FIRESIDE CHAT WITH

Matthew Winkler
NOVEMBER 19, 2019
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler

MATTHEW WINKLER
Matthew Winkler, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus and co-founder of Bloomberg News, answers
questions from journalism students in the studio during his visit to the University of
Oregon in November 2019.

DEMYSTIFYING MEDIA
The Hearst Demystifying Media seminar series was launched in January 2016. Curated
by Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University
of Oregon, it provides a platform for leading media practitioners and scholars to talk
about their work.

Through a combination of guest lectures, class visits, podcasts and TV studio interviews,
the series seeks to help students and faculty at the University of Oregon – and beyond – to
make sense of the rapidly changing media and communications landscape.

Previous speakers have come from a wide range of organizations, including the BBC,
Facebook, NPR and Vox, as well as leading academic institutions such as Stanford, Columbia,
Virginia and George Washington University.

Access the archive at: http://bit.ly/DemystfyingArchive

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 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Matthew Winkler and Damian Radcliffe in conversation.
The Bloomberg Way is the reporting
handbook for everybody at Bloomberg.
How did you develop the philosophy
behind it, and how did you imbue that in an
organization that grew very quickly?
The short answer is two words: with
enthusiasm and difficulty. In other words, I
really believed it and embraced it, but it was
really difficult. Like so many hard things to
do, they’re difficult.
Why do we do it?
I came from a place that had an extraordinary
pedigree in the Wall Street Journal where
the quality of its journalism was pretty
much unimpeachable. And I went to a place
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that was nothing, so to speak, that had no
pedigree, no lineage.
In fact, [it] was openly dismissed, or he was
dismissed (Mike Bloomberg) because again,
what did he know? Who was he? He was
somebody who came from Wall Street. He
was regarded initially with great skepticism
and suspicion.
Right away I figured… The only way you’re
going to win is if you work harder, you train
better, your standards are higher, you do
everything you could possibly do to prove
you’re better than the best.
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
How do you do that? You have to have, just
like the best runners here, you have to have
a whole approach to what you’re going to
do. We had to invent it. And that was the
Bloomberg Way.
How do you define the Bloomberg Way?
Who are we writing for?
We’re writing for the people with the most
at stake.
Who are those people?
They’re very, very powerful. They’re very
smart. They’re highly educated.
They can go wherever they want to go. They
can have whatever they want to have.
Nothing gets in their way.
So if they’re going to buy news, the news that
they buy has to be seen by them as valuable,
if not invaluable.
The only way you can make that happen
is if you say, “All right, we have to be more
accurate, more precise, faster, better, smarter
than everybody else.”
How do you get there?
You say, “[For] every story show don’t tell.”
What does that mean?
It means you write with nouns and verbs and
you skip the modifiers because it’s precision
in language and it’s anecdotes and examples,
which is another way of saying it’s all about
the facts and putting the facts together.
But that’s not enough.
Then it’s, what does every story look like?
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Well, it looks like four paragraphs to begin
with and those four paragraphs have to do a
lot of things, a lot of heavy lifting before you
get to the rest of it. And there may not be a
rest, it may just be four paragraphs.
So what do those four paragraphs have to do?
First of all, they have to tell you what’s the
surprise, and why am I reading this, and why
am I reading it now.
Then it has to tell you, “Why is this important?”
You have to have superlatives in it. Like “it’s
the biggest,” “it’s the worst,” “it’s the best.”
You have to define what that is. Names make
news so you have to have names in there
and details.
Then you have to have, “why should we
care about this? Why is this important?” So
in other words, what’s at stake? So that’s
probably paragraph three.
Then paragraph four has got to have some
voice of authority on the record, [a] voice of
God saying this is the way it is. That’s a lot to
put together in four paragraphs.
IF YOU’RE [TELLING]
REPORTERS, “YOU MUST DO
THIS WITH EVERY STORY,”
YOU’RE ASKING THEM TO
DO A LOT. [THE BLOOMBERG
WAY] DIDN’T ACTUALLY
DIDN’T MAKE ME A VERY
POPULAR PERSON IN THE
FIRST DECADE.
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
However, people noticed, of course they
noticed and if you Google me, there’s all
kinds of stuff about how people love to
write about this. I didn’t like the word “but,”
or I prohibited the word “but,” but actually
it’s not that I prohibited [it], what I said
was [that] your story shouldn’t be a ping
pong match.
Your story is a journey, it should take people
someplace. There should be a beginning, a
middle, and an end and don’t get lost. Be
precise and time is of the essence.
That was essentially the Bloomberg Way.
Now, there’s a lot more to it. It was 365
pages by the time we got to the fourth or
fifth edition.
How did the Bloomberg Way change?
We didn’t have in the first decade
any anonymous attribution, which
was unthinkable.
We didn’t say “sources said.” We didn’t say
“people familiar with the situation said.”
If we had quotes, there was a name next to the
quote and we also said no negative quotes.
I mean, you can have criticism, but nothing
that is essentially scurrilous. Just because
somebody said it on the record doesn’t
make it true. Just because somebody says it
doesn’t make it true.
The whole point was be precise. Now, I
didn’t know Donald Trump was going to be
president of United States someday, but the
point is we were preparing for the worst, if
you think about it that way.
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As a result of preparing for the worst that
way, there was a discipline or rigor built
into Bloomberg journalism from day one,
most of which is still there.
Not all of it. I mean, I had to surrender a
few things like the anonymous attribution
when the dotcom boom took off and there
were mergers and acquisitions everywhere.
The only way you could write about them
was “according to people familiar with the
situation.” So we had to build in all kinds of
checks about who those people were.
WHAT I WAS CONCERNED
ABOUT ALWAYS IS THE
READER IS SACRED, THE
VIEWER IS SACRED, SO
DON’T EVER DECEIVE THE
READER.
If you go behind the curtain, you take the
risk that the reader might think you have
an agenda, particularly if you’re fronting
for somebody they don’t know or you don’t
tell them.
All of those things were part of the Bloomberg
Way. Within five years, we got to a point
where people really did trust us because we
were so transparent.
How do you acknowledge both sides in
a story without it becoming a ping pong
match?
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler

