howard kurtz starts out truth and fiction when we come whoooo.hen it comes to travel, i sweat the details. late checkout... ...down-alternative pillows... ...and of course, price. tripadvisor helps you book a... ...hotel without breaking a sweat. because we now instantly... ...search over 200 booking sites ...to find you the lowest price... ...on the hotel you want. don't sweat your booking. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. >> ed: we hear a all the time of the split in the republican party, but tonight, there is growing divide in the dash take a look at this quote from dick durbin taking on his past. "this is one of the first time since he has been democratic leader that there has been a significant split in the caucus, and it is inevitable, it is awkward. the rebellion led by elizabeth warren was in full display today is the senate passed the biggest listening of regulation since the economic crisis. joining us now is democratic strategist isaac wright and associate opinion editor at "the washington times" radio talk show host

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i'm howard kurtz and this is "mediabuzz." [♪] howie: when the president abruptly fired h.r.cmaster and replaced him with john bolton, he didn't not was happening until shortly before he appeared on fox. reporter: the way you spoking with russia was more hawkish. >> the important thing is what the president says and what advice i give him. howie: joining us now to analyze the coverage. coverage. guy benson, susan ferrechio, animal * who runs georgetown university's understand student of politics. animait's five minutes from stag an apocalyptic war. the open mention, porn stars, hookers. what's interesting about bolton's resume. we see them focusing on on his job description as being a fox news contributor. john bolton held two positions prior to that. he's someone who is deeply informed on foreign policy issues. we should be acknowledging the qualifications he has for the job. you and i may say he's too hawk i shall but that's different. howie: the "new york times" calls him the most of radical foreign policy team in modern memory. mo: the "new york times" description i don't

i'm howard kurtz and this is media buzz live from washington. hope hicks who i first met in the first week of donald trump's campaign stunned washington by re-signing. a communications director whose voice few americans have heard. president trump: she is a little shy, but she is really talented. hope, say a couple words. >> merry christmas, everyone, and thank you, donald trump. howie: conflicting accounts of what she said on capitol hill. mollie hemingway, and ed henry and capri cafaro. mollie, losing hope, very clever. hope hicks who stayed behind the scenes is being cast by the press as the latest sign of utter chaos at the white house. molly: there seems to be a cyclical nature to the stories. the press every few weeks or every few months how things are spiraling out of control. a couple of months ago it was donald trump's mental health that was in question. clearly this white house is different from other white house. but i don't think anonymous sources have been serving our journalists very well. not only because they frequently turn out

howard kurtz joins me now.pted to call these remarks deplorable but that would be too easy very reminiscent of the hillary clinton gaffe during the campaign. this goes further. she is entitled to criticize president trump all she wants. now she is credit sizing his voters saying the people who voted for trump in what she calls the middle of the country, they are opposed to blacks getting rights. they are opposed to you women getting jobs. so she is basically not very careful language a bunch of yahoos and racists and misoggists. i'm really struck as she continues to mitigate the election that she is going to make part of her legacy that she is attacking half the country that voted for this president. >> melissa: i watched the whole thing in length and i was shocked. at first i thought it was a fake video or something because it's so outrageous. when i watched again she insulted everyone including people like myself saying that white women, white married women especially voted for president trump because their h

i'm howard kurtz. it was a friday night media bombshell when jeff sessions acting on an internal doj report fired andrew mccabe hours before he was set to retire. >> it's totally clear and upsetting and disturbing that the president has been gunning for andrew mccabe since the campaign. this friday night massacre is a little concerning. >> this could be the beginning of something great for the country. namely we clean out the under brush in our intelligence agencies. if andrew mccabe lied as the investigation concluded, that's a problem. howie: . joining us to analyze the tumultuous week. mollie hemingway, sarah a westwood and juan williams. you have the president of the united states publicly ripping mccabe for months calling for his ouster. commentators can say he deserved to be fired. mollie: what's important is that the media tell this story accurately. the office of professional ethics found he should be fired. he was involved in many investigations that trump takes personally, but this is the off

