today. we hope you'll take a moment this weekend to remember all the men and women who have given their lives defending our freedom. and we'll see you next fox news sunday. i'm"media buzz" this sunday reporters fail to pin her down on issues regarding the clinton foundation to her private e-mail to her personal wealth. >> was there conflict of interest in your giving paid speeches in the run-up to you aunited states noing you're running for president? >> the answer to the question is no. >> why was it so easy for her to finesse that question? and what about the benghazi e-mails that was first leaked to "the new york times"? as isis captures ramadi much of the media debate is focused on finger pointing. and the brutal truth is that the obama administration and the

en allowed the isis savages to gain power murder thousands of immigrants. thousands. >> how do you live with that? >> but is this blame the other side approach doing any good as isis grows stronger? abc keeping its $100 million man, george stephanopoulos in charge of the campaign but suspended anchor brian williams fighting for his nbc job, is the media coming under an ethical cloud. plus a liberal getting heat for squashing free speech? you is kirsten powers taking on her own side? i'm howard kurtz and this is "media buzz." ♪ it had been 28 days since

hillary clinton took questions from media prompting an interruption in iowa. >> wait. yes. maybe when i finish talking to the people here. how's that? >> [ inaudible ]? >> i might. i'll have to ponder it. >> but the former secretary of state did break her silence fielding questions from five reporters in less than five minutes, such as this one on foreign government donations on the clinton foundation. >> your opponents say the foreign donations and private e-mails are examples of the clintons having one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everyone else. do they have a point? >> i am so proud of the foundation. i'm proud of the work that it has done and that it is doing and i'll let the american people make their own judgment about that. >> and over the weekend, reporters were plowing through her e-mails after the state department made them public.

chris starwall is joining us susan for the washington examiner and national public radio, a fox news contributor. chris, does it now look like great god almighty hillary clinton will be engaging the press? >> no. she won't and she doesn't have to. these are the wagesgetting away with hogwash for the last seven years where they are going to live stream it. they went right along with it and this press corps is going to continue to cover hillary clinton as if she wasn't smashing a grapefruit in their face every day. >> well, chris says she doesn't have to talk to the press. >> no, she doesn't. >> let's take a look at when she

did talk to the press. did reporters do their job when it came to pinning her down? >> how much of a job can they do if they don't have access to her? that's the problem. i was thrilled that they forced her, basically, to deal with the press in front of the constituents and the cameras. she was talking to the cameras, sounded positive and jovial. she was making light of the fact that the press never gets a chance with her and, you're right, she can talk past this now because of social media and other ways youtube, to get at constituents potential voters. >> there was not much of a chance for follow ups and you can basically duck the questions. on friday one reporter asked, what is your vision for iraq? okay like anybody asking that should be sent back to journalism school. but do you agree that the media

sort of pressured her into answering a few questions with the constant drumbeat she won't edge gauge? >> yeah. i think the media was right that she talk to them. she couldn't go forever and ever without talking to the press and, five minutes, what can you get down in five minutes? she's very practiced. she knows how to stick to her talking points and not give a whole lot. she's in a unique position. she doesn't have to give long searching interviews because she's not going to have pressure from anybody else. >> i'm not sure i buy the notion that she doesn't have to because she's going to get the apparent nomination even if she goes away for a year but i think it's really important for a candidate, including hillary clinton, to be seen as taking on questions, engaging the issues when jeb bush is doing it when all of the republican candidates are doing it doesn't she pay some price with scripted events?

