butterfield for exactly when that show will air thank you for joining me on this edition of politic in thank you to larry king for letting me sit in this chair with a suspenders today remember we love hearing from you join the conversation larry's facebook page and as always you can share your thoughts on twitter by tweeting at kings things and using the hashtag politics i also invite you to join me on twitter at laura schwartz that's all for this edition of politicking. about your sudden passing i've only just learned you were yourself in taken your last wrong turn. your act caught up to you as we all knew it would i tell you i'm sorry i could see by right these last words in hopes to put to rest these things that i never got off my chest. i remember when we first met my life turned on each breath. but then my feeling started to change you talked about war like it was

again still some marshawn to view those that didn't like to question our arc and i secretly promised to never be like it's one does not leave a funeral in the same as one enters the mind it's consumed with this one to. speak to you now because there are no other takers. claimed that mainstream media has met its maker. your launching in order to merit got special report when it gets back here with me as well but basically everything that you think you know about civil society has broken down. there's always going to be somebody else one step ahead of the game if we should not be in the business of normalizing. we don't. people that think like

this on are. this is an incredibly situation. greetings and salutation. legendary journalist horace greeley the founder and editor of the famed new york tribune once declared fame is a babe or a popularity an accident and riches take wing is only one thing endures and that is character and character is what's been severely missing these days in the scorched earth carnival landscape that is modern journalism oh oh we have a lot we have a lot of characters but very little characters. take the strange mixed up case of the once revered twenty four hour cable news channel c.n.n. for example started by media mogul ted turner as the world's first twenty four hour

news network the channel has baldwins vaulted in the mainstream prominence for its coverage of the purse to rock war and has dominated waiting rooms in airports ever since by now i'm sure you've read heard and tweeted that c.n.n. has found itself in a pretty journalistically awkward place during the last few days thanks to right wing provocateurs overzealous c.e.o.'s and reporters frothing all over all things russia gate and c.n.n. carving the nutrients out of healthy journalism in the name in pursuit of rising ratings and you've got a twenty four hour cable news channel that too many appears to be just as shallow as the president they've been dead set on taking down but one could say that in the world of today's news outlets that this is not just a c.n.n. problem but of corporate news media in general. in rolling rolling stone journalist matt taibbi recently observed that instead of seeking out broad audiences by selling the miller coverage of phony balance big media companies today are

abandoning the hope of being credible in both directions and instead aggressively hunting for demographics but. it can journalism survive demographic hunting and the multitude of characters without character let's find out and start watching the hawks. were pretty. good the. real that this would be. as it were the plot of. the day like you that i got. with. this. week's. welcome aboard the watching the hawks diameter over the turf and tabitha was to help us find the answers to whether c.

and other mainstream news outlets can survive the new normal of ratings and demographics based journalism and just how culpable the new presidents when it hellery clinton's last had on this new trend we turn to one of the few truly independent thinkers in the field of journalism working today reporter and author of the recent book and same clown president dispatches from the twenty sixteen circus the one the only mattei. matt always a pleasure having you on a while we'll start with the style you touched on this in a recent article rolling stone more and more the news media is kind of shutting any pretense of objectivity and it's pretty much everything is going full partners as you can see this with maddow and olbermann on the left and breitbart man of the in the gang on the right. i think for most of us who you know tragically followed news media as a good part of our lives we've seen this building you know since the sincere imus of the c. of fox but barely i think if we're see that this pitch can we really attribute all

of this just to donald trump the loss of clinton and you know russia. you know i think this trump and this are both so terms of the same thing which is that. you know we have the moment towards polarization in this country you know in the old days somebody like donald trump could never been elected because. candidate one. he's had to conquer the center and that's what both political parties from looking for they were looking for somebody who had quote unquote crossover appeal. but now it doesn't work anymore and this mirrored the old media strategy you know some media creation went out the. standard traditional media method of hearing one republican quote with one democratic vote and having this kind of very structured balanced all political or whoring with

