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 vault was vaulted in the mainstream prominence for its coverage of the purse to rock war and as 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 in the multitude of characters without character let's find out start watching cogs. really. good looks like real that this would be. as good a part of it. but it looks like you know that i got. the

complete. with. this. week's. welcome aboard the watch of the heart by alice i rolled with a turbo and tabitha was to help us find the answers to whether or not c.n.n. 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 circuit is the one the only mattei. matt always a pleasure having you on a will will will start with this that 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 symptoms of the same thing which is that you know we have the sermon 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 that this mirror of the old media strategy you know some new york race is going to have the. standard traditional media method of hearing one republican quote with one democratic vote and adding this kind of very structure and balance to all political or boring with a distant third party third person voice that all who out of an old commercial strategy which was designed to try to appeal to the widest possible audience but. the strategies of the window i know companies are doing doctor are not going wide they're hunting for demographics and that's the commercial strategy you're going after liberals of 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 that's really just us this is just how media companies are

approaching the financial aspect of their control. now 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 it's the same sort of thing with the president it's like you're never going to be trusted or heard outside of your particular political niece so isn't it a pretty momentous shift from what we were always taught that good journalism is is 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 i obviously doing the kind of work that i do i'm very opinionated no way i write and i grew up actively

disbelieving in the traditional definition of objectivity that everybody's always taught in journalism school which is that you know the reason i don't believe in is because you know we're taught that. you know we should strive to be even this possible and seek the perfect middle but there is those that say you're always betraying your point of view and then you know in terms of how big you make a headline whether you want to start m.p.h. want to sixteen whether you're using you know alarmist alarmist language or not alarmist language there's always editorial choice involved so i never really believed in that aspect. of the 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 the model i mean 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 mark the listener make three major networks on the one hand and then you also have you might have hundreds or territory southern 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 but i think there is a place for that kind of stuff actually. 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. i think of exactly right i like that idea of kind of we've got to have like all pieces of the pie that's why you know like the may have 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. absolute good stuff there now let's look at c.n.n. as is playing you know 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 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 they're shoptalk it that goes on in any big media company and you know what with that producer 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 dirty little secret of the media right now is that everybody's making an enormous amount of money and it's a dollar trump you know the business that had been in

a profound inexorable decline for decades is now suddenly kind of on the rebound and everybody's doing pretty well you know from the biggest media companies newspapers even to. 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 got people thinking you know the way the way that or i he put it is. the appeal is that people are turning on the television every night and they're thinking that the fate of the nation is hanging in the balance the same way you do i'm on election night and this gets people to tune in the problem with that is. 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 audiences interested

you might miss a little you know eventually you might start to overhear things from from your sources and i think you know c.n.n. had a couple of minutes recently and that's probably that probably doesn't happen in a different atmosphere. that's got a body of a god matter we're going to say that they were like you know whether he resigns or is there paged or leaves office or whatever after the battle to raise. really going to see that day we're going to see newsrooms and editors and producers and c.e.o.'s going to miss startled probably. yeah i mean i wouldn't be surprised if that's true i mean you know you remember you remember the it was quote from les moonves last year to you know dollar terrible for america but great for business you know. the head of c.b.s. i was sure the executives are sitting there thinking this is the greatest thing ever and the whole truth is has achieved something good nobody has ever been able to achieve the news business use he's got to allow the news business to cut 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 to the news more than they ever have but they're consuming it in different when they're doing it for entertainment purposes almost in a way and that is it's amazing 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 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 this direction i was really worried about it and you're exactly right we picked on fox and me and we picked on the daily caller and the 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 look what happened when the republican media suddenly decided to trump was not appropriate candidate because there was a moment last year when remember when the national review published that opus with the twenty leading conservatives opposing trump including glenn beck. what happened republican audiences tuned out those people because they didn't trust them and why didn't they trust him because they knew that they weren't about anything but but a political fight 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 and other roles whether it 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 they

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 keep them honest integrity somewhere in here and don't politicize mean 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 what 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 in the same picture media companies they're there to give it up and so the whole thing is about consolidating. their target viewership and just keeping a hold on 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 in there 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 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 but matt thank you so much

for coming on once again mt everest rolling stone magazine always a pleasure to have you on there and 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 walks now to discuss their new book the terrorist state to watch the hawks.

