Brian Stelter

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, next week is the election.

By the time you hear from me again, America will know who won.

Or maybe not.

With the pandemic and the president adding chaos to the vote process, Tuesday may not have the kind of final answer we're used to.

Nonetheless, it's still the event of the year for cable news.

Even with the reasonable expectations that we won't know the answer, we'll have the breathless moment-by-moment coverage.

And there may be a real risk in failing to emphasize uncertainty.

The president has pushed the idea that states should call a winner on election night.

But news organizations make those night-of-calls.

States count their votes for days or even weeks before certifying a winner.

The scenario that worries many, though, is, what happens if a small portion of the vote is counted that night and we don't know the outcome, but President Trump declares victory and then asks courts to step in if anything changes?

A lot is at stake in how the people narrating the election on TV portray what is happening on Tuesday night.

So to understand how they should approach it and how they are approaching it, I'm going to talk with Brian Stelter today.

Brian has covered the media for years with a focus on television news.

He's been in front of the camera himself for a while now, hosting reliable sources every Sunday on CNN, and of course has his own podcast, also called Reliable Sources.

We talk about election night coverage, the lessons cable news has learned in four years of Trump, and what the future holds in either a Biden presidency or Trump's second term.

Take a listen.

Brian Stelter, thanks for being here on the ticket.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

We're all building up to election night, or at least the first of election nights on Tuesday.

It might end up being more like Hanukkah this time around.

What worries you when you think about how things look and where we're headed as we go into Tuesday?

I will try out an answer that I'm still practicing in my mind, okay?

Because I'm still trying to figure out what to be concerned about ahead of election night.

I'll start with what I'm not concerned about.

I think the decision desks at the major networks and the Associated Press are as ethical as they come.

They have stiff backbones.

They know what they are doing.

They learned from the mistakes of 2000.

They've revisited those mistakes ever since.

Nobody wants a repeat on their hands.

So I believe the decision desks at Fox and CNN and AAP and other networks will be full of integrity, very careful, very cautious.

What I am worried about is that lies,

premature calls of victory, premature claims will be given a lot of amplification.

And that would be the heart of the problem on election week.

If this is a week or this is a multi-day long event, it's a version of what the press has been been grappling with ever since trump came down the escalator how do we handle lies innuendo misinformation uh distortions how loud or do we let those get and even if the press is very careful for example not to amplify a premature victory claim it's still going to be amplified on social media isn't it it's still going to be amplified by the pro-trump uh internet and so i think that that gets to the heart of the danger that the news outlets in this country they know their responsibility and they know how to make these calls and projections.

But if there's this alternative universe of claims about a rigged election, about claims about voter fraud that don't really add up, that noise is going to be really loud.

And it may actually overwhelm the real news system.

Does that make any sense at all?

It does.

Let's think about it with a specific example, maybe.

So let's say it's election night at about 11 o'clock at night when the last polls close in California California,

and

we don't know what the results are, or maybe we see partial results, or maybe we see Biden ahead by a fair amount, or maybe

the polls will be wrong, and we see Trump ahead.

Either we're in a Biden clearly leading situation or an ambiguous situation, and Donald Trump comes out and declares victory.

What's the right move at that point?

Do you think that that should be covered?

So this is why I'm wrestling with this personally.

For a long time, the answer to this Trump problem has been, well, he's the president.

You have to cover what he says.

You have to broadcast his words live.

And then you can surround those words with fact-checking and context and democracy.

The parenthesis and the Chiron or whatever, right?

And I think historians might look back at us and make fun of us for that.

You know,

who knows who can predict the future.

We're not supposed to do that before Election Day, especially.

But I think many historians may look back at the media's role in the last four years and say, why did you feel like you had to broadcast all those lies?

Your job is to help people know the truth.

So why even broadcast it?

And I think in that frame, the question then becomes, do you take Trump live from his Trump hotel, making these premature claims?

And I'll tell you what, my gut answer is, I think the networks will.

I think the networks will.

I think it's almost inevitable that they will, right?

But I think we need to scrutinize that ahead of time, scrutinize that on the day of, and at the very least, make it very clear with the network anchors.

The networks will have to make it very clear before and after such an event that he's lying.

And maybe the right answer is what happened.

Do you remember, gosh, who can forget the crowdsized day, the first full day of the president's term in office, when Sean Spicer came out to the podium for the first time and he said like five things wrong in five minutes.