a distant third person voice that all who read an old commercial strategy which was designed to try to appeal to the widest possible audience but. the strategy is out the window and now companies aren't doing that they're not going wide they're hunting for demographics and that's the commercial strategy you're going after liberals over here or conservatives over here libertarians over here and that's how you make your money so it's not it's not really a political thing necessarily it's just us this is just how media companies are approaching the financial aspect of their profession. now to james o'keefe who made this sort of sting video on c.n.n. always seems to run into this issue and some on the left face the same accusations that you have to decide whether you're a journalist or you're an operative if you're reporting on events with a very clear bias like he is or some other people in the business it might endure you to your base but you're never going to be trusted or heard that same sort of

thing with the president it's like you're never going to be trusted or heard outside of your particular political least so isn't it a pretty momentous shift from what we were always taught that good journalism is is at mete out good journalism tried to try to reach as many readers or consumers as possible and that challenging your reader or their the viewer is the right thing to do yeah absolutely i mean i think look i don't i don't agree with. doing the kind of work that i do i'm very opinionated nowhere right and i grew up actively disbelieving in the traditional dustbin definition of objectivity everybody's always taught in journalism school which is that you know the reason to believe in it is because you know we're taught that. you know we should strive to be as even as possible and see this is a perfect middle but there is no such thing you're always betraying your point of view and you know in terms of well how big you make a headline and whether you put a story m.p.h.

one piece sixteen. whether you're using you know what alarmists alarmist language or not alarmist language there's always editorial choice involved so i never really believed in that aspect there was. video. i always thought it was really more of a salesman than anything else but what's happening now is that. even the most traditional mainstream companies are moving away from that model i mean in my in my view of the media is that it works best when you have a mix of things when you have that kind of distant detached just the facts ma'am kind of reporting that used to use them are the main three major networks on the one hand and then you also have you might wonder thompson or tara terry southern or tom wolfe on the other hand and even there's a place for people like james o'keefe you know i don't love his politics but i think there is a place for that kind of stuff actually i don't but what's interesting now is that

sort of everybody is becoming opinionated in the end the idea that you you shouldn't strive for objectivity that's now becoming mainstream you know i think you're exactly right i like that idea of kind of you got to have like all pieces of the pie that's why you know like to me it's like that's the same thing i like in my politics is give me as many different ideas for as many different parties as possible because i think when you put them all together you might have some good stuff there now let's look at c.n.n. as playing you know it clearly from the videos we've seen in all that at least amongst the rank and file or whatever you want to say is that you know they kind of think a lot of what they do is pretty much based on play we're playing to the ratings so is this play for ratings. you know if. i want to get your thoughts on that and your thoughts on you know c.n.n. is kind of current predicament you know chasing down the russia gate story as is pretty much put them in a very weird place but will it have any effect on them long term. well i worry about it for them i mean you know not not that the fate of c.n.n.

really keeps me awake at night but. obviously there shoptalk it that goes on in any big media company and you know what that producer said is that i'm usually you know people gossip amongst themselves and i've probably said a thing or two about the motives of my bosses but i think what was interesting about that is that you know there's there's. the the dirty little secret of the media right now is that everybody's making an enormous amount of money as adults from you know a business that had been in a profound in an extra ball decline for decades is now suddenly kind of on the rebound and everybody's doing pretty well you know from the biggest media companies to newspapers even to. to you know small independent outlets and in terms of the big television networks the russia story has been very very successful for a lot of these networks it's got people thinking you know the way the way that you

put it is the appeal is that people are turning on the television every night and they're thinking you know the fate of the nation is hanging in the balance the same way you do an election night and this gets people to tune in the problem with that is that this puts an enormous downward pressure on reporters to come up with the scoops to keep that up and what happens the reporters i know that you know working in the business if you feel that pressure to come up with something to keep the audience's interest you met you might miss a little you know a you might start to overhear things from from your sources and i think you know c.n.n. has had a couple industry recently and that's probably the probably doesn't have been a different happens here i think. it's kind of body is it's like god matter we're going to say that they were like you know whether he resigns or as it was impeached or leaves office or whatever happens about every really going to see that day we're going to see newsrooms of editors and producers and c.e.o.'s going why have missed

