beginning. [sniff] ♪ dramatic music but that plug quickly faded. ♪upbeat music luckily there's febreze plug. it cleans away odors and freshens for 1200 hours. [deep inhale] breathe happy with febreze plug. hey. i'm brian stelter. welcome to washington and this edition of "reliable sources." this is our weekly look at the story behind the story. how the media really works, how the news gets made, and how all of us can help make it better. this hour, there's more and more testimony in the ukraine scandal that is implementing president trump. so find out what it's like for a republican commentator who wants trump impeached. plus, comcast resisting calls for megyn kelly, gretchen carlson, and others. they're call calling on comcast to launch an outside investigation into nbc news. the letter was prompted in part by this man, ronan farrow, and he'll join me live to talk about the fallout. and a little later, the

problem with mark zuckerberg's recent speech about free featsp. and abc syria error and so much more. but first, news cycles are out. shock cycles are. that is what we're experiencing day in, day out. another shock, another scandal, at period of outrage and then the same thing all over again. one day, president trump decides he's going to award himself a rich government contract. his acting chief of staff comes out and tells the press why it's a great idea. and then trump suddenly reverses himself and blames the media for making it an issue. shock on top of shock on top of shock. trump has been promoting debunked conspiracy theories this week. calling the impeachment process a coup. remember the letter that came out to the turkish president this week that seemed so informal, some people thought it was a hoax. these are shock cycles.

one set of talking heads says they're stunned, horrified, bewildered. and then another set of talking heads says we're all taking it too seriously. there's shock about the shock and then trump delivers another shock. he calls nancy pelosi crazy or accuses her of hating america, or mick mulvaney holds a presser and confirms a quid pro quo and then says, get over, and then says, that's not what he said. boom, boom, boom. he's getting basic facts wrong about american forces in harm's way. he's calls james mattis the world's most overrated general. and his lawyer, rudy giuliani, is under federal investigation with new detail evers day. shock, shock, shock. the challenge, i think, for all of us is sto break out of these shock cycles and make sure the news is still front and center. as citizens, we have to retain our capacity to be shocked. but more importantly, we have to recognize why these stories are stunning. and that's where journalists come in. that's why the news cycle is still essential. a lot of folks these day just

hear the shock and outrage and they miss the why. they miss tun constitutihe unconstitutionality of what's going on. they think it's a partisan food fight. but so much of this is nonpartisan. it's constitutional. the big story continues to be abuse of power. and aides like mick mulvaney, they're left just to complain about the press. >> you were asked by jonathan carl, you've described a quid pro quo, and you said, that happens all the time. >> and reporters will use their language all the time. so, my language never said quid pro quo. but let's get to the heart of the matter. go back and look at that list of three things. what was i talking about? things that it was legitimate for the president to do. >> once again, the white house telling us not to believe what we see and what we hear. that's been the throughline for the last few years. but it doesn't mean it's not shocking. it is still shocking. let me bring in my panel here in washington. matt lewis is a daily beast senior columnist and cnn political commentator. olivia nuzzi is "new york" magazine's washington correspondent. crystal ball is the cohost of

hill rising, and katie, what do you think happened about the doral reversal? >> well, i think he had been -- i think the president had been dribbling this idea out for months and months and months, saying this is the perfect piece of property, he got a lot of free media for it. and then when he had mick mulvaney come out and finally say, this is what we're going to do, i really don't think they anticipated the amount of backlash that would come from democrats, but also republicans. lisa murkowski of alaska, it was very tepid, but said, no, this is not appropriate, when asked. congressman rooney of florida said, this is not the kind of thing presidents should be doing. so the white house had to backtrack based on -- it was actually a little bit of a crack in this republican wall of never criticizing the president. >> even the "new york post," which i don't think we can overstate how important the "new york post" is -- >> a murdoch property. one of the president's favorite papers. >> it's something he reads

frequently. he probably reads the content of the "new york post" more than he reads the content of the papers he's criticizing frequently. and i think it's important that the editorial board of the "new york post" came out and said he should change the property. >> you said this is a three-mpat process. part one, trump proposes something crazy or sketchy or stupid. what's part two? >> part two, republicans rush to defend it and republicans and donald trump apologists. there was a piece i saw this week pant why this was brilliant. this puts donald trump at home court advantage. and we should all support it. and step three, of course, is donald trump sort of pulling the rug out from under his own defenders. >> so two things happened here. a lot of support for it among republicans, look like fools now. but at the same time, there were some cracks in the usual defense. there was some dissent from republicans about this doral move. >> and the issue is so easy for people town understand, i think too. even voters who might be locked in republican, still understand that this is the president's family business that would stand to benefit, if not financially, the white house, you know,