In any story that is any good, it’s a journey.

But like any journey, there are all kinds of WE’LL NEVER GET
caveats and twists and turns everywhere.
EVERYTHING. IT’S ALWAYS
So every story in the Bloomberg Way THE PURSUIT OF
has to in effect have what we call the
“to be sure” paragraph, which could be THE TRUTH.
multiple paragraphs.

But “to be sure” is we’re saying that the WE NEVER GIVE YOU
trend is your friend. To be sure here are all
the reasons or facts that could possibly
THE TRUTH.
undermine that conclusion because we don’t
know where things are ultimately going to
wind up.
WE NEVER WILL GIVE YOU
THE TRUTH, BUT WE’LL
We’re not clairvoyant. We can’t predict
the future. We can only provide you with
GIVE YOU SOMETHING
everything we know. So every reporter and WE HOPE IS ACCURATE.
editor must address essentially the opposite
outcome from what is being written.
THAT’S SORT OF THE BEST
WE CAN HOPE FOR.
The reason why you do that is there are lots
of stories that are reported on the front
page that say essentially “here’s where it’s So that’s why “to be sure” is a big part of the
headed.” Then you wind up getting to the Bloomberg Way.
date and it didn’t happen that way.
What tips do you have for writing data
It’s very frustrating because it’s sort of like, stories or stories that are mainly focused
“Oh well, never mind.” Well, wait a second, on data?
you just told me on your front page this is the
way of the world. Data is so versatile in that lots of data
points together can become an example or
In every story you have to account for the an anecdote as long as you collect the data.
possibility that you could be wrong.
One of the things I do now, [and] it’s so much
There’s something you missed, because we fun, I started doing it when I stepped down
don’t get everything. as editor-in-chief, I became a columnist for
Bloomberg Opinion.

