7% of all americans alive today have served in the military as 538 pointed out. to those who have served and are currently serving, we honor you and, of course we remember and honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice this memorial day weekend. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. is fox news actually bad for the gop? a conservative heavyweight says it's guilty of self-brainwashing republican voters. and behind the scenes of the george stephanopoulos donations controversy. does the website that broke the news have more to come? plus my in-depth interview with legendary cbs newsman bob schieffer before he faces the nation one last time. good morning. it's time for "reliable sources sources." i'm brian stelter in washington. i'm starting with a question that matters enormously to abc

news. has george stephanopoulos recovered from his self-inflicted wound? that is his donation to the clinton foundation. this week he resumed his usual coverage of the clintons on "good morning america." here he is interviewing abc's hillary campaign reporter on wednesday, but tabloid newspapers and commentators continue to skewer him for the $75,000 he donated in 2012 2013 2014. yes, he apologized repeatedly and abc says it supports him 100% but there are other rumors that other abc anchors like david muir will be more involved in election coverage as a result and an entier pricing artist sought to keep people talking about stephanopoulos by hanging these posters outside abc headquarters. pay pal they say, linking george and hillary clinton. now, they were taken down in a matter of hours, but not before the blogs noticed. so what are stephanopoulos' rifles saying about the donations?

check out with cbs' bob schieffer told me. he moderates "face the nation." did you read about the stephanopoulos donations and just smack your head and think what was he thinking? it seemed like so many people in the news business reacted that way. >> you know again, i just never comment on my competitors and what they do. that requires no comment from me. people will make up their minds what they think about that. >> i think it requires comment from you because people wonder is everybody doing it? are you making donations? >> no. >> people don't give to campaigns but giving to a charity is different. >> number one, i have never made a political donation to anybody. i've always felt one of the great things about being a reporter is you can say, hey i don't do that and the other part i'll let people make up

their minds. >> i spent some time with schieffer as he gets ready to retire from "face the nation qwest and more of my interview is coming up. first, the story you haven't heard about stephanopoulos. no one would have found out about the donations at all if a startup conservative news website called the washington free beacon had not broke the news. in an age of opining, this website is doing actual reporting and joining me now is the co-founder and editor in chief, matthew continetti. thank you for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> do you believe stephanopoulos is permanently tainted by these donations and the controversy around him? >> i think it does taint him for the simple reason that he had an opportunity to disclose his donations when he interviewed the author of this very controversial book "clinton cash" and really grilled the officer, peter schweitzer. he could have taken that moment to say, i was a clinton foundation donor. he didn't and i think that's the reason that the washington free beacon pursued the story and the reason why the story has legs in other media. >> let's talk more about that in

a minute but take me to the moment where you all found out about this. how exactly did you all find out this donation even happened? >> sure. well it's simple investigative reporting. one of my reporters had composed a spreadsheet of all the foundations donors and another reporter was spending his off hours going through it. he just happened to see that george stephanopoulos was in the list so he contacts me and says i found this out, what do i do? my first thought was, well has he disclosed it? we did the research it turned out george had not. my second thought was well, we're going to write it up as a straight news piece but first go to abc news for comment. >> let's pick up there in a minute. but are you surprised that nobody had seen his name on a list before? >> not really. i found since in the three years we've been doing the free beacon that there are a lot of stories out there that for whatever reason media just doesn't cover. so whether it's archival research we've done pertaining

to hillary clinton, whether it's the staff of senator rand paul or whether it's george stephanopoulos' donations, there's plenty of material for an upstart conservative site like the free beacon to cover. >> there definitely is. the foundation has been under such scrutiny it seems surprising people haven't gone to through the list and spotted stephanopoulos' name. >> it's surprising to me. of course his donation $75,000 wasn't quite as big as soment of the millions of dollars that the clintons have received from for countries, for example, which is where i think most people's attention is right now. >> and to be clear and to be fair it was a charitable donation. not a donation to a campaign. what i was say and what a lot of others have said is it's a one-of-a-kind charity. it's not your average charity and it's a controversial organization. tell me about what happened when you reached out to abc and asked for comment. >> well we reached out to abc news because like any news site we wanted fair comment from the subject of our stories, and abc