stressed that there wouldn't be any profit. that is free media. that is people coming from all over the world. it's earned media, the president has bragged about being a master of this at length before. this is what the trump organization stands to gain, or stood to gain. >> crystal, i always say, the trump white house should have more preferenss conferences, mo press briefings. then mick mulvaney holds a press briefing. it's a disaster. he has to walk back key statements. am i hypocrite for then saying it's a disaster, or should we be able to have both frequent press briefings and accurate information at the briefings? >> that would be ideal, for sure. and i loved your monologue. i think the doral thing, it was just a shade too shameless, though. but i love your monologue, because it takes a bigger look at what's going on. this is not a news cycle of shock/outrage, shock/outrage, shock/outrage. and trump has totally gamed that system. that's a big part of why he is in the white house to start with. and as long as we keep covering it in this same way of being so shocked and then outraged and so

shocked and so outraged, he's going to continue to game that whole thing. >> and then exhausted. shocked, outraged, and then exhausted. >> here's the reality. i think we all know, trump is the symptom of a larger problem. yet, rather than covering that larger problem or even covering the other symptoms, we just cover trump, like he is the center of the problem. you have a massive working cross movement rising up in this country and rising up around the world. that's what's really going on. so when we fixate on, did he call nancy pelosi third rate or third grade, et cetera, we miss those underlying currents that are really driving all of what's happening here in this country. >> what about mulvaney having a press conference at all? do you wonder? i don't normally buy into the idea that he's trying to distract from gordon sondland's testimony or something. but in this case, given he has completely reversed himself about doral, part of me does wonder if there was an element of, change the story, change the shock. >> i would say the syria thing is actually the worst thing going on for trump right now.

you have military veterans who are saying, this is completely unacceptable. you have essentially a genocide unfolding that, you know, our president green lit. so that's a real problem. but again, zooming out, you have 70% of americans who say they are furious at the political establishment. you have 40% who say they want to burn it all down. and so when they see us pulling our hair out, when they see nancy pelosi and chuck schumer, et cetera, freaking out, they don't mind that. the details of the story get glossed over. they like to see the elite institutions breaking down and freaking out. they love that. matt? >> i was just going to say, donald trump may very well be trying to distract and following up one chaotic thing with one chaotic thing. and i think you have a point. i want does work. it's catnip for the press. i think it gets the american public offplans. we don't know what to believe. and eventually it, normalizes things. but the one catch to that is, and you mentioned the exhaustion. i think republican politicians are finally becoming thoroughly

exhausted with defending this president, day in and day out, and it means defending t ining indefensible. and we saw them step out in the case of syria, mitch mcconnell has an op-ed in "the washington post," condemning what donald trump did there. i think we're starting to see republicans move away from this president. >> and olivia, you wrote about that this week, the exhaustion. >> i think the way that the media or liberals have trump fatigue, that exists on the right, as well. it's just different. because they're not outraged. they're not trying to get rid of him. they're not trying to actively do anything to change the situation, but they also feel a kind of fatigue. they feel sick of what he's doing. they can't be shocked by anything anymore, because i think they've lost -- >> look at marco rubio. >> marco rubio's body language is utterly defeated. >> but i don't think it's fair to say that it's, you know, we get distracted by the outrage cycle and that that's not quite important. i think that what the president says is obviously news, no matter where he says it, if he says it to the press waiting for

air force one or marine one, if he says it on twitter. it's always news. and i think we have to treat it as such, treat it as important. even if he is trying to say, hey, look over there. >> even if it's nonsense. >> i think that's fair, olivia. of course, what the leader of the free world says is newsworthy, of course. but, it crowds out everything else. and so, when we fixate, i mean, impeachment is a great example, right? i can't stand this president. i can't stand him. i think he's terrible for the country and for the world. but i think it's very telling what the media and the elite institutions decide is a step too far. it's when another elite, joe biden, is threatened. it's when the military industrial complex's right to send javelin missiles to ukraine is threatened. like, that's a bad thing. i'm not excusing any of this, right? it was not okay that trump did this. but he has caused real harm to real people. and that doesn't seem to get the same outrage as when he's, quote/unquote, breaking the norms and guardrails of