startled problem. yet. you know i wouldn't be surprised if that's true i mean you know you know if you remember the it was a quote from les moonves last year to you know dollar trumps terrible for america but great for business you know. the head of c.b.s. i'm sure the executives are sitting there thinking this is the greatest thing ever the whole truth has has achieved something good nobody has ever been able to achieve the news business use he's got. allowed the news business to code into the profit margin margins of the entertainment business and this is previously unthinkable especially when you look at the statistics you read all the time the confidence in the news media is that all time low that people believe us less than they ever have but they're tuning in more than me ever have and so what does that tell you that they're consuming media into the news more than they ever have but they're consuming it in different way they're doing it for entertainment purposes

almost in a way and that is it's an amazing thing for the news business they must be really excited about it yeah it does seem weird it seems very strange to be you know people hate watch they hate wires you know the republican debates they hate watched everything alice and i feel like that's kind of what we're doing now but giving up that objectivity isn't the mainstream media in these mainstream news outlets also shooting themselves in the foot on that put on the public trust because why would the general public trust a c.n.n. or a new york times if they continue to sacrifice this integrity just for pushing ratings or openly for a political narrative i mean we used to lock reversal leslie fox news for the exact kind of reporting that we're seeing now today on c.n.n. and that's n.b.c. . i mean yes i agree with you i started to say this last year last summer because i started to see things moving in the stir action and i was really worried about it and you're exactly right we picked on fox and me we picked on the

daily caller and. washington times and and all that all those outlets for being completely tilted towards this politicize you and overtly targeting a demographic by feeding them news they know they knew their audience like. that but the the end result of that and we saw this last year with the republican race that you if you do that long enough even your own audience after a while begins the suspect that you're not really on the level and we saw us again with trump but what happened when the republican media suddenly decided to trump was not an appropriate candidate because there was a moment last year when remember when the national review published that openness with the twenty leading conservatives opposing trump including glenn beck you know what happened republican audiences tuned out those people because they didn't trust them and why didn't they trust them because they knew that they weren't about

anything but but a political line about business and that's that's what i worry about the media has to be only about one thing and that's about getting stuff right if we start to you know try on other roles whether it's this is about politics whether it's about making money then we're good we get out of our comfort zone and bad things always happen to be the only way we retain trust of people is what is if we make difficult choices just kind of stick to the truth of things no matter how painful that because. you know i think i want to finish up and i'll ask you you know where a where do you see this trend heading and before those out there who you know whether journalists or news consumers you know who kind of would rather have what we were talking about earlier you know kind of like give me a little bit of everything but but keeps them honest integrity somewhere in here and don't politicize me and don't try to sell me you know where do you see where we're going now and where can most people you know what can we build a kind of keep the plight and bring news back to where it should be. i think it's

going to be very very difficult i mean we would. the problem is the financial incentives don't run in the right way anymore and the companies now don't see that there's no way they're going to get everybody the same way the politicians understand that there is no message that's going to appeal to both the left and the right now people are so set in their ways that this is this is entirely a competition about turnout you know on the political side and about energizing your base and they don't even try to think about you know conquering the middle that's just out of the picture now and it's a picture media companies they're there to give it up and so the whole thing is about consolidating. their target viewership and just keeping the holes in them for as long as possible and so that i really worry but the only endo is that there's probably going to be a new generation of reporters you come up and it's probably going to start small turnout media and they're going to be about something different and a bit i'll bit

a name that you're going to start to see an exodus of audiences that are going to depart these big networks and they're going to start moving towards these other voices if you are more credible just because they're not about you know politics and they're not about just throwing red meat to a demographic and i hope that that's the case that there's a new generation coming because of politicized media is a characteristic i'm basically every. no no no i lived in a couple of them and it's it would be terrible for the united states to adopt that model i couldn't agree with you more really absolutely matt thank you so much for coming on once again matt turtles rolling stone magazine always a pleasure to have you on very take care. as we go to break watchers don't forget to let us know what you think of the topics we've covered on our facebook and twitter pages and see our poll shows that r t v dot com coming up we welcome former cia agent and torture whistleblower john kiriakou and former military intelligence officer officer joseph pick with into the hawks now to discuss their new book the