And CNN did not carry that live because we knew he was going to come out and lie.

He had been yelling at our bureau chief all day.

So we knew that Spicer was going to come out and smear the press.

We didn't take it live.

And I wonder if maybe that's the right answer on election night.

You can always monitor what the president says and then replay it a few minutes later.

That might be the more responsible choice.

Does it matter, though?

I mean, to your point, it'll be out in the

ecosystem through

Fox.

Yeah, it'll be on Fox.

And by the way, this is just me speaking as a journalist.

I don't know what the official CNN position would be.

And by the way, these calls happen in the moment, right?

These are moment-by-moment editorial choices that can be scrutinized later, but they happen in the moment.

And what I always do keep in mind, to your point, is Fox or Newsmax or OAN or Trump.com will be streaming this stuff.

They will be showing it live in this alternative universe.

What I think is really interesting about Fox is Fox is multiple things in one.

And the news operation knows what it's doing on election night.

They are not going to call it for Trump or Biden before it's really accurate.

However, the propagandists at Fox are more popular and more powerful.

And my concern about Fox is that they'll let, I'm just going to make up a name here, Sean Hannity, come on the air and spout off Trump's lies in the event of a contested election, and that his voice will be louder than the decision desk staff that actually know the truth.

And again, if your ultimate principle is we need to help people get to the truth, then having Laura Ingram or Sean Hannity on the air confusing the public does damage.

And, you know, Fox's official position is election night is a news event.

We cover it with news anchors.

The opinion hosts are not on election night.

But what happens if this drags on for days?

Whose voices will be the loudest?

I think a lot of this is going to be about that question.

It brings to mind what happened in 2012 when Karl Rove was on the air saying that he didn't think that Romney had lost and was telling Fox not to make the call.

And then that scene of Megan Kelly then going down the hall to the decision desk and looking at the polls.

And they were saying that they were pretty comfortable with their call.

Is that something that could exist?

That was in 2012.

It's not ancient history.

The anchors will be Brett Bear and Martha McCallum, in theory.

One of them could take the walk down the long hallway.

Certainly, they know that their reputations are on the line, right, to report the news accurately on election night and beyond.

I think there's a dilemma, though.

Fox, of course, has been telling the audience that Biden is a crook.

You know, there's been this anti-Biden narrative on Fox.

But furthermore, Trump has been telling his fans that the only way Biden will win is if Biden cheats.

And I worry about the pressure that Fox will feel not to let down its audience.

And by the way, I want to be really clear.

These anchors are ethical.

These are real journalists of Fox who are in charge.

But their audience is being told every day to expect something.

And if what they are hoping for, a Trump victory, does not come to pass, it is difficult for the anchors in that position to deliver that bad news to those viewers.

I'm sure that the anchors will do it.

I'm not doubting their morality or their integrity, but the pressure is enormous.

And the voices of Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Waters and Janine Pirro may be so loud in the aftermath of this that they will overwhelm the news anchors at Fox.

You spent a lot of time thinking about Fox, not just week to week, but for your book, Hoax.

You're laying out the possibilities.

What's your gut of where this goes?

You don't sound optimistic about journalistic integrity winning the day.

Well, it's all on Rupert and Lotha Murdoch and on Suzanne Scott, the head of Fox News, to make the calls to ensure that the network is on the side of reality.

Because ultimately, that's what this is about.

The votes will eventually be counted.

They'll eventually be certified.

In the event that you described, where there's a clear Biden lead and Trump makes a premature victory announcement.

There will be at the end of the day a reality that cannot be disputed.

So Fox will, in theory, want to be on the side of reality and want to show off its journalism backbone.

That's what it should want to do.

That's what the Murdoch should want to do.

There's a story in the Washington Post about Rupert Murdoch already expecting Trump to lose, already expecting Biden to win, and knowing that would be good for Fox's business.

So, there's also that calculation going on.

I think at the end of the day, there are journalists at Fox who want to be viewed just like CNN and NBC and ABC.

They want to be viewed in the same peer group.

And that's also a factor in this.

I have had the conversation with some Fox reporters where they are living out the struggle that

you describe of wanting to be taken seriously and wanting to just be a reporter like any other reporter, but knowing that in order to get on the air or in order to make a splash at the network, they maybe need to tilt in a direction on a question or an approach to a story that engages with the kind of audience and the desires for that audience

that Fox tends to elevate.