democracy. >> except when i was driving down the highway the other day and there's banners saying, "stop family separation," there are many people taking action on many issues. >> of course. but did we impeach film him for? >> matt, you've been a republican that's spoken out against impeachment. what's it been like for you? >> it's great. the water's warm. i don't have to change or defend the indefensible. i thought the kurds were our allies before. i don't suddenly think that they're worse than isis. i thought general mattis was a hero and a tough-as-nails ple m general before. inget to just be consistent. >> does that mean you're not a real republican? your headline for daily beast says, this is the bs you have to believe to be a republican in 2019. to believe that mattis -- >> reagan said, i didn't leave the party, the party left me. i think that's what it is. but the things i believe in are still conservative. i believe in things like the rule of law. i remember when republicans and conservatives thought it was wrong to rent out the lincoln bedroom during the bill clinton

administration. now republicans suddenly think it's okay for the president to line his own pockets, you know, downn florida with his own hotel. so i think that my position is the conservative republican position. >> i see what you're saying. >> hopefully they'll come back around. hillary clinton, tulsi gabbard, disinformation, that's coming right up.

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on friday, the state department released a report into its probe of hillary clinton's release of a private email server and found, according to the "washington post," no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information. right-wing media was going on about this for years, but this to me sounds like a friday night news dump. yes, there were some headlines and tv segments, but this seems like a very anti-climactic end to a story that's been raging for years. the panel is back with me now to discuss that and more. i suppose, you know, friday night, what can you do? comes out on a friday, but i think it's jobs of newsrooms to bring it back up in days to come to make sure everybody feels like it. >> it's kind of like the correction never gets as much attention as the initial story. anybody who's ever been written about in a way that's not accurate can attest to that. i don't think it's particularly surprising. it's also not a particularly exciting story for people right now. there are so many other things going on, as we were talking -- >> and there are trump aides using private email servers and getting in trouble for that.

>> yeah, i don't think this is something that the administration wants to talk about, certainly. and we are, as we talked about previously, pretty much being dictated by what the administration wants to talk about. so i don't think it's particularly surprising and i think it's a more difficult story for people to understand. and that was part of what the difficulty was initially back in 2016 with the story. >> there's another related story. that's hillary clinton versus tulsi gabbard. clinton suggesting on a podcast that tulsi gabbard is somehow a russian agent or something. this seems to me, crystal, i know you're a fan of tulsi gabbard, it seems like a disinformation situation, where the russians want this kind of disinformation out there. >> you mean from the hillary clinton side? whether you're a fan of tulsi gabbard or not, there is zero evidence that she is some russian plant. and i think it just makes the whole russian conspiracy thing look absurd, that it's gone this far. that you would, as hillary clinton, a major figure in the democratic establishment to this day, baselessly smear an american veteran who served in

the iraq war as a medic, and still serves in the hawaii army national guard as being groomed by vladimir putin, i mean, that's disgusting and absurd. >> i just always think to myself, this is what foreign governments want. when there's this kind of vitriol and venom in american politics. >> but that's -- sure, right? it helps our adversaries, but there's also this trend now on the left, of which i'm a part of the left, to smear anyone who dares tell the truth about, you know, ugliness that's happening in america or disagree with the sort of military industrial complex or bipartisan pro-war consensus, to smear those people as russian plants. it's happened to all sorts of people online. and that hillary clinton, someone that prominent, would take it to this level a presidential candidate, i think it's -- >> i think the truth is that tulsi gabbard does advance some of the same talking points that turkey wants to advance right now in syria. some of the same talking points that russia -- >> tulsi gabbard, president trump, they have in common.