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 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Matthew Winkler and Damian Radcliffe.
And I figured, now is an opportunity to
showcase the best of Bloomberg. By that
I mean, I try to take assumptions that
people have and find the data that belies
the assumption. The only way I can make the
column work or the story work is by getting
enough data to provide the examples.
I’ll give you one [an example] that is
particularly relevant to us right now.
When a handful of states led by California and
New York--Oregon was in the mix, so was the
state of Washington, your neighbor--decided
that it was essential to increase the minimum
wage, at the time, the overwhelming
whelming assumption reported widely didn’t
matter which newspaper and widely by
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politicians was that, “that’s all well and good,
but raising the minimum wage is a job killer.”
That [raising the minimum wage] will hurt the
economy and it will kill jobs. If you go back
to just a few years ago, even to the present,
when you Google the subject, you’ll find all
kinds of people, important people, powerful
people saying that, that raising the minimum
wage is a job killer. So I figured, “This is a
good subject to tackle the Bloomberg Way.”
So what we did was we said, “All right,
let’s look at all the States so far that have
committed to raising the minimum wage
above a certain level.”
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
We took the big states, major states, and
said, “Okay, over here we have the states that
raised the minimum wage. And over here we
have the states that not only didn’t raise
the minimum wage, but are insistent on not
raising the minimum wage and say it’s bad
for the economy and all that stuff.”
Then we’ll take all these measures of
economic performance like employment
rate, creating jobs, personal income, all kinds
of measures of an economy and we’ll say:
“What happened to the states over five years to
the present that raise the minimum wage?
And what happened to the states that said, ‘No,
that’s a bad thing and we’re not going the other side who’ve gone into news. It’s
to do that.’
WHAT’S INTERESTING IS
THAT THE STATES THAT
RAISED THE MINIMUM
WAGE OUTPERFORMED
BY EVERY MEASURE THE
STATES THAT SAID, “NO,
IT’S A BAD THING.”
When you’re looking at it now and you look
at all the data, you say, “Well, of course
that makes sense, because if you put more
money in people’s pockets, they’re going to
spend it. No matter where they are, they’re
going to spend it.” And if they spend it, it
means everybody’s going to benefit, which is
increasingly where people are going now. But
it wasn’t that way initially.
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So that’s what I mean by if you have the
data, you can turn the data points into
example after example, anecdote after
anecdote, and then it becomes a very
factual story.
What data and computer science skills
should people who want to work at
Bloomberg learn?
We’ve always been very collaborative. There
are people who start out [in] news who go
into the computer programming side of
Bloomberg because it’s exciting or whatever.
And there are people who have been on
a personal choice, really, or a professional
choice. Suffice to say, though, we’re all very
data-driven.
We love data. It really helps us do everything
we’re doing. And of course, we got that
disease a long time ago from our owner. He’s
very data-driven.
At Bloomberg News, we’re very diverse. We
have English majors and history majors and
sociology and psychology majors. We have
not just economics and journalism and so on.
We have everything. It’s a big tent.
How is technology, like AI, changing
journalism? Bloomberg was one of
the leading proponents of automated
reporting, particularly for earnings stories.
However, there’s a sense of unease, in
some quarters about these new tools.
When we were just 15 people, one of the
biggest challenges was, right away, how can
15 people compete against 1,500 people?
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Students from the Journalism School putting their questions to Matthew Winkler.
There were news organizations day one that
we were competing against. There were
multiple of our size.
So how do we show up, if you will, day one
and be credible when we just don’t have the
horses for the course? And the answer to
that is, day one, we said, we can use our
computers to create at our initiative, to
create stories based on templates that
we’ve created that do a lot of heavy lifting.
That don’t do everything, but do a lot.
In the first year of Bloomberg News, we had
50 different stock markets covered around
the world because we could write a program
that could tell you everything that’s, if you
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will, “what’s what” and “how’s what” but not
“why what.”
Now “what’s what” is “the market went up X,
it was the biggest gain, biggest decline since
. . . “ [we] can do all that. “For every stock
that advanced, 20 declined,” we can do that.
We can say it was the biggest decline since,
for the market, since whenever. We could say
how many shares traded and that was the
biggest store whatever, since whenever. So
800 words just like that.
Now, [the story] didn’t tell you why the
market went up, but it told you everything
else. For a lot of people, day one they said,
“Wow, where does Bloomberg get all
these people?”
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler

It was a machine. That was day one.
Now, to do that is a lousy job, because who
wants to write “what’s what”? It’s like the
most basic kind of reporting that’s boring
over time. If a computer can do that, But the computer catches [this] because
it’s why not?
What you want to be able to write [about] is
the people who are doing things that they
shouldn’t be doing, like insider trading.
News is what people don’t want you to
know. That’s the definition of news. That is
where you want your reporters.
computer, which could show me so many
irregular things going on in the market that I
- or my colleagues - just don’t have the time
to look at.
it’s trained, it’s programmed to catch these
things. And then you put them all together
and next thing you know, you’ve got [a] story
that is amazing.
How did you get into the financial side
of journalism?
So I have to confess that the course I hated
the most in college was economics.