>> depending on what republicans do i doubt it will be that way in the long run. she can get through this primary because there isn't a primary so far. in the long run, she's going to get herself into trouble but it isn't whining by the press. it's consequential. what we saw when the e-mails were released the questions are enormous. it's not that she doesn't want to answer the questions. she cannot answer the question. sidney blumenthal's involvement in libya on her libya policy while paid by the foundation and it's not that she doesn't want to answer it, there is no answer. >> i'm glad you said that for this sound bite. sidney blumenthal a clinton pal, barred by the obama administration peppers hillary with all kinds of questions on libya while trying to do business in libya with business associates. that came up at the brief on monday i guess you'd call it. take a look. >> can you explain your

relationship as secretary of state with sidney blumenthal? there's a report out this morning that you exchanged several e-mails. >> i have many many old friends and i always think that it's important when you get into politics to have friends you had before you were in politics and to understand what is on their minds and he's been a friend of mine for a long time. he sent me unsolicited e-mails which i passed on in some instances, and i think that's part of the give and take. >> can you explain your relationship with sidney blumenthal? the question didn't even include libya. >> no. >> there was no attempt to sort of press her on the specifics. it's difficult on the road on the fly, but still. >> on the road on the fly, there's no time. but the media can still do its due diligence even though they can't corner her and get a long interview about this. there's not been a lot of in-depth coverage. the question is as these e-mails come out piecemeal over time is the media going to keep

looking into the e-mails that come out or are they going to drop this? is it going to become an old story? is the media going to essentially give her a pass on this over the long haul? >> i don't think they are going to give her a pass. i think when you get into the benghazi timelines and blumenthal -- >> it's murky. >> by the way, those private e-mails from blumenthal to secretary of state clinton, what happened to the liberal media giving hillary special treatment? >> the "new york times" is doing yoman's work here. they are doing a great job of covering hillary clinton and basically treating her as a hostile witness because that's what she is. and they are doing a great job. also i think the decision whose ever decision it was to like to "the times" in advance so it wouldn't be a friday afternoon news dump and go to the bottom of the sea was good.

>> treating her as a hostile witness? >> i think. what the clinton campaign wants to avoid is what happened last time. so much hostility, it was toxic. it's incumbent upon her that she look successful. don't forget voters look at you and judge you whether you look authentic and real and jeb bush is showcasing his ability to take questions from anybody and not get ruffled, at least from ordinary people. sometimes he gets ruffled -- >> yeah. the contrast with jeb bush who takes questions from reporters at almost every stop or almost every day is really striking. what about the document by the state department on friday about benghazi? susan used the word murky. >> it was covered but it was hard to find -- >> a bombshell story? >> well, i didn't find a

bombshell in there. maybe somebody else did. i didn't find any smoking gun in there. >> let me move on to what i call a fascinating exchange with senator ted cruz running for president with a texas reporter for station kbmt and the subject was gay marriage which republicans often get asked about a lot and public opinion is shifting on gay marriage. ireland yesterday approving a gay marriage referendum. if we can put it up on the screen this reporter says "do you have a personal animosity against gay americans?" and ted cruz said "let me ask a question. is there something about the left and i'm going to put the media in this category that's obsessed with sex? why is it that the only question you want to ask concerns this? i recognize that you're reading questions from msnbc." and then the reporter said "do

you have a personal animosity against gay animosity against gay americans?" >> i would say that he has no personal animosity towards gay americans, i would say that's a hostile question but cruz profits from it. the reporter gave cruz an opportunity to swing harder than he usually would and say, why are you such a weirdo? why are you creepy? >> the senator went on to say -- talking about how he thinks msnbc is setting the template here. very few viewers are in the radical and supreme outlet. cruz is not a guy who seems to complain about his media coverage. he knows a lot of reporters don't like him or what he stands for. what did you make of that whole exchange? >> i thought it really highlighted the focus that the media makes on social issues along these campaigns.

i saw this with rick santorum when he was running for president three years ago. >> used to complain a lot about not exclusively but predominantly about social issues in a way that his gop rivals were not. >> i think the same thing will happen with ted cruz. he also said why are we not talking about foreign policy. the frustration is that the media is focusing on these particular candidates on their skill issues like abortion or gay marriage the stuff that the candidates would prefer talking about. >> i think ted cruz who is focused on the primary only it's a good tack tech. it's always good to bash the liberal media. but i don't know over the long term if that's a fruitful strategy. at some point you have to answer the question. but for him, right now, that is fine. >> if he answered the question -- >> he let mark halperin off the hook for his racist interview. >> right. >> but cruz said no problem, mark we all have a bad day. >> right.