>> they actually have a lot in common. but it's a bridge way too far for hillary clinton to imply that she's an asset. that to me was crossing the line. >> let's talk about the vile video that the "new york times" first revealed was shown at this pro-trump conference at doral last week. this is a video that had been online for a long time. it images a fake donald trump murdering journalists and democratic lawmakers. and katie, you asked mick mulvaney about this video. the first question out of his mouth was, did you ask the president about it. and my colleagues jumped forth to say, we asked him, he didn't answer. my response is, you know, naturally, why do you have to ask the president what he thinks? why do we have to shout a question at him or bug the white house relentlessly, which reporters in the white house correspondent correspondents' association have done all week. why would he not just come out and say, this is inappropriate, this is awful, i condemn this? his press secretary, of course, said he hadn't seen the video,

but condemned the sentiment behind it. mulvaney said, you know, well, i didn't like it. but that's completely different than the leader of the country coming out and say, this was vi vile and it was at one of my properties and i don't stand for this. >> and what makes matter worse, it's his rhetoric that makes people think about this kind of violence. >> i think we have an empathy gap. i think we talk a lot about misinformation and who is susceptible to misinformation, but don't talk a lot about why people are susceptible to it. and a lot of it is that we are all in our own little bubble, we only agree what we already agree with and only see what we already agree with. but a lot of it is we're so disconnected that it is difficult for anyone to empathize with anyone that they do not inherently like. and so why does a video like that exist? why is it that donald trump is probably saddling not coming out to condemn this video? because he knows that there are some of his supporters who like it, who think it's funny. >> that's part of the problem, they do like it. to me, go back to where we were during the last segment,

conservatives, social conservatives, people who used to criticize video games, rap music, whatever. now, to be like cheering on and supporting this sort of perverse, disgusting video, it's just a complete reversal. and it shows you the state of conservatism today. >> the words i'm taking away, empathy gap. that's what missing. to the panel, thank you. quick break here. and then mark zuckerberg's free speech speech getting flack from multiple directions. the joe biden campaign just issued a brand-new challenge to facebook. you'll hear about it, next. so bob, what do you take for back pain? before i take anything, i apply topical pain relievers first. salonpas lidocaine patch blocks pain receptors for effective, non-addictive relief. salonpas lidocaine. patch, roll-on or cream. hisamitsu. we're oscar mayer deli fresh your very first sandwich,m... your mammoth masterpiece. and...whatever this was. because we make our meat with the good of the deli and no artificial preservatives. make every sandwich count with oscar mayer deli fresh.

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e-cigarettes. juul is "following big tobacco's playbook." and now, juul is pushing prop c to overturn e-cigarette protections. vote no on juul. no on big tobacco. no on prop c. facebook is making it harder to know what's true. case in point, the company's policy letting politicians lie in ads. this weekend, the joe biden campaign is calling on facebook for a second time, saying that facebook's policy is deeply flawed and allowing misinformation to spread on the platform. this is something that's been bubbling up for several weeks now and it comes at the same time that mark zuckerberg, head of facebook, is out there talking about free speech and free expression. he gave a big speech this week at georgetown university. he said he talked about how to

draw the line, where to draw the line, and how to make sure free expression reigns on the site. joining me now is the co-director of harvard's platform accountability project, who after his time in the obama white house, worked for facebook as a private and public policy adviser. ghosh quit in 2016 and wrote this paper calling on companies like facebook to acknowledge their role in misinformation. he wrote a column on this about on cnn.com that we will talk about. and here mo illithy. he moderated the q&a portion. thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> i would love to know what you took away from zuckerberg's speech, given that it took place right there on your campus? >> it was interesting, we had a packed house. students lined up for hours, because they wanted to hear this. i appreciated it and i think a lot of appreciated his efforts to point out the complexities in a lot of these issues. he came in and said, maybe

there's a big gray area. having said that, most people walked away from the speech wanting something more. there was something in that speech that offended just about everybody on the ideological spectrum. conservatives who feel like he did not go far enough in addressing arguments or allegations of an anti-conservative algorithmic bias. and progressives who are going at him for allowing trump campaign misinformation to appear on their platform. whether it's in ads or in other ways. i don't think a lot of people walked out of there feeling satisfied by what he said. >> and is that just because we've never seen a platform like facebook before, in the history of the world. so there's no easy answers for what to do with it? >> i think that's right. i think that it is incredibly complicated and it deals with how we all consume information in the digital age. but, there are -- what was interesting to me, we had over a hundred questions submitted by the students in the room. and most of those questions didn't focus as much on policy as they did on ethics. >> ethics.