said they would get back to us. well friday morning we were about to run the story, i asked if we had received anything. my reporter said no abc hadn't gotten back to him, and just as we were about to publish our story, another story on politico with the headline george stephanopoulos discloses clinton foundation donations appears at that very moment. i knew right away that what had happened was abc news had gone to politico with our scoop in order to control the narrative. >> how did you feel when you saw it happen? >> i felt very angry brian. >> i would have too, i guess. >> and it's lucky in this new media age that an angryeth for has outlets like twitter to express himself. so i went on twitter and expressed my rage and gratifyingly -- >> and got a lot of attention. >> and got a lot of attention. the free beacon was still able to own the story. >> by leaking it to politico they made it worse for

themselves. >> it bake an inside baseball story that picked up and then you saw george stephanopoulos the old campaign operative, taking information from one source, the reporter is asking questions, and handing it another source in order to shape the narrative. >> we talked in the opening about you being a conservative site. you use the same word. what do you say to people who might think you're just going after a guy you think is liberal? this is all ideological for an editor like you or a reporter like yours? >> you might be i had lol in the way you approach the news the subjects you start to cover, even the way you go about your investigations but what you cannot do is be ideological in the way you report the news and one thing we've always tried to do at the free beacon is make copy that could appear in "the new york times" or "the washington post" except the names of the people we cover is different, the types of stories we cover is different, our selection of expert quotes for example, are different.

>> what if you had found bret bair what if you found his name in the list do you think it would have been a story? >> it would have been a story but i probably wouldn't have found it because there are plenty of liberal reporters looking for exactly that kind of information. we're looking for the stories that most of the media aren't paying attention to just because of their prior beliefs and experiences. >> you guys acknowledge you come from the conservative point of view but are doing real reporting. >> right. i think that's our value added to this fractured media landscape we're all in. when we set up the free beacon we made a rule there would be one opinion column on the site and that would be mine and that's the editor's prerogative. otherwise every writer i hire is there to do reporting and they've done a pretty good job so far i think. >> have you heard much from abc in recent days and have they apologized for this apparent handing off of your scoop to politico. >> no apology. i'm still waiting by it's phone, abc. >> i think you're being a little sarcastic. >> no apology.

they responded to one of our inquiries about a separate story which was thrilling, but i have to say it does make me pause as an editor if a reporter comes up with another george stephanopoulos story and says should i go to him for comment? i'm going to think twice. >> thanks for being here. great talking with you. >> thank you, brian. >> we're just getting started this morning. coming up you will see more of my interview with "face the nation's" bob schieffer. it's the eve of his retirement and we talked about the lessons from his 46 years in the television news business. don't go away. it's more than a network and the cloud. it's reliable uptime. and multi-layered security. it's how you stay connected to each other and to your customers. with centurylink you get advanced technology solutions, including an industry leading broadband network, and cloud and hosting services - my interview with "face the with centurylink as your trusted technology partner you're free to focus on growing your business. centurylink. your link to what's next.

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there was a lot of hull ba lieu about the departure of letterman from "late night." but my next cbs guest, bob schieffer, has letterman beat by more than a decade actually. the legendary newsman has been with cbs for 46 years and has hosted the sunday morning political program "face the nation qwest for 24 of those years. he is retiring after next sunday's broadcast. schieffer's journalism career began in brint with the ft. worth star telegram. he said he's still a newspaperman at heart. he's done it all including

covering the pentagon to the white house and the evening news. he's moderated debates written four books and he really has done it all. i was lucky to state down with him to learn about his storied career. we're sitting here on your set. you will be signing offer here in a few days. what does it feel like to be leaving the show? >> well i'm not quite sure it's really sunk in yet. i wanted to leave while i thought i could still do the job. i mean i have seen too many people in washington that have to be sort of led by the hand off the stage as it were and i didn't want to be one of those guys. i feel like i can still do it. cbs is doing very well these days, requests"face the nation" is doing well. >> jon stewart is suggesting one of the reasons he's stepping is down is he's just over it he's tired of it. is that true for you? >> no.