SO I WOULD ARGUE JUST I mean, ultimately that’s my fault, but at the

time I blamed it on the professor who at the
THE OPPOSITE, THAT time had no respect for environmentalism.
HAVING COMPUTER- He’d put up all these curves on the blackboard
showing that trying to clean up the river by
GENERATED STORIES government mandate was a fool’s errand and
ENABLES US TO HAVE A made economic 0 cents and everything else.
MUCH HIGHER CALIBER This is 1973, ‘74, and it was right after Earth Day
OF JOURNALISM THAN [was] created and I’m a big environmentalist
and still am. So that didn’t go down well.
WE OTHERWISE WOULD However, obviously the fact that I’m talking
BECAUSE WE HAVE TO about it tells you something, that it stuck with
me. The whole thing stuck with me because it
DO THE “WHAT’S WHAT” really was a year of misery.
EVERY DAY.
In the ‘70s when I started as a journalist
for the United States, [it] was a
And to bring it full circle, we’ve gotten tumultuous decade. Not simply politically,
very sophisticated. but economically.

I just turned in a piece for Bloomberg For example, transportation in this country,
Businessweek, the magazine, all about everybody drove a car back then. Gasoline, 25
insider trading and examples of insider cents a gallon.
trading. Which I couldn’t do without the

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 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
It quadrupled in a matter of weeks and then
there were gas lines everywhere and then it
did it again. And there were two oil shocks
in a decade. New York City went bankrupt
in the ‘70s, hard to believe. New York City
went bankrupt. We discovered oil in Alaska,
Prudhoe Bay.
Nixon was worried about the economy,
but his prescription was to leave the gold
standard and the Bretton Woods Monetary
System, which ushered in a period of approach. I realized actually it was the center
rampant inflation.
So if I look back on that period, the world is
turning upside down in the United States for
all kinds of economic reasons.
I’M JUST BEGINNING MY
CAREER AS A REPORTER
AND I’M SAYING, “WOW,
EVERYTHING I KNOW AND
SEE AROUND ME IS BEING
AFFECTED BY MONEY IN
SOME FORM OR FASHION.
IT’S ALL ABOUT MONEY.”
I had already concluded, by the way, that I
wanted to work for the Wall Street Journal
and it wasn’t because so much of the
business and economic focus of the journal.
It was because at the time, the long form
journalism in the Wall Street Journal was
second to none.
And it’s what every person who wants to
write a long story at least 2,500 words dreams
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of doing that, and so I wanted to do that.
In order to do that, I had to be knowledgeable
about everything else having to do with the
economy and business. I just said, “Okay, I’m
going to do this.” I got lucky along the way
because the one subject that I became very
aware of was, of all things, bonds.
Most journalists back then thought that was
the driest dullest subject you could possibly
of everything.
When they say the canary in the coal mine,
if you want to know [whether] the canary is
singing or not singing in the coal mine, it’s
going to be [in] the debt market. That’s the
one that’s going to tell you whether things
are good or bad everywhere in the world.
I realized that at the outset and I leveraged it.
That’s how it happened.
The Bloomberg website references
integrity in reporting. What does that
mean and has it grown more challenging
given how our news cycle is structured
today?
Over the course of my career at Bloomberg, I
would get asked things like, what are the three
most important things to you or journalism?
And I’d always answer by saying, “Okay, there
are three things. Integrity without a doubt
because . . . and I would say this actually not
just about journalism, I’d say it about life.
If you have no integrity, who are you? What
are you? Why should anyone believe you?
Why should anyone trust you? Why should
the people depend on you?
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Integrity is everything. You can’t succeed
as far as I’m concerned ultimately without
integrity. You certainly can’t have a happy life
without integrity.
We’re in the business of news. What is news? I
mean, another way of saying is, if it isn’t true,
it isn’t news. If you don’t have integrity, you
can’t do news because news is all about
being true or getting as close to the truth.
The second thing is commitment, because if
you don’t have commitment, you’re not going
to have integrity because it’s hard work. Just
trying to be truthful about everything is really
hard work. That takes commitment.
Then the last, the third thing, and it’s by no
means the least important because they all
go together, is gratitude, because none of us
succeeds on our own.
WE SUCCEED BECAUSE OF THE
PEOPLE WHO CAME BEFORE
US. WE SUCCEED BECAUSE
OF THE PEOPLE AROUND
US, NEXT TO US, PEOPLE WE
DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO
HAVE HELPED US. AND IF WE
DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE THAT,
IF WE’RE NOT AWARE OF
THAT, IT’S GOING TO BE VERY
DIFFICULT FOR US TO GET TO
INTEGRITY.
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Because part of having integrity is recognizing
and being grateful for what enabled us to
get to this point, wherever it is. So integrity,
commitment, and gratitude.
Is it harder in a 24/7 news cycle to maintain
those three maxims?
It’s always hard because people are being
tested on the spot and have to react
on the spot.
If you are trained well, if you’re prepared,
there’s an Arab proverb that goes like, “Luck
begins when preparation meets opportunity
Bloomberg has some really big customers
such as investment banks, Bank of
America, Goldman Sachs, and so on. When
you do have to report on them, how does
this relationship get affected?
It happens a lot.
That was the first conversation or second
conversation I had with [Michael Bloomberg]
when he said, “I want to get in the
news business.”
And I said, “Right, your biggest customer, just
is reading this story that you’ve published
that says your biggest customer is not good,
to say the least, and is not happy. They’re
paying you. And you’ve just, as far as they’re
concerned, you’ve insulted them.” That’s
the news business. I mean, the real news
business, that’s it. That’s what you’re doing
every day.
Now, how do you survive and continue to
do it with integrity? The answer is by being
as transparent, factual as you possibly can.
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Examples of Bloomberg’s output. Image via Bloomberg.
Part of the Bloomberg Way, certainly in the
25 years that I was running Bloomberg News,
we said, “Look, you’ve reported a story that is
saying your biggest customer or your second
biggest customer, or for all I know, your
biggest customer, second biggest customer,
third biggest customer, and fourth biggest
customer rigged the currency market.” (That
actually happened by the way. We actually
did write that story.)
You tell them before you report the story,
this is what we’re going to write. Or we’ve
already written it, but you know what? The
third paragraph is yours. Fourth paragraph is
yours. Whatever you want to say, we’ll listen
to you and we’ll put it in. You give them a
heads up, but you run the story. It’s probably
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[multiple] stories. It’s not just one story. And
there’s the story.
And then almost immediately my phone
rings and it’s the head of sales for Bloomberg.
“What the hell are you doing? What is
going on?”
So a part of my job and my colleagues’ jobs
is to listen to every complaint, not to get
excited, and then to address the complaints.
There’s always a risk that you’ve missed
something that maybe you didn’t get it right
or whatever. So you listen, you always listen.
You always open yourself up and you explain,
“Look, we are writing, we’re reporting for
everybody’s benefit.”
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler

The market is always bigger than one or
two firms or three firms or four firms. It’s
a lot of firms. It’s a lot of people and we’re
writing for the market.
We’re writing for the biggest possible
audience so that people are completely
informed about what they didn’t know
before and they should know as long as it’s and truth comes limping after it.” He wrote
factually true.
It doesn’t always work that way, but the point
was, we got it right. The story was right.
Eventually, you’ve heard the saying--it’s
attributed falsely to Mark Twain--”A lie
travels halfway around the world before
the truth laces up its shoes.” Actually it was
Jonathan Swift who wrote, “Falsehood flies
that, I think, in 1710 for the London Examiner.

Fortunately, we’re lucky, because when

I say we’re lucky is that our owner, Mike IT’S TREACHEROUS. IT’S
Bloomberg, got it day one. I trusted MESSY. NEWS IS A MESSY
him day one.
BUSINESS. MESSY BECAUSE
Even in the first decade, one great example
was, one of our biggest customers is Credit
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE
Suisse, [a] Swiss bank and thousands of THE STORY’S GOING TO
Bloomberg terminals. It was right at the
height of the bull market in the late ‘90s.
TAKE YOU. BUT IF YOU
And the bank itself was getting into trouble HAVE INTEGRITY, YOU
with regulators around the world and the
US included. We decided we were doing this
HAVE TO LET THE STORY
Bloomberg Markets magazine story about all TAKE YOU WHERE IT’S
the trouble they were in. And we told [Credit
Suisse], we’re doing this story about all the
GOING TO TAKE YOU.
trouble you’re in.
So you tell your customers that you’re
We took their biggest deal maker, Frank running the story?
Quattrone, and put him on the cover of the
magazine. And [Credit Suisse] told Mike, you Yeah. Look, that was an essential part of the
run that magazine story and we’re going to Bloomberg Way. Not every journalist does
pull the Bloomberg terminals from that. Not every news organization does that.
Credit Suisse.
I did it as a matter of course at the Wall Street
We ran the story and almost a day later, sixty- Journal before I got to Bloomberg, because I
five Bloomberg terminals disappeared from figured, what do we have to lose? Either I got
Credit Suisse. Six months later, that CEO got it right or I didn’t.
fired at Credit Suisse and three months after
that, all the terminals came back. So if I tell them before I publish, I can only
benefit. It won’t hurt me.