i'm howard kurtz and this is "mediabuzz." the state department told reporters thursday the u.s. was not going to talk to the kim re jean. but the president said he'll accept north korea's offer to talk. >> the press for two hours is going, this is fantastic, this is amazing. a certain anchor on cnn, fake as hell, cnn, said this is really something. he would go down as a truly great president if this happened. nbc is worse than cnn. then i get up in the morning, same people, they are saying not that big a deal. anybody could have done it. obama could have done it. howie: joining me to analyze the coverage. gillian turner, mollie hemingway, senior editor at "the federalist" and a fox news contributor. and adrienne elrod. gillian i have heard the meeting shouldn't take place. i haven't heard anybody say the meeting is not a big deal. gillian: the reason the media is all over this because nothing make for a good story other than a nuclear summit. especially when it's between one world leader and one dictator' who have been treating jabs the last year. the administration's tone has c

joining me now is fox news media analyst howard kurtz. howard, thank you so much for talking to us.o the author of media madness. in case you haven't read it, you better. donald trumps the press and the war over the truth is that okay a plug. >> i like that. hope hicks is in the book by the way. >> julie: great. let me ask you first of all because the media is fascinated by this woman. "the washington post" says that silence made hope hicks intriguing recent article inside hicks romances between rob porter and corey lewandowski. why do you think the mainstream media is so fascinated with this woman? >> i first dealt with hope hicks the first week of the campaign when the campaign was her and corey lewandowski. she is very quiet behind the scenes but very effective. channels donald trump. knows how to read his mood. she delivers the bad news. because she is not out there on television. she doesn't have a twitter account. there is this sort of air of mystery that's developed around her i think what it says is that she doesn't care at all about her own image and devoted to the presiden

let me ask howard kurtz. how on are you supposed to cover all these things in such a short time?owie: you are covering jared and ivanka and hope, ban all of a sudden he's imposing gun regulations and he named the campaign manager for 2020. it's a constant churn much news. kennedy: where should the press be reporting first? >> i always say let's focus on the agenda, things that affect people's lives. howie: it is a central feature of the trump white house and you can't ignore it. but on economics and this gun issue, i don't think the president has gotten much credit from the mainstream media for trying to pull together something from both parties on the gun issue. i think if i had to defaulty only any of thoilts would be those issues. kennedy: what is the danger of these stories getting lost in the shuffle? >> it is a bit of a chaotic environment. the president thrives on chaos. he always wants to have the narrative revolve around him. when he's doing 15 things at once, he's dominating every hour of every news cycle like he did in the campaign. and on the guns and mental health an

howard kurtz, our media critic is here, he's going to weigh in. it's all about trust and transparency. trust that we do what's right for our clients, without the constraints imposed by the traditional brokerage houses. transparency in the way we're compensated. our philosophy is one of service, not sales... that's why i'm independent. charles schwab is proud to support more independent financial advisors and their clients than anyone else. visit findyourindependentadvisor.com at crowne plaza, we know business travel isn't just business. there's this. a bit of this. why not? your hotel should make it easy to do all the things you do. which is what we do. crowne plaza. we're all business, mostly. . trish: a lot of chaos at the white house, apparently. at least if you listen to the mainstream media these days. and there have been a lot of high-profile departures, certainly, as of late. but, but, the firing of va secretary david shulkin is not necessarily part of that chaos, right? if you're going to call it chaos. because he was fired because he spen

tonight fox news media analyst and host of fox's "media buzz" howard kurtz has a recap of this stormy daniels interview. >> this is not a "me too." >> some journalists say that the actress failed to prove her allegations and her lawyer, michael avenatti, through criticism on the morning shows for overhyping the 60 minutes appearance. avenatti tweeted a picture of a cd, implying his client might have photos or texts. she refused to discuss. daniel said that in 2011 when she was going to tell her tale to a magazine, a man confronted her in a parking lot and told her to leave trump alone and forget the story. >> he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said "it's a beautiful little girl. it would be a shame if something happened to her mom." >> daniels said she can't identify the man i didn't go the police. daniel said she excepted it $130,000 nondisclosure deal from trump attorney michael: because she didn't want the story to come out. she said she later felt pressured, as recently as january, into releasing statements denying any affair. >> the exact sentence used was "they can m