i will never get tired of it. i have wanted to be a reporter since the eighth grade and i got to be one which a lot of people don't get the chance to do when they grow up what they wanted to do when they were a little boy, and i've always found it interesting. every job i have ever had in journalism and that's the only thing i have ever done i always thought it was the best job in the world and i always felt that way. i just love the news. >> let me show you a couple photos we saw from your storied career. i thought this was so remarkable. it's an advertisement in the newspaper for you heading to vietnam as a rorner for the ft. worth star telegram. >> yes. >> i can't imagine a newspaper doing that nowadays but they were trying to promote the fact you would be over there checking in with the troops from the local community who were over there. >> that was a full-age ad. they ran a full-page ad and the idea was i would go to vietnam. i was the first reporter from the star telegram to go overseas since world war ii. i was the first reporter from a

texas newspaper to go to vietnam, and so the idea was i would go and find boys from ft. worth and write stories about them. which i did. and i wound up writing about kids from all over texas, but that was what it was all about, and i got more than 700 letters while i was in vietnam, and i would just line them up and then i would just go out by myself and i'm bum rides on helicopters and so forth and find these kids. it was the single most rewarding thing i have ever done in journalism because when these kids and i mean they're 19 -- you know i was 26 years old. sometimes seven or eight years older than they were, when a guy from their hometown showed up and said, you know your mama asked me to come and check on you and i never forgot it. >> wow. >> they loved it. >> this image of you questioning

jimmy carter at a presidential press conference when you see these press conferences now, how much has changed and how much has stayed the same with relationships between the press and the presidency. >> for one thing they're more orderly. in those days presidents didn't have a list of reporters -- >> i think the list is kind of -- it sort of makes it less interesting. >> and we would have to hold our hands up and say, mr. president, mr. president, and sometimes they would respond to you and sometimes they didn't. >> then there's a lot less access to the administration or is there more access more transparency? >> people always ask me what's the most manipulative and the most secret administration you have covered? i always say the current one. this one is always more restrik of it than the guys who came before and they had the screws turned down more tightly than the people who came before. they all learned from the

previous administration and i guess it will be ever thus. >> so what do we do? what do we do in the industry to combat that? >> we have to understand there are two things here the politicians' mission is to deliver a message. our mission is to try to find out if it's true and to try to get to whatever the truth is. >> uh-huh. >> and that's not saying there's, you know, anything wrong with what the politicians do but what's happened brian, is that information management has become so much more sophisticated, not just in politics but in business in sports. think about this when i came to washington in 1969 most members of congress still didn't have press secretaries. most of them, you know handle their own press relations. >> people hear so much negativity about our profession. >> you know we've got to have journalists. the need for accurate

information is more important than ever and unless -- i mean in our system of government having access to independently gathered accurate information is as important to our process as the right to vote. you have to have that in a democracy like we have. i don't know where reporters are going to work in the future but whatever their platform we have to have that information, and getting accurate information, brian, is harder now than it's ever been. >> you think so even though the internet has made it more accessible? >> yes, because most of the information is wrong. i mean you know we're just overwhelmed by news. there's so much news that we can't get to the news and, you know that's what our job is as mainstream journalists is try to cut tlau this great maw of

information and tell them what they need to know. >> do you think the brian williams exaggeration controversy hurt the whole industry made all journalists look bad? >> you know i don't know. i don't think it did us any good that's for sure but brian is a friend of mine. i haven't talked to him in a long long time and i've kind of made a practice brian, of not commenting on my competitors, and i always had the feeling that it requires no comment from me. things like that people come to their own conclusions about it, and i just kind of let it go at that. >> do you see him returning to nbc? >> i have no idea. you know i have -- juno >> you you know how cbs works though. you know how network politics work. >> i will say this i have never offered advice to my competitors because i was afraid they might use it, might use it to their advantage. nbc will make up its mind about what to do about that. >> to me still a newbie to

television one of the lessons of television is stability and time are so key. you know you have been on "face the nation "nation" for so many years and you are seeing your baitest ratings. i won >> you know i have seen so many wheels invented, reinvented in the time that i have been in television. i'm not sure you can reinvent this wheel. i think you have to get back to basics. what people want when they turn on a news program of any kind is news. they want to know what it is that they need to know about that's going to impact their lives, and that's what we've tried to do and i think that's what the success in recent years of "face the nation qwest has been. >> is there any job in journalist you wish you had that you wanted to have that you