if you missed it bloomberg's mark halperin asked cruz a series of condescending questions about his race and he doesn't claim to be fluent in special and did not grow up in cuba. >> send me a tweet @howardkurtz. ahead, as abc is paying george stephanopoulos more than $100 million, does that explain why they still back him over the clinton foundation mess. when we return ramadi has plenty of

the fall of ramadi this week is a huge setback. there have been some good reporting on this turning point,

some pundits are framing it as a question of which president to blame. >> president obama and hillary clinton are responsible for the biggest betrayal of troops since vietnam. >> it's a very real consequence. from the u.s. invasion of iraq. >> susan, i feel like i'm back in 2003. is there too much partisan scoring points here? >> yes. first of all, it plays to everybody's -- whoever their -- chris matthews' viewers and sean hannity viewers. >> they are playing to their base? >> of course. but there's nothing to cover in terms of what to do next. and that's because -- and what is missing here is the coverage of how congress and the white house are unable and unwilling to come up with a real strategy for dealing with the crisis in the middle east. there's nothing to write about but there's also very little coverage that they are failing to come up with a plan.

>> when asked about what would you do about isis there were vague responses but that's precisely my point, which is it's so easy to rerun the obama versus romney debate and there are no great options to talk about what do we do now, short of sending in ground troops which most politicians want to avoid because it's not very popular. >> and when you listen to republicans, they are going to be tougher, kill more bad guys they wouldn't have let this happen. but they maybe would have done it earlier. there's not a huge shift with the exception of lindsey graham who is willing to put in troops. >> it's not very politics to say but kill them in much larger volumes with many more bombs. we're doing a limited number of missions dropping very few

munitions compared to complex in the past and the republicans say, smoke them. put the b-52s in the air and get serious about this. >> i'm watching chris matthews as an example, from msnbc for two weeks and he's going haywire. and then a lot of conservatives say, well if obama hadn't withdrawn the last 10,000 troops and it seems like it is so much easier to look at the past than to deal with the president. >> we have a system that's based on conflict between two parties to solve problems. and i'm okay with that. and the two parties disagree about whose fault it is and which way forward. that's why we have election. the real question here is for the republicans and democrats alike, was it worth it? the 4500 dead was it worth it? the tens and thousands with traumatic injuries to their bodies and their brain, was it worth it? and they don't want to answer that question because the answer is it depends on what we do now.

>> and this is an outgrowth of the now famous jeb bush, if you knew what you know now which you didn't know then would you invid invade iraq? i have people tweeting and saying this is a gotcha question. >> no it's not. the story not being covered, i will argue, is that the parallelization. they don't want to touch it. >> it's so much easier to blame the other guy. mara chris, susan, thank you for stopping by this sunday. ahead, the left accused of squelching free speech by kirsten powers. and abc and nbc under an

ethical cloud. what george

maybe we know why abc has staunchly supported george stephanopoulos. it's being reported that he's paid $100 million. this amid the anchor admitting he screwed up. >> i should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. i apologize to all of you for failing to do that. >> but when msnbc totally ignored the story when it broke, mia has a different view. >> he worked on the clinton campaign. he served under bill clinton. who would be so surprised that he is tied for the clintons? everybody on television has

biases. i think the important thing here and what was lost here was the lack of transparency. we all have to be -- look at joe and me. totally different world views. totally different ideology. >> joining us now for the b block is media critic for the baltimore sun. i thought i was one of the toughest critics but you wrote "george stephanopoulos is dead to me." >> well howie, here is what is upsetting. when we have to go to mika for information on media news we're all in trouble. she's clearer than these guys about it. she has a clear view. this is the upsetting thing about stephanopoulos. he says i should have gone the extra mile. no you should have gone the first mile for god's sakes, and disclosed this thing. it's so obvious. >> or not donated in the first

