with me now, jim cavanaugh, retired atf agent and former hostage negotiator. jim, i'd say it's good to see you but generally when i see you, it's talking about pretty terrible news. this is no exception. what can be done in order to prevent or at least mitigate this sort of thing? is a federal law something that can help this? or is this something that needs to be treated incident by incident? >> well, i think a lot can be done. let's look, first, katy, at what the mayor's done. he stood up new hate crime task force new the nypd. the federal government could. the president, the attorney general, could do some big steps. look. i worked on these guys all my life. i've arrested the nazis and the clan planting bombs at jewish temples. commanded cases where guys were going to shoot up jewish schools and kill people. infiltrated the things with our agents. we fought them for years. they could throw atf back in the fight real heavy. that would really help. they could give the fbi what they need to do it. they could even enlist special agents at homeland security and t

joining me now is jim cavanaugh. do the details of the attack suggest to you that this was random?just the behavior of the suspect. he lived 40 miles or so west of the attack location and he tried to escape into new york city across the george washington bridge. he came with a machete, tried to get into the rabbi's house and tried to get into the synagogue on a night hanukkah is being is celebrated. it has all the planning, purpose, travel, you know, this is a guy probably deep-seeded in hatred. i can't see any other logical motive for it right now. that's what itas at a rabbi's house. it was a private event. at one point some 50 people were there. is there any way to kind of defend a situation like this? i know we've been ramping up security during hanukkah week, but something like this? >> well, right, kendis. it's a change in your mindset, physician of all. all leaders of house of worship, no matter the denomination, have to put skurs in their mindset. you lock the outside door. you have members watching the outside who are outside watching that people can't just walk up with a

jim cavanaugh, do i still have you with me?ise you, what courtney just said? it happens now two hours ago, and the navy doesn't yet know or they're not yet reporting the number of people injured. is that just a precaution, they want to be sure they're reporting it accurately, or does it seem strange to you that they wouldn't know the number this far out from the shooting? >> well, it's chaos on these things when you get there. i mean, just like you experience as a journalist, you experience the same thing when you're a commander there, it's chaos. you don't know where everybody was shot. you're trying to gather that information. you have a lot of people on the ground in an area in front of you where you may set up your command, your field command. but there's a whole area in front of you that's a mystery to you. you don't know where the shooter traveled. in some of these cases, i'll tell you the shooting at virginia tech, the killer went in one dorm and killed a student and then he went clear across campus to another building w

jim is calling from virginia on the independent line. caller: i want to congratulate misses cavanaugh, she is 100% right. i cannot disagree. propaganda, the problem is salesmanship, the problem is journalism that has become another sports broadcast. affairs covering public like it is ballgames. you have journalists who will support one team over another. this is not the way the first amendment was designed. we should have journalism and not propaganda. guest: i agree 100%. i think we would be better served by having a media and journalism that was more fact-based and made it easier for us to find the facts and evidence, and made it more transparent about how news was created. i would love to know more about how a journalist put together a story, the sources consulted, the things they found that they did not trust and discarded. all of that information could be useful to a media consumer to understand more about the way it is produced and what they are consuming. i think that understanding the shift from a more objective news reporting to a more subjective one is one that we at rand ar