didn't have? >> well i tried when i came back from vietnam, i tried very hard to get a job at the "new york times" and "the washington post" and i never got an appointment. and so i finally wound up working for a local television station. >> i guess it worked out pretty well here huh, tv? >> so far it's worked out just fine. >> bob, thanks so much. >> thank you, brian. i appreciate it. okay. >> schieffer signs off one week from today and it will truly be an end of an era moment for television news. john dickerson will be taking his place in june. coming up on "reliable sources," attacking hillary clinton, we could call it a common sport for republican wanya bees but one candidate says he thinks it's the only way he can get airtime on cnn and elsewhere. hear what he says about that right after the break.

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we are back with more "reliable sources." and this next segment is about something you probably noticed about election coverage. each week a new presidential candidate jumps into an already crowded race. mostly on the republican side. but there are also declared candidates besides hillary clinton on the democratic side, including bernie sanders and soon martin o'malley. clinton has been taking a lot of heat from the media for ignoring the media, and i think that heat is perfectly appropriate. she did answer some questions from reporters early in the week and she says she's now planning a big campaign event in mid-june. meanwhile, bernie sanders has appeared on multiple networks. he's willing to answer almost any question but it seems sometimes all anyone wants to talk about is hillary. what got me thinking about this is what sanders said last sunday here on cnn on "state of the union." >> the american people want to hear serious discussions why they're working longer hours for lower wages. they want to know about why year after year we have these

disastrous trade agreements why the rich get richer and everybody else gets poorer. are you and the media prepared to allow us to engage in that serious debate or do i have to make media attention by making reckless attacks on hillary clinton or anybody else? i don't believe in that. >> so are journalists giving that campaign a fair shake? senator bernie sanders is here with me now on set to talk about that. thanks for being here. >> my pleasure. >> it's rare to hear a candidate or any politician really talk about the systemic issues in the press the way you did last week. i kind of lit up when i heard it and i wondered is it a winning strategy for you to be going at the were he is? >> i don't know if it's a winning strategy or not but this is what i do know. the middle class of this country is disappearing despite the fact that people are working longer hours and they're earning lower wages. we have seen an explosion in technology and productivity and yet all of the increase in income and wealth is going to the top 1%. do you think that that's an important issue to discuss? according to the scientific

community, climate change is the great planetary crisis we now face. do you think we might want to be discussing that issue? you have the top 1/10th of 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 90%. i'm the ranking member of the budget committee. i dealt with the republican budget which throws 27 million people off of health insurance, cuts educational programs by tens of billions of dollars, gives tax breaks to billionaires. do you know how much coverage that got? outside of the political gossip? virtually nothing. last year i had the president of cbs, nbc, abc. we talked to them. why is it you're not covering climate change significantly? >> what happened in that meeting? >> actually a couple weeks later there was a lot of discussion about climate change. but the scientific community is virtually unanimous in telling us that climate change is real already causing devastating problems and that we have to reverse course. do you think we're seeing that kind of discussion in the media?

>> nom republicans will hear about that meeting you had with the presidents of the news divisions of the networks and say that sounds like some sort of inappropriate coordination between the government and the press. >> inappropriate coordination. to ask them why they're not discussing the major planetary crisis facing us? yoges. >> but the rebuttal is the press should maybe up its own mind about what should be covered. >> answer is of course the american people and elected officials can weigh in as well. no one is telling them no one is forcing them but when the scientific community tells us something is enormously maybe, just maybe, we may want to be discussing it. >> with your campaign now a few yex in are you finding the media is taking it seriously or using you only as a foil to get headlines? >> i think we are doing pretty well. we have gotten more serious discussion on our issues than i might have thought about, but this is what i worry about. in terms of campaign coverage there is more coverage about the political gossip of a campaign

about raising money, about polling, about somebody saying something dumb or some kid works for a campaign sends out something stupid on facebook. we can expect that to be a major story. but what your job is what the media's job is is to say these are the major issues facing the country. we're a democracy, people have different points of view let's argue it. >> fundamentally you're describing what is the systemic issue in press, in the nation's news media which is an interesting spectacle over policy. >> to me it is astounding. correct me if you think i'm wrong. when you have abc, cbs and nbc not devoting one minute to the most significant trade agreement in the history of the united states of america, help me out. give me an explanation. >> they might say they're covering it on the outlet. they might say there are niche outlets that can do a better job covering it. >> not a good answer. television is an important medium medium.