But for that very reason, reason, because the audience is so loyal and so pro-Trump, in large part, it is those Fox truth tellers that have tremendous influence in the coming days.

In the same way that we would have used that we would have

in a former version of the Republican Party, we would have said George W.

Bush and Karl Rove have key roles to play in this.

Well, now it's Dan Bongino.

Now it's Sean Hannity who have key roles to play to help people understand the truth and understand reality and not to live in this alternative reality.

Again, this is all predicated on your concept of Biden's leading, Trump declares prematurely.

There are other scenarios, right?

What if it's an inside election and Biden is clearly by Wednesday going to be the next president?

If Trump and his pro-Trump flacks try to lead this resistance effort where they try to deny reality, think about who in the party, who in the apparatus are going to be most influential.

It's going to be Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends and Laura Ingram.

Ultimately, again, it goes to the Murdochs and the Murdoch's responsibility in this matter.

And there's also the scenario in which Trump is ahead on election night and that that lead either sticks or it starts to dissolve over the course of the next few days as more votes come in.

In either of those scenarios, how do you see it?

Not just in Fox, but the coverage overall.

What does that look like?

What I remember in 2016, before I embarrassingly fell asleep on the couch and slept through most of election night, which is something I'll never live down.

What I remember is John King.

Not that much happened, it's okay.

Yeah, apparently I woke up at 3 a.m.

and the president-elect was giving a speech at the Hilton.

I think the answer is: it was John King all night.

And I think the answer will be even more John King.

What I mean is even more Steve Kornacki, even more of the anchors at the big board counting the votes as they come in.

And that's what we should be.

I mean, that's what the network should be doing

is because it's the best way to show the uncertainty and show how it's happening in real time.

So,

I mean, it brings me, it's a thought that I've had a lot of like, how much do we, those of us in the mainstream press, engage in the conspiracy thinking, engage in the crazy ideas that get out there.

And

it's a constant thing now.

The way that I think about it is covering QAnon, right?

Which on the one hand, you have to cover, it would seem, because so many people seem engaged with it.

On the other hand, the coverage of it seems to have helped the conspiracy cult grow.

And

how do we do that kind of coverage that seems like it could be a big part of what the months ahead are?

If Biden wins, it is, it seems inevitable that Donald Trump will not concede graciously.

And,

you know, I'm thinking about, I was one of the reporters in the Oval Office two days after the election in 2016 when Trump came to see Obama.

I cannot imagine that if Biden wins, Trump will invite Biden into the Oval Office for a long chat.

I'm not even sure that we should count on a concession call coming at any point.

You wonder, what is the story Trump is going to tell in the event of a Biden win?

What is the story Trump tells?

Is it that he made America great again, he succeeded, now he's done?

Is it something much more bitter and conspiracy-fueled?

History would suggest that it will be conspiracy-fueled.

And what do we do about that?

This gets to the, do we broadcast the lies?

And I think there's been a lot more care given to that in the last couple of years than there was in 2016.

Think about how many rallies are shown live now versus in 2016.

But I always go back to Fox and say Fox is still carrying every rally and showing every word.

And more importantly than showing every word, taking Trump's words seriously.

The ProTrump media

pretends like he doesn't lie all the time.

The ProTrump media pretends like he's an honest broker.

And so, the reason I think we have to take on conspiracy theories is

the megaphone for those theories is gigantic and, in some ways, growing, as you said, with QAnon.

I think most people in this country, right, left, whatever they are, don't care about politics, whatever they are, just want to know what's true.

They just want to know what's right.

And that's the role of the mainstream press, to guide people back to what's true.

Even if it means saying, hey, there is this thing called QAnon,

and the ideas are sickening.

Here's where it came from.

Explaining where it came from and why the Q, the so-called Q theories have been wrong so many times, proven wrong.

That does do a service to point out that, you know, of all of Q's predictions, here are the ones that have clearly not come true.

I think it's a tricky thing.

I think

it's always a kind of game-time executive decision of is repeating the thing that's not right get rid of the wrong thing or does it give it more seeds out and about?

I think about it.

Partly it's in the delivery.

Partly it's in the delivery and partly it's in it's in the deliverer because it's about do you trust the person who is doing this debunking?