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 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
Probably they’re not going to be able to
persuade me that I got it wrong, but at least
I’m giving them a heads up and they can’t say
I’m not being fair.
It’s a good practice is how I saw it and we of
course adapted it at Bloomberg.
Looking ahead to the 2020 Election, there
are rumors that a certain former mayor of
New York might be throwing their hat into
the presidential ring. What does that mean
for Bloomberg News?
Editor’s note: this interview took place before
Michael Bloomberg formally announced there every day lots of ways. If we do our job
his candidacy.
To some extent, I feel like we sort of went
through this a while ago because we
had Bloomberg News and he decided he
[Michael Bloomberg] was going to run for
mayor of New York city.
We said right away, “Look, we’re not going
to write about ourselves or him, as a matter
of course.” We’re not going to write about
Bloomberg and we’re not going to write
about Mike Bloomberg.
We’re not going to do an investigative
series on Mike Bloomberg, which would
be ridiculous. [But] if he says, “I’m going to
have a policy that forbids smoking in public
places,” we will make sure that gets on the
Bloomberg and people know that.
But in terms of investigating what went
on hours before that led him to make
that decision, we’re not going to do
that story because that is a conflict of
interest. So said and done, we can do that.
15
No one’s going to consider that conflicted.
Obviously the presidency is much more
complicated, formidable than being mayor
of New York. Although I think the experience
of being mayor of New York for twelve years
and Bloomberg News actually doing just fine
while he was mayor of New York and we were
based in New York city, at least the biggest
part of us. And we did figure it out. We did it
by just following the Bloomberg Way.
So should he declare his candidacy, I for one
think, well, that’s great for the brand. I’m
not being cynical. Certainly our name will be
right, we’re going to do fine because there
are lots of other stories to do than the inside
story about how Mike Bloomberg figured
out how he was going to run for president
or what he’s doing or what’s going on in the
campaign and things like that.
Plenty of people will do that story. We
wouldn’t do that story, but we’re not going to
lose much if we don’t do that story as far as
I’m concerned.
There will be reporters who say, “Oh my God,
we’ve giving away the story.” But I don’t
think so.
I think we’ll do fine. But that’s not really my
call. My successor is handling that and I dare
say he’s far more on top of this at this point
than I am, because I’m fortunately quite
removed from this. It’s easy to talk about it
the way I am but he’s actually right in the
middle of it all.
 Fireside Chat with Matthew Winkler
There was a lot of hand wringing following
the 2016 election and a sense that a lot
of the media got its coverage wrong.
Arguably, it still struggles to understand
how to deal with a presidency that is unlike
any other. How could we be to hell.” You had Donald Trump say, “America
reporting differently?
I mean, you didn’t realize that you just
touched one of those nerves with me. 2016
. . . . I wasn’t at that point directing news
coverage. Maybe that was a good thing.
I was very frustrated throughout 2016
because in January of 2016, there was only
one economy in the developed world that
had record gross domestic product, that had
not only recovered everything that had been
lost in the financial crisis and the ensuing
recession, which was the worst since the
great depression, but had record GDP in
January of 2016.
It would be even bigger in February, even
bigger in March, bigger in April, May and completely wrong, but because he said it
so on.
Louder, louder, louder, bigger, bigger, bigger.
There was one candidate who was taking
over the Republican party and there were
two candidates essentially in the Democratic
party competing.
Throughout 2016, not a single news
organization said the best performing
economy in the world, bar none, is the United
States of America.
Record GDP.
You didn’t see it on CNN. You didn’t see it
on MSNBC. You didn’t see it anywhere.
16
You didn’t read it in the New York Times.
You didn’t read it in the Washington Post.
You didn’t read it anywhere.
You had Bernie Sanders say, “America’s going
is going to hell.” And Hillary Clinton didn’t
want to alienate anybody so she didn’t say
much about the economy.
But that’s where journalism comes in. And
journalism completely failed to say that the
Obama economy, which Trump inherited,
was the best economy in the world.
But you didn’t hear that on nightly news, on
morning news, or anybody’s news. It
wasn’t there.
Everybody was focused on entertainment.
Everybody was focused on everything Trump
was saying.
Much of what he said about NAFTA was
and he tweeted it and over and over again,
it got amplified.
Bad, bad, bad, bad journalism. That’s what we
got. No brains, you get what you deserve.
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