you cannot ignore that. you cannot ignore the reality of income and wealth inequality. you cannot ignore the fact that citizens united is undermining our democratic way of life. now, there are two sides to the story. i'm not saying everybody has got to agree with me but have that issue, have that debate. that's what elections should be about. >> some people might say how do you do that in a way that keeps people watching that keeps people stay tuned and not turn the channel. >> good question. all right. let me back it up. about a year ago there was a poll out there. pollsters asked the american people tell me which political party controls the u.s. senate and controls the u.s. house. that was a year ago. >> it's almost disappointing to see how mame people are wrong with their answers. >> 63% of the people in this country do not know that answer. who bears responsibility? does the media bear any responsibility? how do you have a serious discussion -- if you don't like what's going on in washington, which nobody does, who are you going to plame if you don't know which party controls what? so i think that instead of coming up with the next news of

the moment breaking news there was an automobile accident a cat got run over here is breaking news for 40 years the american middle class mab disappearing and the rich have been getting richer. why? >> i have an idea for you. >> okay. >> bernie sanders, cable news president. >> all right. are you making me that offer? >> i don't think i'm able to make it. >> i accept it. >> but it sounds like you have some ideas. >> i just think that as a nation, no matter what our political point of view is i would hope that we are concerned about the state of american democracy. we need serious discussion about serious issues. >> i want to briefly go back to the issue about hillary clinton. i don't want to become a parody of this conversation by focusing on it because that would miss the point. but i wonder what it's been like for the past few weeks as you've officially declared? do you wake up some mornings and think the way i'm going to get attention today is to criticize hillary clinton? are you leaning in to that reality of the media? >> of course hillary clinton and anybody else deserves criticism

when you have different points of view i guess that's what criticism is about. but i will tell you that i have never run a negative political ad in the state of vermont in my life. people of vermont know that. i just don't think that that's what politics is about. will i criticize hillary clinton on her position of tpp or lack of position? will i criticize her on her views of wall street? will i criticize her on foreign policy? that's what democracy is about. but taking cheap shots at people making it personal i don't think that's what politics should be about. >> senator sanders, thank you for being here this morning. >> my pleasure. >> coming up a question that came up, is fox news actually hurting the republican party? a major conservative thinker says yes and he'll join me to say why right after the break. wow. sweet new subaru, huh mitch? yep. you're selling the mitchmobile!? man, we had a lot of good times in this baby. what's your dad want for it? ..like a hundred and fifty grand, two hundred if they want that tape deck. you're not going to tell your dad about the time my hamster had babies in the backseat, are you?!

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welcome back. something very important for the 2016 election happened this week. something that i bet you didn't hear about. the entry rules for the first republican primary debates were

announced. might not sound exciting but it is very important because fox news will only include the ten candidates faring best in the polls. as of today actually carly fiorina and bobby jindal and lindsey graham would be among the uninvited candidates. the polls will change between now and the first debate in august but that's how it's going to be. cnn will do it a little bit differently and have a two-part debate. one part will have the top eight to ten candidates according to the polls and the other part that will have candidates that aren't polling as well but have at least 1% of support. 1% will be the threshold. what is fox going to do with those folks around 1% or above? it says they will be invited on other fox shows the day of the debate but not on the debate stage. now, these rules are a great example of how fox news influences politics. fox has long been the favorite channel of the republican party, but is it actually bad for the gop? the question was reignited this week not by jon stewart or a

liberal columnist but by the well-respected conservative historian bruce bartlets. he wrote this paper. it's titled how fox news changed american media and political dynamics using statistics to charge that fox makes its viewers less educated and that the channel even dampened turnout for mitt romney in the last presidential election. this is the rare scholarly paper that has stirred a media frenzy maybe because bartlett works in the administrations of president reagan and george h.w. bush and he's joining me on the set in washington. thanks for being here. >> happy to be here. >> let me read one line that stood out to me and a lot of other people. you said it can almost be called self-brainwashing. many conservatives now refuse to even listen to any news or pb not vetted through fox and to believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth. self brainwashing. >> i don't think that word is too strong. i think many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only fox news on television they listen only to conservative