convenient terrorist you don't want to miss list stay tuned. so watching the hawks . live. rejected tonight is a comedy gold and not defect by the corporate media. would you go after the poor peroration that just lawyer live profit over people at every turn. over data it's not for me it's like medicine it's like a cancer to all the stress that the news but still under redacted tonight is a show where you can go to cry from laughing about the stuff that's going on in the

world as opposed to just regular crying we're going to find out what the corporate mainstream media is not telling you about how we're going to filter it through some satirical comedic lenses to make it more digestible that's what we do every week hard hitting radical comedy news like redacted tonight is where it's at. i'm tom hartman and i'll give you what the mainstream media can't the big picture. a little. and when question more find what you're looking for this little the little dog. will go deeper investigate and debate all so you can get the big picture. listen.

as the war on terror. sixteenth anniversary we sometimes forget just how shocking and unprecedented some of its darkest turns have ben take for example the case of the beta the first so-called high value target captured by the cia following nine eleven abu zubaida spent years traveling the cia's secret prison circuit and went through a variety of torture methods including waterboarding sleep deprivation forced hunger and nudity also beatings in two thousand and six he was transferred to a special section of the entente of mo where he has been ever since to take us through these dark twists and turns we're joined earlier by john kerry aco an axiom a officer who led the capture of authors of ada and just of hickman and ex military intelligence officer who took custody of him and guantanamo working together kiriakou and hickman recently published the convenient terrorist an all encompassing account of the abos a beta affair. thank you very much for joining us talking about your new book let's

start i want to commit terrorist as a book because i don't rarely do we get this chance where we can kind of see both the capture. of a war on terror suspect especially a controversial publicized one like. john what about his capture of anything in his capture wells with you and the events surrounding his capture typical for the war on terror no frankly they were not typical what was typical was we would break down the door of a place that we thought was an al qaeda safe house there would be one or two people inside they would give up immediately we would cuffed them take them outside and eventually get around to interviewing them. i mean it was completely totally different we could not narrow his locations down to any fewer than fourteen possible sites and so we had to fly in a huge team half f.b.i. half cia we worked with pakistani military authorities and we hit all fourteen

sites simultaneously at two o'clock in the morning we ended up capturing we weren't allowed to say in the book the cia would allow us to say exactly how many people were captured but it was many dozens of people so that was highly unusual what was even more unusual though is you know we were very specific with our pakistani friends that we had to take him alive and as soon as he climbed to the roof of his safe house to try to jump to the roof of the neighboring house to escape the pakistanis just opened fire on him and shot him three times with an a k forty seven they shot him in the five the growing in the stomach and the doctor that night who saved his life told me that he had never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived but he was a strong young man and he pulled through world is incredible. just so while while stationed at the guantanamo bay prison you stop or

a stand at the imprisoned man as that bedo with his. what is his treatment there typical far for prisoners at guantanamo bay at and at the time as a former marine as an army and army sergeant did did the treatment of the beta bother you at all well the treatment of all the detainees in guantanamo what bothered me was a baby was treated very different in the case where he was sent to air to we picked him up. from the airport one time to the d.o.d. actually took custody of him we took him into a classified case in a classified base most people in the media and called camp seven. now. camp seven is totally. you know off limits to any other person known to detainees separates him from the other detainees and one of the strangest one of the things that really caught me in

a briefing was they told us that they had to keep these fourteen high value detainees that arrived on september ninth two thousand and six one of them being observation of they had to keep them separate from the rest of seanie population because if they were in with the other detainees population the other sunni population want to kill them. and i brought up the question in the briefing they said well if we have the worst of the worst down here already you would or would or these guys the worst the worst words none of this makes sense and of course i was i was overlooked and they just went on with their briefing but none of it made sense he was treated very different in the fact that he was putting them in a classified book ation. you know it's interesting because. you know labeled as the number three. trainee in kind of his ilk and that side of the equation on the converse lee a lot of activists and humanitarian rights people say that he's completely not a terrorist and he's never. never done anything wrong in his life. i want to ask