. >> reporter: this is howard kurtz, defense attorney, and here's what he thought about the murder caseis client, brad cooper. >> you need actual evidence to convict and actual evidence is something that they did not have. >> reporter: no physical evidence, said defense attorneys kurtz and robert trankle to tie brad to nancy's murder. the awful scenes from the cooper marriage the jury heard no witness from either side had seen brad physically violent toward nancy. for the $300 a week allowance there was a reason, the defense argued. remember the couple had serious debt. the defense offered contrasting scenes of the cooper marriage from another set of friends. >> people who had known the couple for years, did not jump on this bandwagon to paint this as an abusive relationship. >> reporter: remember that "i hate brad" day, the day the prosecution said the marriage hit its boiling point. on that very day, said laura hiller, nancy was making plans for saturday night, the day she disappeared. >> she wanted my husband and i to come over and play sequence with her and brad. >> was that a game

howard kurtz joins us. said she kept quiet, but she denied that affair had happened. >> she lied repeatedly. that's one of the take aways from this interview. in fact, the very much hyped interview failed to live up to the sky high expectations. she described a one time consensual sexual encounter with donald trump a dozen years ago. she said this about a parking lot conversation about a man in 2011 when she was going to tell her tale to a magazine. >> i was in a parking lot going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. a guy walked up on me and said to me, please jump along, forget the story. he looked at my daughter and said, a beautiful little girl. would be a shame if something happened to her mom. he was gone. >> but daniels said she can't identify the man and didn't go to the police making the account impossible for others to verify. she all told anderson cooper that she felt pressure into releasing statements denying an affair as recently as january. as the sound bite you played makes clear, she

media madness author howard kurtz joins us now. tial, but i wonder was impartiality written into the agreements they signed to get into the airports in the first place? >> i'm sure it had nothing to do with editorial content. these are business deals. stuart, i believe in the free market. if cnn wants to pay hundreds of thousand of dollars, to rent these tvs like renting a billboard in times square. i don't have a problem with it and another company can come along and replace cnn. stuart: airports, could say, we better be fair and balanced, we bring in somebody else. they could do that couldn't they? >> i think you would be a very effective spokesman to make that argument. stuart: cnn is supposed to be impartial. i'm a founder of cnn, lou dobbs and i got the whole thing going. we were the first to broadcast from income, 1980 june. we covered the news. that is what we did. i don't think that is true of cnn any longer. how but, do you? >> there is no question cnn moved sharply in an anti-trump direction. that has been a good financial

leslie marshall syndicated talk show radio host and fox news media analyst howard kurtz.allies who feel this is the wrong thing. a lot of push back from capitol hill there are some allies of the president's both on the republican side and democratic side. who say they have been waiting for this. >> well, i think a lot of us have been waiting for this in the sense that the president made obvious during the campaign that this is what he wanted to do. so, noble should be particularly surprised by his actions. i think what is surprising is the president's language. you don't typically hear a president argue for raising tariffs by announcing that he is starting a trade war and then trying to spin his trade war as a good thing for the country. i think if you read what the president tweeted this morning. there is no polite way to put this. he doesn't understand how trade works. and he is talking about it as if it's an $800 billion loss on a ledger. that's not how trade works. we have got a long history of this. go back to adam smith. did you go back before. i think that the othe

. >> sandra: here now howard kurtz is host of media buzz. his lost confession. i have been trying to get myself worked up about it, sandra. i feel like most people i'm sick of all things o.j. there was a lot of revulsion more than a decade ago over this book and television project. in which in creepy fashion kind of wink, wink simpson apparently is going to say if i committed the murders, here's how i would have done it. and there was so much public pressure and also some revulsion here at fox news that fox's parent company decided not to go forward with the project. now 2018. he served a long prison term for burglary. i think most people are ready to move on. >> sandra: there was an exchange of words that he used that kind of alluded to him making a confession in that interview, right, howie. >> absolutely. look, most of america, despite the results of that criminal trial believes that o.j. simpson, former football hero is a double murderer. it's a little unsettling to hear him sort of dance around it and not just come out and confess which legally he is though