Do you trust this person who's providing the information?

And I think the press has done a lot actually this year to regain trust.

I know that's not a fashionable thing to say, but in covering the coronavirus and taking the virus seriously, the Atlantic being a key example of this, I think news outlets do gain and rebuild trust with the audience.

You know, I think it's remarkable that after four years of fake news smears, four years of those lies about the media, most Americans see through it.

Most Americans know the president's not trustworthy.

Most Americans know that he can't be trusted.

And so the attempt to destroy all common ground of reality has mostly failed.

It clearly has worked with a segment of the president's base,

but it's mostly failed.

And that makes me somewhat, dare I say, hopeful, that no matter the-

No matter the lies in the coming days, no matter, well, 2020 is almost over and there will be a better year.

And no matter how loud the lies are, most people do see through them.

And actually, I would go a step further and say many Trump supporters see through them, even if they choose to vote for him, even if they choose to say in polling that they trust him.

You start to talk to voters one-on-one.

They're mostly in on what he's doing.

And that does give me some hope.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I ask Brian about the future of Fox News.

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We've been talking in the scenarios in which Trump does not win and what happens then.

Let's just spend a moment on the idea of if Trump does win

outside of the Fox News world, which would be very happy about that.

How do you think that goes for the rest of the media, whether it's the mainstream media or the left-wing media?

Well, I think number one, the coverage is different this year than it was in 2016.

The way that polls are covered is different.

There's clearly been an overcorrection from 2016 to the point where many Democrats don't even want to believe it's possible for Biden to win.

And so the reactions to a Trump reelection would be somewhat different based on what people are going in, the emotions people are carrying in these final days, right?

I think that the road to 270 focus on CNN and MSNBC and elsewhere is crucial.

There's more of a focus on those questions than there were in 2016.

So that in the event of a Trump re-election, there won't be as many people saying they were surprised.

I think that that's right.

And someone said to me, who worked on the Clinton campaign a couple of years ago, it's at least more believable that he will win in 2020 than it was that he would win in 2016, and he did win in 2016.

So

if Trump wins, what you think MSNBC coverage looks like over the next four years?

Ooh, interesting.

No one's ever asked me that.

In the event of a Trump re-election, I would assume they'd be a narrow re-election, the 50-plus percent of Americans who strongly disapprove of the president probably aren't going anywhere.

Any Trump re-election would be a loss in the popular vote.

Is that a fair assumption as well?

It seems almost certain.

Unfathomable, right?

Just given where things are.

And look, it may be, if that's the way things go, that the vote count is based in California, New York, or something like that, the way that Trump has tried to write off his popular vote loss in 2016.

But given what the national polls look like, there does not seem to be a real scenario in which he will win the popular vote, which doesn't mean he won't be re-elected president.

So I'm pointing to this idea that there will still be this popular opposition to the president.

There will still be appetite for media about that.

And I think what we would see in some ways is a radicalization of the Democrats, right?

That would be the expected outcome, a radicalization of the Democratic Party.

Now, that doesn't mean diamond and silk version of that, you know, of them are suddenly on MSNBC.

But I do think it means we would be seeing these more radical approaches to blowing up the system, so to speak.

And then let's take the reverse of that.

If Biden wins, you made reference to this, that Rupert Murdoch has looked at the business opportunities of what that might mean.

It does seem like the last four years have been good for MSNBC to have the coverage.

Certainly Fox did very well during the Obama years.

What does Fox and the right-wing media overall look like

if Joe Biden is the president?

Heads, Fox wins, and tails, Fox wins.

Fox wins either way because they've built this loyal audience, a cult-like audience that stays with them no matter what.

An audience, by the way, that's been told for decades not to trust any other form of media.

And so Fox becomes anti-Biden, as it already is.

If you look carefully, Fox is already more anti-Biden than it is pro-Trump, but more the anti-Kamala Harris network.

Remember, they're thinking about the future, just like everybody else.

