> i think he would be very active in the resistance. sense it was ad moment that had chosen him. he would have more or less ignored trump himself. thought clinton was a titanic vulgarian. he would've jumped out of his shoes to see trump in his pomp. a think he would've gone for steve bannon. he would have honed in on steve bannon who revealed himself get her day as a semiliterate neurotic when he said every morning president trump tells

reince andi, means me. the idea that he is intellectual is laughable. he is a neurotic windbag. >> exactly. think christopher would have said look to the language. first with trump, incredible poverty and possibly of his language. of his language. his attack on the press, we remember the nattering nabobs of negativity. that is what is coming out of bannon and trump now. just look to the language is what he would have said. i think we would have learned a lot from that. the idea that he is the heavyweight and ideologue of and super nationalist wing of the republican party is laughable. >> what you think the state of the american system would be right now?

>> a couple things. christopher said, totalitarian is my enemy. not the person that tells you how to live or makes you pay taxes. it is a person who wants to control how you think. he would be very concerned of thoses happening in spicer press conferences, coming out of bannon and miller and trump himself. this controlling of the thought process goes before our world to tom paine. if you cannot think liberty is a ,shadow that quits the horizon. i think looking at the numbers, he would have on the whole russia issue, i think he nould've loved the puti bashing, but would not have bought the notion that the ew the election in

any way. he would said that was the responsibility of the hillary campaign. he would've looked at the numbers in michigan for example, he would have said they were not there on the ground, they did not woo the unions, they did not do the job. in onhink he would zero the threat to the press. everyone knows democracy cannot work without a free press. these dark, menacing remarks and trump have been making about the opposition party. they said, we are going to do something about it. that is what would set off all the alarm bells. >> he was being called the enemy. you see on cable news this sanctimonious kind of, why are you calling me the enemy? i'm just a journalist. he would take it. i am the enemy, then? you would see the spirit come

out and that is what is absent right now. >> i think he would think it was a badge of honor for the press to be attacked in the way that it is. the question is, can the press in general, those who covered trump, live up to it? it is a high compliment that they are attacking the president. press. the question is, will the press deserve it? >> that is the salient question for us. the press itself has a job to do. say -- say what would it hitch say it is because we admire and missing. but what is the press to do in this moment? what do you think doug? , >> we had richard nixon after all, hitchens participated in all that. he loved to gossip about the nixon tapes and all the heinous things that he said. i think one of christopher's most successful endeavors was calling henry kissinger a war criminal.

that took some bravery and he stayed on it with a steady drumbeat whether you agree with it or not. he was proud of the press. hunter s. thompson wrote a book, called "the great shark hunt. the shark was richard nixon. the press came and went after next in and got him. a think hitchens would be proud of investigative journalists like him. to get out there and do stories, breaking news. being in washington, d.c. and not new york, he would have been the grand poohbah. it would have been a hub of how hitchens would look at the trump phenomenon. their apartment was the salon of washington then and it would be now. root -- the press is reporting and he had that ability to rise above and say

look at what they are doing. >> he would have joined in solidarity of the press. when one journalist is shouted down by trump, all the other journalists, i am spartacus. they should all last the same question. they have got to be confrontational with him. because he will be confrontational with the press. said we gotwhen he a real beauty today, the press, and they will pay for, that beauty was that the clouds were not as big as they were for obama at his another patient. his sons middle name wrong he calls it fake news. he muddies the waters. fake news is no longer usable through ambiguity because for trumpet means news i do not like. does christopher hitchens, do you think, know the script of how we proceed?

what he look back at his knowledge of orwell and the 20th century and the fascists and dictators who came and went and that he could quote chapter and verse like no one else, and know where we are headed nowhere -- like no one else? >> i think you are right about that. i think also, we know trump does not really read. there are two movies i think he would be revisiting. i am certainly not the first to point this out. the manchurian candidate. imagine that angela lansbury is bannon, but not half as clever as she was. also network, i looked at it again recently, incredibly apt. i think he would been drawing on these movie references. blue,glas brinkley, carol martin amos, what would hitchens say? we have an inkling. ♪ david: i am david inglis, in the

middle of asian trading. the last one of the week. welcome to "bloomberg markets, asia. ♪ david: wall street's caution. a nine day run of strength. one of the big winners, looking at hong kong markets despite a slump in profits. the forecast is been for a loss.

banging the drum for free trade. recovery should remain. investors here in hong kong are reacting to the headwinds. a fragile recovery with a legislative friction when it comes to the trump health care reform plan and what it means going forward. markets have done quite well. resilience. when you look across asia this week, emerging markets in particular, come along with me. andre looking at india south korea. i been looking at these individual charts all week when it comes to malaysia, indonesia. markets like this like india, south korea, very high data markets. these piling back into the markets. look at march.