what does howard kurtz say? you have a strange expression on your pace face, howard.el about this. what do you think about the president saying that nasty stuff about chuck todd? >> i say good morning, first. i say that was mistake. that is undignified, punching down by name with sunday show host vulgarity you had to bleep, i played it on my air, i didn't bleep it. the president of the united states has every right to hit back against chuck todd if he thinks they reported something unfair or untrue but just to call names, tom brokaw got on the twitter and said very classy, explain that to your children. the irony here, as i reported in media madness, president trump had relationship with chuck todd. had them over to the white house for off the record sessions with the president yelling at chuck, chuck yelling back. they settle down to have a civil conversation. just to be cursing him i think is not a good look for the president. stuart: i want to talk to you about vice president mike pence is calling for a public apology from joy behar after she mocked his faith. shou

howard kurtz talks to anthony scaramucci who always has a lot to say about everything, about the coveragerex tiller's firing and the president's battles with the press. eboni: two new developments righted to the russia investigation. michael flynn is talking about his indictment and new text messages that reveal fbi agent peter strzok had a personal relationship with a judge who presided over former national security advisor michael flynn's case in the russia probe. the judge did eventually recuse himself. gillian turner has many more details for us right now. gillian? >> that's right, eboni. president trump's first national security advisor michael flynn is back in the spotlight for the first time since he pled guilty for lying to the fbi last december. he is talking about his indictment on the campaign trail while stumping for a california congressional candidate. >> i'm not here to complain about who has done me wrong. [laughter] or how unfair i have been treated or how unfair the entire process has been. you know, it is what it is and my previous statement stand for themselves. >> thi

eastern, howard kurtz will talk exclusively with jenny willoughby, one of the ex-wifes of rob porter.e'll talk about the media coverage of the story and as the press moves on. mark levine talks to president benjamin netanyahu. and coming up, we'll go live, from ohio to pittsburgh. where president trump is holding a rally. we'll hold it in its entirety beginning at 7 p.m. eastern. as congress works to fix the broken immigration system and attorney general jeff sessions battles california over its sanctuary laws. we'll talk to a border state congressman trying to work out a solution. and fallout from president trump's brand new tariff on steel and aluminum. we'll talk to a business leader who says protecting these vital industries is key to bringing jobs back to america. . >> by unfair foreign trade practices leading to the shuttered plants and mills, the laying off of millions of workers, and the decimation of entire communities. and that's going to stop. thank you. ♪ imagine if the things you bought every day... earned you miles to get to the places you really want to go. with the uni

the author of, "media madness, donald trump, the press and the war oaf the truth, our very own howard kurtzwill be a media darling despite what he did to hillary clinton's campaign? >> you can place a lot of money on that bet, stuart. i'm looking forward to president trump's review on amazon of the book, zero stars. it will sell a lot of copies for this reason. there is a big anti-trump audience out there that would love to hear comey's story. plus he will be on every television show in creation. you know, we haven't heard much from him, you mentioned that, a few tweets here and there, so what he has to say, anything he has to say will be news. his firing triggered this whole sequence of events landing us with the mueller investigation which the president was attacking this morning. stuart: i believe at the top of the amazon list at the moment for preorders. it comes out april 17th, right? >> proceeded orders are a big deal in the book world. stuart: money in the bank, aren't they? i want to talk to you about msnbc's andrea mitchell. here is what she tweeted about andrew mccabe who just had

howard kurtz of fox news is writing about it at foxnews.com with the headline -- stormy weather, canrs attempt to silece the point star hurt the president? he writes -- website,m the fox news the story online. first new york times, the foreign president -- the fi with t photo of the president -- she writes, the stormy episode is exactly the type of embarrassing episode that trump denied, denied he knew women who would accuse him, playing the media angle to kill stories, getting the help of rents and employees to pay off women. the times have changed dramatically. they tried again to bury the story, same we have addressed this extensively. i have nothing else to add that that will not modified the millions of women who find the president's behavior unacceptable. damien from port saint lucie, florida, good morning. caller: how are you today? host: good morning. citizen ofm just a the u.s. and all i really care about is the president does well. i understand there are a lot of things that happened in a person's past, some good and bad but as long as we can keep the country moving forward