>> ethics. >> and the ethics of, what is facebook's responsibility when foreign actors, bad actors are using the platform to facilitate violence against its own people or even genocide. what is facebook's responsibility when it comes to protecting privacy? what is facebook's responsibility when it comes to misinformation, disinformation? those types of ethical questions are what the students were grappling with and were hoping he would talk about. >> let's put on screen some of the bullet points from this speech, especially around political ads. because ultimately, zuckerberg said, when it comes down to these thorny questions, we're going to err on the side of free expression. he said, tech companies should not be deciding which political ads can run and can't run. here's some of what the rest of zuk said. you wrote an op-ed saying, cnn needs to be regulated, citing some of what zuckerberg said in this speech. >> this is an absolute commercial convenience for mark zuckerberg and for facebook.

i think it is always a thing that we need to scratch our heads over when we have ceos deliver specioeches on policy. that's not to say that mark zuckerberg does not truly believe the things that he said. but what we have to acknowledge is that for facebook to come out and say that it supports free speech on its platform and on the internet and that that should influence u.s. public policy making is a commercial convenience for facebook. it allows them to not have to take responsibility for the harm that is happening in our political circumstance today, in political advertising. >> facebook is knowingly accepting money from people who they know are lying. broadcast television networks do have to accept ads from anybody when you're running for a campaign, but the difference with facebook is facebook allows you to reach the most vulnerable people over and over and over again and target them with lies over and over and over and over

again. and it's not just trump that's going to do this. other politicians will in the future, as well. that's personally why i'm worried. >> that is exactly right. i think what -- we live in a new world of digital communication today. digital communication has absolutely affected our media universe. and what the russians did is exactly what trump can do in 2020. 2020 could very well be 2016 on steroids, where political campaigns in this country are given a free pass to splice and dice the american population, target our marginalized communities with voter suppression and with all sorts of political lies, which is going to influence our election. and potentially even the ultimate outcome of the election. >> now, mo, you're here with your day job at georgetown. you're also a fox news contributor. and i wondered what you made of zuckerberg going fox and trying to reach out to a conservative audience? >> i think we've seen this strategy coming from them for

some time. they have been criticized on the right for quite some time, arguing that the platform has an inherent bias against conservatives. you've heard stories about him doing meetings one on one with conservative thought leaders or in small groups over the past couple of months. i thought it was interesting that he went to dana prino, who's a pretty straight shooter, to go to her to sort of make the case. and you see, that was one of the first question that he got asked by her, was about, you know, is facebook, you know, biased against conservatives? >> and what can people see the full speech from georgetown? >> on the georgetown university's facebook page. georgetown.edu. >> it is worth watching in full. >> yeah, and not just the speech, but the student q&a, chi thought really gave a good sense as to the ethical questions that young people were hoping he would address. >> thank you both for being here. thank you both for joining me. we did invite facebook to be here as well and they declined our interview request. up next here, trump's ability to

lie seemingly hitting an all-time high. daniel dale, our fact checker in chief is here in just a moment. plp blp.

some breaking news now from our team in syria. hundreds of trucks carrying u.s. personnel were observed by cnn gathering, heading toward the border with iraq. this is part of the troop withdrawal that we've been hearing about for days. austin official confirming to cnn the ground move is the largest the u.s. has made in syria so far. some of those troops now heading toward iraq.

let's talk about the president's statements about syria. the president's misstatements about troops. the president's misspelling of the defense secretary's name today. that and much more with my panel here. daniel dale is a cnn fact checker who analyzes every word the president says. also fact checks other politicians. elaina plott is a white house correspondent for the atlantic and a cnn analyst. and eric wimpl el is a fact checker at "the washington post." so this is a president getting the facts wrong about troops in harm's way. what stood out to you this week? we have a full screen that can show one of the misstatements about brokering a cease-fire deal in turkey. >> the president declared over and over that president presidents had tried for ten years, 15 years, then more than 15 years to broker this deal with turkey. and that's simply nonsensical. this is an extremely narrow deal related to the particular turkish incursion of this month. and it included very

concessionaire terms that no previous president had tried to offer turkey. so the president just made this up. >> elena, what do you make of this week and the reaction from republicans about what's going on in syria. because it feels different in some ways. this week has felt different. >> i think that's absolutely right. i think that republicans are never going to have, suddenly, a moral uprising over the president lying, just, you know, writ large. but what they often say, though, is that the president governs like any typical republican president. conservative justice, tax cuts. but with syria, this is a very rare instance in which he has done something that they acti actively disagree with. you saw mitch mcconnell with a pretty provocative op-ed denouncing this decision to withdraw our troops. i think this might be one of the first moments. and i hate to use the term inflection point in this presidency, because it's said so often, that republicans are not going to be keen to let him, i guess, get away with this one. >> you know, we've been talking about these misstatements from the president.