place to the family foundation of your ex-boss. >> but if you did, you should have told your viewers. you should have been square with them. that's what is so maddening about this. i've sat here and told you how smart he is yet he's so ignorant that he can say, it was a matter of pub electric record. by the way, it wasn't a matter of public record unless they disclosed it. so this outrageous. now where i think the real problem lies howie, is you're right, in asking about the salary it's totally about him. when i say dead to me i think in a political commentator, political reporter/anchor, he's dead to me. i don't want to hear what he has to say to me anymore. i'm 2016 election. i think he's so poisoned. any belief i would have in his work -- and people are saying oh zurawik, you're wrong. he's going to err on the other side. i don't care.

that's not the way it's done. >> i can't verify this $105 million over seven years, but even if it's two-thirds or half of that to me abc believes that george stephanopoulos is too big to fail. on the other hand 40% want stephanopoulos banned from campaign coverage. he pulled out of the presidential debate but then how will he interview a candidate, including hillary clinton? >> that's exactly my point. if abc news wanted to behave ethically on this and not lose him, they should have said you're out of the 2016 campaign. we can't have you as t the face of our coverage. >> how could you do that when he's co-anchor of "good morning america"? >> then they have to shift it or put a reporter out there on the desk and let them read the nice

thing things things where a lion chase the car. howie, you know that's exactly what it looks like he is. i'm angry because i gave him the benefit of the doubt for years. you know i said this guy can do it diane sawyer betweencame a fair journalist and he showed his strikes. >> he worked really hard to establish himself as a journalist and undid some of that. you've got abc chief anchor apologizing, brian williams on suspension fighting for his job, what do these and other episodes do to public confidence in television news? >> howie, i think it's awful. i think the same people who are angry, you know you use the term "too big to fail." in 2008 there's a lot of bitterness distrust pessimism, i think, even despair in america because of what happened in 2008 and nobody on wall street was

punished in a meaningful way. too big to fail. now we look at these anchormen who behave -- it is ethics 101. there's no gray area. what they did was so bad they should be punished. if they are not punished people say the same thing. it's all rigged. the rich people get away with everything. they are not on my side. they are playing for this or that. they are part of the 1%. why should i trust them? now, if somebody else comes along in news and convinces the audience that they are getting them the straight stuff, they are going to kill abc this year. >> i would argue it doesn't just hurt abc, it hurts all of us because they look at us as a bunch of insiders with politicians and maybe make too much money. next some on the left trying to squash free speech. not coming from a right winger but from kirsten powers.

and david letterman gets so many wet kisses as he bows out.

the title makes it sound like an attack from the right. kirsten powers' new book is called "the silencing." kirsten powers welcome. >> thank you. >> as somebody who spent a lot of time in democratic politics are you resigning from the left? >> no because i make a distinction between what i call the liberal left and what i consider your average democrat or another liberal who i may share the policy views of many of the liberal left. i don't share the view that it's -- that you should silence people who disagree with you. that's where i make the distinction. >> some of your friends and allies cannot be happy. you wrote a book on "an attempt

to silence the sin from the real world view". >> yes, there are some people unhappy but most of the people making the criticisms are not happy with the book. it's quite clear that it's not about how conservatives are being silenced. conservatives are some of the people evangelicals are some of them. a lot of the people that i interview are liberals themselves have been silenced or liberals very concerned about what they consider the silencing going on there are politicallypolitically politically agnostic. >> is this hard for you? >> did i think twice about writing this book? absolutely. but when i looked at the overwhelming evidence what i saw was a very serious cultural trend that i think is very damaging to the country and i think it's ill liberal. >> i have not been invited on a