talk radio, rush limbaugh sean hannity, many of the same people. when they go on to the internet they look at only conservative websites like national review news max, world net daily, and so they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again, and that's brainwashing. >> do you believe that's more true for conservatives than for liberals? >> yeah i do. i believe that but -- >> what causes that? >> well, i think for a long time the media was -- did tilt a bit to the left and so i think that conservatives once they got a media of their own just sort of glommed onto it like a man in the desert, you know being given some water. they drank very heavily from the

fox waters but what i don't think they've quite come to understand yet is it's a double-edged sword. there's no question that fox helps the republican party enormously but it's not 100% positive. there are some negatives, and i think we're starting to see some of them in this election cycle. >> you're bringing up -- basically you're describing negative negative consequences of having a channel that does reinforce viewers' beliefs. >> i cite a study in my paper where i talk about how fox viewers in the 2012 election cycle tended to have more wishful thinking so to speak. that is they were more confident unrealistically confident i think based on objective analysis of the polls, and you may remember there was this website, unskewed polls, remember that? >> right. >> where it was just widely widely believed in republican circles that all of the polls were biased against romney and

he was actually doing really really well much better and was going to win pretty easily and as we know, karl rove among others was shocked on election night when he didn't do as well as expected. >> circling back to the point i made in the beginning about the debate rules, do you think the debate rules where only the top ten contenders will be allowed on stage does that help the republican party or hurt the republican party? >> well i don't know it depends, i suppose, on who gets left off the list. certain candidates have broad but not deep support. others have very deep but not broad support and so i think if you're somebody who feels strongly about, say, ben carson and he ends up being the guy who gets left off, your feelings towards the party and perhaps towards fox news may be affected. >> bruce, thanks for being here. thoughtful conversation this morning. >> okay. still ahead, there's been as much debate over the lack of the use thug in waco this week as

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get started at xfinity.com/myaccount welcome back. a major announcement on thursday. baltimore city state's attorney general marilyn mossby said six police officers were indicted in the death of freddie gray. some are calling this a victory for a national grassroots movement called black lives matter. the movement's message about alleged police brutality has spread from social media into the mainstream media. you have to wonder if the media, mainly cable news gets the coverage right, gets the tone right, or it at times actually makes it worse. i wanted to talk about this with community organizer and civil rights activist deray mckesen

who joins me now. thanks for being here. >> it's good to be here. >> i know you through twitter because i feel like you live broadcast protests via your twitter account but this time last year you were a school administrators in minneapolis. >> i was an administrator in minneapolis. >> what provoked you, what moment provoked you? you may disagree with the term full time protester. >> i was sitting on my couch on august 16th. mike brown got killed on august 9th. i got in my car, drove nine hours to st. louis, and i became a protester then. the reason i quit was i wanted to figure out how to like use my skills and talent to fight in this space because you can't just kill people. all the work i did in education was important but kids have to be alive to learn and that was important to me to do this work. >> what's your single biggest objection to the way the movement is treated by the press? >> i think that -- i think there

is a constant path ol jazzing of black bodies. >> elaborate on that. >> this idea when black people is a symbol >> who's saying that? >> it's the way the story is crafted. so what you saw in st. louis is like the police were literally attacking protesters. and that wasn't always -- that was put out by the mainstream media. what you saw in baltimore sometimes is you saw people focusing on sort of the property damage and not actually focusing on what caused the unrest in the first place. >> i wonder are you saying the press should automatically assume the worst about the officers about the authorities? >> i'm saying there should be balance in the way that the critique is spread and there isn't. so when i see news articles or when i see broadcasts that present the police narrative as true. when they say things like -- >> but it is oftentimes true. the police narrative. >> is it true? i don't know if it was true with mike brown. i don't know if it was true with

rickia boyd. maybe we differ on what truth means. >> but maybe you're talking about anecdotes as opposed to statistics. are you saying the majority of police statements in the u.s. are not true public statements press releases, et cetera? >> what i'm saying is the police are killing people and they're saying it's justified in every case in a way that it just isn't. this is a conversation about state violence. so when i think about walter scott, the police gave an account that was untrue and we would not have known unless there was a video. >> right. that was very clear-cut. >> and i would say there are many other case. freddie gray's another one. the way the police mobilized to respond to his death was really different until we got a video. so we challenge the police narratives because we have reason to challenge, because we've been lied to. >> it sounds like you see a double standard of sorts on race. i want to see if you agree with that sentiment. because what we saw in waco earlier in the week the coverage of this biker gang -- i don't even know what to call it. the coverage of this biker gang madness that happened in waco there, wasn't the use of the word thug in the media coverage.