you in your opinion john where does a beta actually fall on the spectrum of what the one side says is number three man is the completely clean where where where where there's a joe and i really really struggled to to make sure that the readers understood that it was a beta situation and position was far more complicated than dick cheney or the defense attorneys would have you have you believe it was a bit it was not the number three and that was just simply not true i don't think that cia officers and white house policymakers were lying at the time that they said he was number three i think the intelligence was so bad that they just didn't know and they made an assumption that turned out to not be true on the other hand the defense attorneys would have you believe that this poor poor man was mistakenly

captured that the intelligence was so faulty that his life was essentially ruined for something that he didn't do and that's just not true either it's something down the middle i was a bit of was the largest station for al qaeda even though he did not ever formally join the group and never pledged fealty to some of bin laden he was the group's logistician he ran the house of martyr safe house and push our he opened and ran the. al qaeda training camps in southern afghanistan if you were an al qaeda fighter and you wanted to go home you needed a passport maybe a ticket was a bit it was the guy so. he was certainly involved but he was not the monster that the white house wanted to merican to believe the crime never matched the polish never met up with i mean i think we can all agree on that well let me ask this sad you know so who is this guy who is

a bad why why why do you guys think that the cia the administration and the powers that be at the time just became so obsessed with him what was the value. i was in but it is a palestinian that was raised from saudi arabia he as a child he and he even as a as a young teenager he started questioning the status quo he started questioning you know the how he was treated as a palestinian living in saudi arabia he started questioning how the people palestinians were treated by the israelis he was always he was a good kid he was a smart kid but he was he was rebellious and and had a lot of believes he was always looking for for his place in life and i think when he went to afghanistan for jihadi training. many many he went to india for college in the met someone who was going for a job any training in afghanistan which is not uncommon in in the middle east. for

someone to do this he really thought he found his niche and thought he felt were study found where he was supposed to be was was a mujahideen. and so is. i think one of the biggest things that the government more than do you since you don't really water comes a believe it once you realize you wasn't a number three it was in the cards was she was. as a rule judge that this was names of people is very valuable and i seem to government really really want is ruled out soon. as we all learned from watching traffic parklife finds a way and now it appears that nature has found a way to recycle old cigarette butts in a recent published study researchers at the national autonomous university of mexico have discovered the birds in particular house finches are using the

cigarette butts to line their nests in response to ticks and other eco parasites while birds living in close contact with humans have long been known to use our trash for nasty building it wasn't until recently that when it comes to cigarettes there may indeed be a math aid to the madness nicotine has always been at batu all fresh breath an insect repellent and in an experiment on thirty two house finch nests research discovered that the nests where ticks were introduced the birds were more likely to add cigarette butts to the lining as opposed to the nass that were clean of tickets no word yet of course if big tobacco executives are looking to replace joe camel with tweety bird. try to find a way world for the better but all right that was our show earlier today remember everyone in this world were not told beloved enough sure to tell you all about you i am i roll over the top and on top of the wall if people are watching all those hawks out there a number great night everybody. i

welcome to are exactly the. camp tonight i've got my friend jim we do a war on the show and you know it's the jimmy dollar show on the young turks network and there's a fellow political comedian and he's on a bashing really loud mouth and opinionated and brilliant and funny throughout the election season he was a bold voice for change and for sinking the corporate democrat ship that does nothing but drive this nation into the open arms of new year old liberal

destruction i think you'll enjoy our conversation i disagree with him on almost nothing but that didn't stop him from getting righteously angry during our talk enjoy. everything to do this hey leave my pleasure. so you know i can't give away this long to do this for your show has blew up over the past two years for obvious reasons do you like anything you know you've been a political comedy a long time do you feel that anything about you has as change or is it really just the country has come around finally started giving and you were there talking about it. i think it's the latter i think that the country is finally coming around to what neo liberalism is really really is and that it's infected both political parties are complete our politicians are neo liberals that america so what it has happened i think recently with the election of trump neo liberalism somebody else i heard made this analogy it's like we're the frog in the pot and you.