variety of media outlets. >> you mentioned in the book, gloria steinem and others, what do they say? >> i recall a conversation with gloria where we were at an event and she basically leaned over and said you know why do you go on fox news? and i don't remember what my answer was but she just said it's coming at such a great cost. and i said you know i disagree. i think you should go on. i think people should get the whole picture of you and not the stereotype. >> and you wrote about the left war on fox news and megyn kelly, attracting looking blond anchor woman leads the pact at fox news. >> they were linking to a "new york times" profile of megyn kelly that did not in any way make that case about her. >> very positive. >> very positive about her as a journ lifts journalist. the fact that they took a quote out of the entire very positive profile shows that is what they are reducing her to. i don't think there's anything

wrong saying women are attractive. i have no problem with that. it's when they just dismiss somebody. and that's what i talk about with the liberal left. >> you originally saw conservatives and religious people as stereotypes and talk about what happened when george w. bush nominated his white house lawyer to the supreme court. you thought -- >> i had this conversation with somebody at fox news and isn't it great that he chose a woman? and i said she doesn't really count as a woman choice because she's conservative and an evangelical. and i'm very embarrassed to admit that now but that's a very commonplace view and i chronicle along with what i call the liberal feminist. people who care about dismissing women and saying that a conservative woman is not actually a real woman. >> some may say for a liberal to

write about how the left is killing free speech and you have a lot of examples in the book you've become more conservative a little bit while at fox we're trying to fit in more at fox? >> no. because it's not about ideology or whether you're a democrat or not. a group of people like i said i may agree with on policies. i just don't agree with the free speech. so it is purely about trying to encourage a robust debate and calling out people who i just don't consider -- first of all, they are not the majority. this is a very minority situation. >> if they had outside influence, it sounds to me like there is just a group over there and it sounds like you make the case that this mindset, not only do i disagree with you what you said but don't want you coming to my campus to -- >> no. it's absolutely very influential people and what i'm saying is that if you talk to most

democrats, just find a democrat on the street and tell them about this or even a liberal and tell them about the situation, the things i'm talking about in my book, they would say i'm not okay with that. on the campus you will see a handful of people who will get upset about something and make so much noise and then everybody sort of caves to this because they don't want to be seen as allowing somebody on campus who is creating -- making it unsafe for most students even though they want to be that person and that's what you see in the interviews that i do. that most people are saying we actually can handle this. >> kirsten powers, thank you for sitting down. >> thanks, howie. ahead on "media buzz," anderson cooper ends up on his

own "ridiculist." but first, how the benghazi e-mails were leaked.

here's a look at hillary clinton's private e-mails after state department officials released them friday afternoon. i checked in with james rosen, fox news' evening correspondent at the state department. james rosen welcome. >> thanks howie. good to be with you.

>> about a third of the e-mails were leaked to the "new york times." did that blunt the coverage of the state department release, make them seem a little less newsworthy? >> to some extent they did. perhaps there's been some speculation that perhaps it wasn't the benghazi committee that leaked the documents to "the new york times," as many people have suggested, but rather the clinton team to lessen the impact. there's no way to blunt the impact rather than dumping them out on a friday as you well know. >> on a friday on memorial day weekend. >> you bet. >> what was it like as a reporter to spend friday plowing through these e-mails? >> well it was tough. you had 296 e-mails to try and get through. they were released at 12:30 p.m. sharp on friday. eastern time. and so you had all of these reporters, hundreds of reporters

assaulting this website trying to get at them and trying to discern a little interesting nugget. >> you make it sound like the landing at normandy. >> well the pressure was on for sure. another interesting fact is that as i on friday was uploading nuggets that i was taking out of the documents occasionally on twitter, you even had interaction between reporters. i was the first to break the fact that the documents revealed that three days after the benghazi attack hillary clinton slept through an appointment where she was supposed to receive the president's daily brief, the most sensitive classified intelligence document that the intelligence community produces and alerted her staff to this fact by typing out an e-mail at 10:43 in the morning saying i just woke up so i missed dan, the presidential daily brief. i reported this and josh gersten of politico said well that was a saturday. the interaction among the media