in a revealing video c.n.n. has shown as many critics have claimed the network is more interested in the bottom line and a political agenda rather than reporting on real news we have asked c n n's evidence free war against donald trump is really at the expense of real journalism. speaking of failure there's a situation over. the private company where sixty or seventy billion dollars a lot of the radical executives are leaving or have left include the c.e.o. who are going to parachute in. the c.f.o. according to c.s. and so that i'm sure will be another multi hundred billion dollars he's already a billionaire so this could be a multi hundred billion dollars or for her regardless of where the company says

she's or not there's a lot of people speculating that the underlying core business model of goober is unsustainable and this company's going to go the way of enron as multi. billion dollars. here's what people have been saying about rejected in the us it actually does pull along. really show i go out of my way to lunch you know what it is that really packs a punch. is the john oliver of r t america is doing the same. apparently better than. to see people you've never heard of low down for the night the president of the world bank so very. seriously send us an e-mail. as the war on terror approaches that sixteenth anniversary we sometimes forget just

how shocking and unprecedented some of its darkest turns have been take for example the case of the beta the first so-called high value target captured by the cia following nine eleven i was a beta spent years traveling the cia secret prisons 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 guantanamo where he has ben ever sent to take us through these dark twists and turns we're joined earlier by john kerry aka an axiom a officer who led the capture of fathers of ada and just that hickman an ex military intelligence officer who took custody of him and working together and hickman recently published a convenient terrorist an all encompassing account of the abos the beta affair. joseph thank you very much for joining us talking about your new book club star i want to get over commitment 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 one publicized one like. john what about his capture that 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 cover 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. 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 fi 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 while this incredible joe said while while stationed at the guantanamo bay prison you saw firsthand the imprisonment abs that bedo with his. what is his treatment there typical 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 detainees at guantanamo bothered me as a baby was treated very different in the case where he was sent to erica we picked him up. from the airport it one time to. actually took custody of him we took him to a classified ok she was classified base most people in the media and called camp seven now. camp seven is really. 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

obtuse a bit of they had to keep them separate from the rest. 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 year already you would or would or these guys the worst the worst worst none of this makes sense of course i wasn't i was overlooked and they just went on with their briefing but none of it made sense he was treated very different. he was put in question. though it's interesting because. you know labeled as the number three man. cheney 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 it is completely not a terrorist and he's never been there was not a crow it never done anything wrong in his life. i want to ask you know it 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 lead where where where where there's a joe and i really really struggled to to make sure that the readers understood that was a beta situation and position was far more complicated than dick cheney or the abuse of data defense attorneys would have you have you believe that 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 beatle was the largest station for al qaeda even though he did not ever formally join the group and never pledged fealty to osama bin laden he was the group's logistician he ran the house of martyr safe house and to shower 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 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 a very graphic we can all agree on that well let me ask this you know so who is this guy who is obviously 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 a bit is a palestinian that was raised in saudi arabia he has a child here 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 beliefs he was always looking for for his place in life and i think when he went to afghanistan for a job he training. many many he went to india for college in the meant someone who was going for a job any training in afghanistan which is not uncommon in the middle east. for someone to do this he really thought he found his niche and thought he felt were

saudis down where he was supposed to be was. it was a mujahideen. and so beta is. i think one of the biggest things in the government why that is things the government really want to preserve beta at once they realize he wasn't a number three guy wasn't al qaida was he was. even as a rule judge that was good was. is very variable in urging to government really really want is rule directions more. 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 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 nest

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 and that will fresh breath an insect repellent and in an experiment thirty to 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 nasa that were clean of tickets no word yet of course if big tobacco executives are looking to replace show 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 should tell you all i love you i am very world winter and on top of the wall if people are watching all those hawks out there a number of great everybody. i see i don't want to see i'm still in the south that. goes

terrible you know. we might need six years but that's a lot of the old everybody. wants to know if you don't think that's a magnificent. somebody who's going to see my point. in saving me save us from people who read you know it's imprint of the in my my conformance they're welcome in grocery stores. interesting. that it was the food was dusty at least not a very enjoyable place to be in several of her friends make a told my son come to lose you the number one letter to be so amazingly someplace you go through. the punch. and they're nice people the mail over here we're very glad that the prices have gone here which of those little things will still learn something in the muslim world you either have to ship and therefore i don't think there's any interest in the movie any more big thank you.

in case you're new to the game this is how it works now the economy is built around corners corporations run washington washington media the media the. voters elected the businessman to run this country business equals power who must it's not business as usual it's business like it's never been done before . feel. for how. i. feel i i.

i. continue to pay paul.