eric, you wrote something this week that really smoke to me. you talked about how it's difficult to use neutral-sounding language to describe what the president does, because that makes it sounds like you have an axe to grind. great example today, the president misspells the defense secretary's name on twitter. mark asps esper is his name. and the president wrote esperanto. but the president should have a proof reed proof reader. and just talking about this, it sounds like an attack. >> cnn gets hammered for this every single day, saying, trump came on the air and just mocked a reporter with a disability. well, that happens to be the fact. >> back during the campaign, we were just stating the truth. >> or on the president is on tape saying he had made a practice of grabbing women by the pussy, that is a very neutral statement from a factual standpoint. and it sounds like a condemnation. the facts double as condemnations under trump.

i think that's -- and that has blown up the traditional model of broadcasting, because you always want to sound measured and neutral. >> and as neutral. how do you handle that, daniel, on a daily basis? >> i think you just call it out every time. i think what a serial liar like trump counts on is his ability to wear us down and wear us out. he knows we might fact check it the first time, but some of these false claims, he's told a hundreds times. if we let the other 98 go, he wins with those 98. >> that's why i like that you keep track of the number of times he's said the same falsehood. here's another one. he talks about the u.s. deployment to syria initially being just one month, when, in fact -- >> there was notime table on it. the obama administration and trump administration both declared it would be a short-term deployment, but never put a 30-day timetable on it like trump has repeatedly claimed. >> again and again. >> please stick around. quick break here and the latest on the fallout of fox news about

shep smith. what are fox viewers saying about shep leaving the network. ♪ sport drumming starts [ referee whistle sounds ] [ cheering ] when you need the fuel to be your nephew's number one fan. holiday inn express. we're there. so you can be too.

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all right. shep smith has left the fox building. fox journalists are still troubled by his departure, but the network has not missed a beat. loyal fox fans don't seem to miss him at all. in the words of one new mexico man, it is great that he redesigned. eric interviewed trump spoerts from across the country who were

here in d.c. this week and that quote comes from your piece on the "washington post" website. there was a woman in ohio who said to you, i always had to turn shep off because he upset me so much. >> the trump fans sound like trump. you know how oftentimes trump used to bash cnn, and it's the same dynamic, shep's awful, he's a socialist, he's a lefty, i never watched him. that was a very common refrain. but these people are very, very well informed about what shep smith stood for and what he did and when he broadcast it and how much years he had been at fox news. these are extremely media-conscious people. >> fox-conscious people. >> fox-conscious people, i should say. but they knew the other ones, too. the point is that i feel that these folks could have really benefited from shep smith's journalism, but they were the first ones to turn him off. that's a really big deal. the other big deal is what you said before. you know, every time one of

these cataclysms happens at fox, some big news, some big bad news. we think, what's going to happen next? and what happens next, they win the ratings. >> that's right. they roll right along. >> let's talk about the most egregious media error of the week. this involves abc news showing video from a gun range in kentucky that they said was video of a slaughter in syria. you can say, it's labeled slaughter in syria. it's actually from a kentucky gun range. abc says it regrets the error, but it has not explained what happened. what went wrong here. why do you think that matters? that the network has not addressed how this happened? >> because i think, like any network right now, and any group of journalists, you're trying to point out each day that, you know, this president lies often. this president delivers misinformation. you cannot also be a purveyor of said misinformation if you feel your job is to call out the president of the united states for that. >> even if it's an accident. >> of course. doubly more so, to go above and beyond, to explain what happened, the processes behind such an egregious error.

i think it does a disservice to other reporters each day who do feel that their job is to go out and report the truth. >> eric, an abc source said to me, there will be consequences, internally, but they won't say what that means. >> and i think they won't explain, either, exactly what happened. beckett adams at the "washington examiner" -- >> has been doing great work on this. >> great work on this and god bless him, because this is important pressure to keep on abc. and good for you for bringing it one too, because i think they want this thing to blow over. i think they should explain what happened, because all sorts of broadcast outlets, all sorts of youtube outlets and such deal with footage and need to know how this mistake happened. now, some people think it was not an accident that this was intentional. i don't think that's -- >> i see no evidence of that. >> i see no evidence of that. >> but we also don't have an explanation one way or the other. >> but i don't think they would have bailed on it if it had been intentional. i think it was probably a mistake. but i think that they should explain how it happened. because i think this industry,

journalism can only get better if we all know how the mistakes occurred in the first place. >> i'll have more on this in the "reliable sources" newsletter. eric, elena, thank you very much. a quick break here. and then the revelations from "catch and kill" that you haven't heard yet. it's either the assurance of a 165-point