So it's the anti-Harris network, the anti-AOC network continues, and that's a very profitable enterprise for Fox

and the pro-Trump media now what does trump do and does he have a tv show does he have a radio show those become interesting questions

tony schwartz who wrote the art of the deal told me last week on the podcast he imagines trump would take over for rush limbaugh so so i i i hate to say those words because i i hope that rush limbaugh recovers from his uh his cancer but i do think that in any event of any opening in right-wing radio it's a logical move for trump uh trump's gonna find a platform probably multiple platforms tucker carlson had this very strange moment on the air on wednesday night that I think a lot of people have seen where he claims that he had some package of anti-Biden documents that were tied to Hunter Biden and he has this whole tale that he told of the package was intercepted at a mail facility and there was a huge investigation that appears to have all occurred in the course of about four hours.

They've interviewed everyone and the documents are gone.

He

I mean, the whole story is ridiculous just in terms of what he, the investigation that he claims happened and that there's no other copy of these documents and they're just disappeared it seems to tell us something about what fox news as the highest rated guy on fox right the direction that they would be heading in in the biden years if the biden years are one indeed is ahead yeah i wrote and hoaxed that sean hannedy was the most powerful person at fox in the trump years i should revise that for the paperback edition it was true until 2019 in 2020 trucker carlson is the most powerful person at fox because he's thinking post-trump he's thinking ahead whether he wants wants to run for something in the future or not.

He is bigger than the Trump era.

And as you mentioned, now the highest rated host on Fox, six, seven million viewers some nights.

That does tell us something about what the audience wants.

The right-wing audience wants Tucker Carlson's conspiracy theories and his white identity politics.

They want a backlash to a Brian America.

That's why I say it's going to be the anti-Harris channel more than the anti-Biden channel in the event of a Biden election.

The only way to change this, this version of Fox, is with leadership change.

You know, the only way is through leadership.

It's not going to change through Tucker Carlson waking up and realizing that he's poisoning his viewers.

It's only going to change if the Murdoch decide to make a change.

And of course, in the event of Rupert Murdoch's death, if and when that occurs, there could be a struggle for Fox and a takeover of Fox by the liberal son, James Murdoch, who is supporting Biden.

So I mentioned that just to say, we never know what could happen to these media outlets over time.

I'm not talking about change tomorrow, but over time.

The question about the future of Fox is so wedded to the future of the GOP.

And

chicken egg, we can play that game, but Tucker does embody this post-Trump version of the GOP.

Let's leave it with this.

You spent a lot of time thinking about broadcast journalism.

You wrote your book about your first book about morning shows, your second book about Fox.

You spend a lot of time yourself on the air thinking about this.

Does any of it matter as much as what's going on on Facebook or social media?

It's true that senators are meme lords now and lawmakers are Twitter stars, but I'll give you the pro-broadcast, pro-TV argument, which I think is very true.

On election night and into election morning, the television networks in this country will be the primary source for most Americans.

Hopefully I won't fall asleep on the couch like I did four years ago, but I'll be on that same couch watching, and so will.

almost everyone else who's awake and able to be at home during election night.

We will have our phones open.

We'll have our Facebook feeds out.

But even a lot of the raw material people are seeing on Facebook will be coming from the television networks and the AP.

You know, the AP, it will be providing raw data sets to all these social media platforms as well for alerts about local races.

So that backbone of American media, that news system of MBC and ABC and CNN and Reuters and the AP, it is still essential in providing the raw material that we then fight about on Twitter and Facebook.

And I think election nights actually are a reaffirmation of the power of broadcast media in this really polarized, broken up, divided age.

Is that really optimistic?

Is that too hopeful about mainstream media?

I mean, I was about to say, like, does that leave us?

I'm not sure at the end of this conversation.

Because it has

true.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know if you've made me more pessimistic or optimistic or

just confused.

Think about election night, right?

Times Square, ABC, and CBS are on opposite sides of the street.

Like, CNN and Fox are blocks from each other.

There's this intense competition.

And yet, at the same time, there's this complementary system of news.

These major networks still are the ones that assemble the votes in this country.

The AP is still the news outlet that says the next president is so-and-so.

And that's tremendous power that Facebook and Twitter don't want to have, and which makes the networks and the AP still fundamentally different from the social media players.

All right.

So what you're saying is watch TV.

That's what I'm saying.

That's my tip.

Well, that's what I'll be doing.

I think that's what we're all going to be doing.

It's going to be good ratings no matter which channel.

But Brian, thanks for being here and helping make at least some more sense sense of this, if not making it more optimistic or pessimistic.

Thanks, Brian.

Thanks.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe and make sure to vote.

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