as the story was unfolding. >> so benghazi has been pretty heavy investigated. is it possible that media expectations there would be some kind of smoking gun, e-mail perhaps inflated a bit too high? >> i'm not sure that there was an expectation, howie, principally because we learned that hillary clinton maintained all of her e-mails on a private server because she, of her own accord and by herself, had determined that roughly half of them were personal in nature. >> sure. >> so the working supposition of the media has been whatever we would see might have been subjected to the same kind of sanitizing process. >> we'll let you go. you're a big twitter aficionado. tweeting under his own name is this his strategy to engage with the folks or is it kind of a stunt? >> well i would be remiss if i didn't begin my answer by alerting your viewers to the

fact that you can all follow me on twitter @jamesrosenfnc. >> the president's new twitter handle @potus. very quickly, a comment from president clinton, asking for a friend if the @potus handle will stay with whomever becomes president. i think it's not going to make that much of a difference in terms of the communication strategy at the white house but follows along with lineage dating back to the last 50 60 years, politicians have been rushing to make use of the latest means of communication and often it's informal and outside of what we conventionally think is political. >> the reaction to the tweet is violent and racist in nature. remember it can be a very rough neighborhood. james rosen, thank you for joining us from the state

department. >> thank you, howie. after the break, david letterman getting a standing ovation from the media as he signs off but what if his impact wasn't all that positive?

showered david letterman with praise, way over the top on in my view during the runup to his final show. >> i'll be honest to you. it's beginning to look like i'm not going to get the tonight show. i want to thank the folks at home. people come up to me and say i've been watching you since your morning show and i always say have you thought about a complete psychological workout? the people who watch this show

there's nothing i can do to ever you. thank you for everything. you've given me everything. >> david zurawik is back with us. you say he infected the culture with irony and snark. >> it is a disease, young people that's all we have and we believe in nothing. seriousness of purpose is mocked. i think it's a really kind of cultural malaise and i think he's part of it. to blame can david letterman for it would bely ridiculous. it's all they have. no look at social media. it's filled with it in. >> you also say that the letterman show which went through a lot of changes over the years, giving baby boomer men a way to be silly or stupid and think they were cool. >> i can live with that. we all love our pets but i'll

tell you what really troubled me about letterman, politicians being able to bypass the press and go to the late night couch and talk directly to the people. i think that's a really bad development. you know it started on arsenio hall and clinton on the sax phone. >> i disagree with you. they all do it now, but with letterman who's liberal, he could have an intelligent political conversation with someone and i think that the current crop they're talented guys but jimmy fallon slow jams the news. they're not having those kinds of conversations. >> so he did it better than them. i'll grant you that and had a more intelligent conversation but this is what we're left with now but also with that i think in one sense it places the political discourse in an entertainment box instead of in the serious box of public

affairs. also it keeps unruly nasty reporters, honest reporters from asking hard questions. >> but it also lets politicians communicate with people who are not regular watchers of news. you have to go where the people are. >> i'm not saying it's all letterman but -- >> politicians should stay off and only talk to news anchors. i got you silence for a second. i think letterman has been a tadover praised when you consider for over these years he was number two to jay leno but others loved him. >> that was the result of this narrative after he didn't get the tonight show that dave is the hip, edgy daring guy. jay is the corporate hack who only says whatever is safe. you know what? david letterman is as much of a

corporate hack. anybody who fetegets a network show is not a radical. you're not going to take on capitalism and get a nighttime talk show. that was the difference. everybody did it. all the baby boomer male critics, and we were part of it that bought into that and aloved dave and mocked jay. i think it was unfair. >> it was not emotional but dave is not a weepy guy. you're not holding back. thanks for joining us. still to come your top tweets. avrnds anderson cooper tweets his way

yeaears of blood and pressure in combat for our u.s. men and woman women in iraq and now a bombshell from the obama administration. iraq's military a key movement to the islamic state savages, does not have the will to fight. we saw it in motion. thousands of iraqi fighters essentially dropping their weapons and running as the terror army captured the strategic arm strategic town of ramadi. iraq soldiers are unwilling to fight for their own country. >> what apparently happened was