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the new back "catch and kill" has been on a top seller list all long. new allegations about matt lauer and nbc's handling of the allegations and former employees including megyn kelly have spoken out and written a letter to comcast demanding an outside investigation. there's been only internal investigations up until this point. there is a lot more in "catch and kill" so let's get into it with ronan ferrell. congratulations on the book launch. there are questions i've been watching about nbc news and why they let you walk out the door with your harvey weinstein scoop. is this a push versus pull between you the reporter and

your bosses, editors? that's what nbc claims this day. >> the reporting in the book is very careful and very carefully fact checked and in a way that weaves in responses. i'll let people judge for themselves. we're very confident in it and the fact checking and what the book lays out is this a company in a manier i didn't do thy er . we document how several of those were with executives who stayed at the company, people like matt lauer that stayed at the company years after high level people at this institution were talking about these individuals being a threat and that's bigger than nbc, brian. that is about patterns of corporate coverup behavior that allow people to get hurt and yes, in some cases, both at cbs, which i reported on and you've done wonderful coverage of and nbc and other companies that use

those patterns of covering up behavior rather than addressing it. you see it distort editorial coverage and the book lays out why this institution was so in a corner when harvey weinstein laid siege to them and they did kill this reporting. >> nbc news says your book say smear and you have an ax to grind because you used to be a reporter there. the reason nbc news is holding firm is because the head of the company doesn't want tow give you a win or seem like anything is wrong at nbc news. there is questions all week why is the president of nbc news still have a job? why does the chairman still have a job? the answer is steve burke, the head of the company still supports them. are you surprised by that? >> i'm a report er, not an activist. they are very carefully vetted and this company had to admit to things like this pattern of settlements and say it's a coincidence they were paying out these women and happen to have

these complaints but they have acknowledged things like secret settlements they previously denied and acknowledged things like secret calls with harvey weinstein during the killing of this story. so look, the reporting has with stood this scrutiny, other journalists have rallied around it, journalist within that building have rallied around it. they are anguished and want to see accountability and are asking tough questions. all i can say, i'm glad any time when i rig laorously inter cigarette the facts, very often it gets a campaign in the press to under cut and gets legal threats. n brks krrkbc universal legal department -- >> about what? what were they doing? >> from square one, this is in the book, this is not a new revelation, nbc was issuing legal threats as well as these threats in the press and efforts to spin and down play and put out misinformation and that's typical. that happened with cbs and every

major story that i do. you saw ami issue threats, dillon howard the editor of the threaten book sellers in australia until they with drew this book from sale. now it's on sale there. the point being this is a standard playbook to kind of go up askrins the gainst the repore powerful people dig in and each case i broke a story, i can say i'm glad to see jousrnalist cut through that and that's happening now. >> your reporting about the national enquirer and dillon howard and documents shredded before election day, what do you think happened in 2016 that could impact 2020? >> we're at this moment, brian, where the press is so embattled many of your guests talked about today. we're subject to authoritarian rhetoric that describes us as the enemy of the people. this is a constitutionally protected profession that's crucial to ensuring people have

information as they participate in a democracy and crucial to holding the powerful accountable and if we want to be a powerful instrument to do that, we have to check ourselves and clean house, as well. we have to make sure we are reporting the truth and not becoming instruments of suppression and in the last cycle, we saw that happen. ami is an instrument of suppression. we seen that at other organizations, too, and they are asking tough questions. >> thank you so much. the book is "catch and kill." nbc news and the national enquirer have been invited to be here and i'd love them to join us on a future program. sign up for your nightly newsletter there and a reminder at 9:00 p.m. eastern time, a special report titled "scheme and scandal, inside the college admissions crisis." i'll see you back here this time next week.

strategic nightmare, president trump totes his skilling on the stage. >> it's a great day for civilizati civilization. >> did the president give turkey and russia everything they wanted? we'll ask former cia director general daivid petraeus next. >> there will be political influence. >> will that strategy backfire on capitol hill? we'll speak with the republican who is not ruling out impeachment. congressman francis rouney

ahead.