people like you i think spoke out and said there's a double standard as a result. am i getting that right? >> yeah i think that waco's fascinating. right? what we didn't see were any dead bodies. nine people were dead. there were 18 people injured. and like there was no -- the media didn't show any of that spectacle of blood. and not that i want to see bloody bodies but there was a stark difference. and you also saw like the bikers chilling. they are in gangs. this is organized crime. and they are just like hanging out at the police line after nine people are killed and they're now saying they might have recovered 1,000 weapons. that context would not have happened if those bodies were dark skinned. what was interesting about waco was there was all this nuance suddenly because whiteness gets nuanced in the media and blackness doesn't. what you saw with waco is this is just like a biker group, it's a biker shootout. you're like no they killed nine people. like shot in the presence of innocent bystanders. 1,000 weapons potentially recovered. >> you're saying the media -- i think you're painting with a pretty broad brush. but let me take it to the next

step. are the journalists who are involved in these stories subconsciously racist? what causes the differences you're describing? >> so that's a good question. i think one of the dangers when we talk about racism is we tend to think about racism only at the extremes. right? so this idea that the n word is the only signifier of racism in america. when that's actually not true. racism is about how power is used to negatively impact people because of issues of race. so what you saw with waco is you saw this radical humanization of people who actually committed violent crimes who really did violent crimes in a way you didn't actually see that same humanization with people in baltimore, who were breaking curfew. right? they were treated in ways that like criminalized them in really intense ways and in a way that you didn't see with actual criminals, with people who like violently did things. >> thanks so much for being here. >> thank you. >> coming up here on the program, a glimmer of hope for a freelance journalist who's been missing in syria for nearly three years. and a major development for jailed "washington post" reporter jason rezaian. stay with us for the details.

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this week two very unfortunate reminders of the perils that reporters face when trying to inform all of us about conflict zones and repressive regimes. today marks 1,013 days since freelance journalist austin tice went missing in syria. at the time he vanished he had contributed to news outlets like cbs and the "washington post." and on tuesday his mother debra tice held a press conference in beirut where she made an emotional plea to the u.s. and syrian governments asking them to work together to secure her son's release. and for the first time in a long time she gave us a specific flicker of hope that her son is still alive. >> we ask both governments to work together and to work effectively to locate austin and

to secure his safe release. we hear that he's well that he's safe which is of course very important, and the most important thing is for us to stay patient. i long to hold my son in my arms. i want my family to be whole again. >> hopefully, someday soon we can report the news that austin has been reunited with his mother. meanwhile, next week in iran "washington post" reporter jason rezaian will appear in a tehran court. rezaian has been detained for 306 days on charge of espionage, charges that are not backed up by any evidence. according to an attorney the trial will begin on may 26th. and there are widespread doubts that it will be a fair trial. "washington post" editor marty baron recently said here on the program that the charges are absurd and not supported by a single fact. and journalists around the world continue to hope that the charges will be dismissed and that jason will be released. that's all for this televised

edition of "reliable sources" but our media coverage keeps going 24/7 on cnn.com. we will see you right back here next sunday at 11:00 a.m., and stay tuned now for stn stn. "state of the union." isis grabs more territory and momentum. and is there a smoking gun in hillary clinton's e-mails? this is "state of the union." defense secretary ash carter on isis gaining new ground in iraq. housing secretary julian castro embraces america's tough neighborhoods. but what about 2016? speaking of that hundreds of hillary clinton's personal e-mails go public. and the surprising history behind arlington national cemetery. good morning from washington. i'm jim acosta. iraqi forces are preparing a counteroffensive against isis after the terror group had one of its biggest weeks in nearly a year. isis seized control of the ancient syrian town of palm yooira as