Mark Halperin Opens Up About His Career and Political Views, Plus the Truth About Media Bias, with Drew Holden

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Mark Halperin Opens Up About His Career and Political Views, Plus the Truth About Media Bias, with Drew Holden"

Next Up with Mark Halperin (MK Media) | March 31, 2026
Guests: Emily Drushinski (Interviewer), Drew Holden (Media Critic)
Main Themes: Mark Halperin’s personal and professional history, his approach to journalism, the evolution of media bias, and constructive criticism of American media.

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Next Up with Mark Halperin" uniquely flips the script: longtime journalist and host Mark Halperin becomes the interview subject, with guest host Emily Drushinski leading a candid, wide-ranging biographical AMA about his life, values, career, and views on reporting. The second half of the show welcomes Drew Holden, a noted media analyst, for an in-depth discussion of liberal media bias—where it comes from, how it manifests, and how it might be addressed. The tone is direct, self-reflective, and marked by Halperin’s commitment to public trust and skepticism of power.

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Part 1: Mark Halperin in the Hot Seat (with Emily Drushinski)

(Segment Starts: 06:26)

Halperin’s Early Life and Family

• Background:
  • Grew up in Bethesda, Maryland; father was a major figure in US government and foreign policy.
  • Dinner table conversation often focused on policy—national security, economics, civil rights—though Halperin read the sports section as a child ([07:50]).
• Unique Childhood Experience:
  • Family home was wiretapped for 21 months by Nixon/Kissinger, resulting in a 21-year lawsuit ([08:40]).
  • “...the seminal thing was... we found out our home phone had been wiretapped for 21 months by Nixon and Kissinger... that was omnipresent reality of my childhood.” —Mark Halperin ([08:40]).

Vantage Point on Washington

• Culture of DC has shifted over time: more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, better restaurants and consumer options ([10:53]).
  • Cites JFK: “Washington is a city, he said, of northern charm and southern efficiency.”

Remarkable Encounters

• Notable Dinner Guest:
  • Daniel Ellsberg, famed for the Pentagon Papers, once fascinated by bubblegum ice cream at a local Baskin Robbins ([11:56]).

Harvard and Journalism Path

• Did not pursue journalism at college—considered law/diplomacy, studied Japanese ([12:56]).
• Family connections helped with post-college opportunities; first ABC News job was menial but formative.
• Entry-level anxieties (“got lost in the building” making script packets) still haunt him; emphasizes value of learning through error ([16:38]).

Mentors, Networking, and Nepotism

• Father was only “Washington famous.” In New York, few knew about him—connections helped at some stages, but mostly made own way ([18:41]).

Hobbies and Off-Duty Life

• Loves spending time with his son (especially thumb wars and Japanese counting) ([19:59]).
• Interest in the craft of comedy and broadcasting; admires Peter Jennings for skill and mentorship ([20:06]).
• “To the extent I’m a decent broadcaster, it’s because of Peter.” ([22:01])

On Loss and Legacy: Peter Jennings

• Jennings was “generous... extraordinary voice,” supported Halperin through career. Their famous caution on calling 2000 election stands out.
• Emotional recounting of final conversations before Jennings’ passing, and lasting professional/personal impact ([22:01]–[30:42]).
  • “I think all the time about what he would think about Next Up, about Two Way, about me as a broadcaster... to the extent I’m a decent broadcaster, it’s because of Peter.”

Worldview and Politics

• Would live in Tokyo or London; deep affection for Japanese culture stems from both family and 1980s geopolitics ([31:04]).

Political Objectivity and Media’s Role

• Rejects both liberal and conservative labels; strives for accountability to the public and not personal partisanship ([33:40]).
  • “I really think my obligation... is to hold all powerful interests accountable to the public interest and to keep my opinions out of it.” ([33:40])
• Asserts that his “assiduous” neutrality often confuses both sides.

Perspective on Journalism’s Pitfalls

• Young reporters now over-reliant on digital communication—“Don’t talk to anybody. All the young reporters do is text people...” ([35:24])
• Urges real, in-person reporting and storytelling focused on people over process.
• Success, for him, is unchanged: “Hold all powerful interests accountable to the public interest and tell the great stories of our time in an interesting way” ([36:56]).

Institutional and Establishment Bias

• Bias toward the establishment, wealth, and insulated coastal experience is “always pernicious,” but media’s lack of understanding of Middle America especially notable ([37:43]–[39:25]).

Influential Advice and Legacy

• Charlie Gibson cited as a role model for kindness and decency to all colleagues ([39:39]).
• Hopes to be remembered as a “Great Dad,” but professionally believes journalism is a public trust to help America “understand itself and do better” ([40:34]).

Memorable Quotes:

• “I’m just for everybody and against everybody. I’m just for holding everybody accountable and trying to help all voters and all citizens understand the stories and the personalities of our time.” —Mark Halperin ([33:40])
• “Journalism, particularly, including political journalism, is a public trust. And you can’t do it for fun or because it’s interesting to elites. You have to do it to help the country understand itself and do better.” —Mark Halperin ([40:34])

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Part 2: The Truth About Media Bias (with Drew Holden)

(Segment Starts: 44:06)

Media Criticism Philosophy

• Host Mark Halperin introduces Drew Holden as a unique commentator: brings receipts, is fair and nonpartisan in his critique of “liberal media bias” ([45:23]).
  • “You do it with receipts, as the kids say... it’s not cherry picked, it’s not exaggerated, it’s not out of context. It’s just, it is what it is and it’s done with great sophistication.” —Mark Halperin ([45:26])

Roots of Liberal Media Bias

• Drew Holden attributes today’s media bias most of all to journalism’s collective “monochromatic mentality” about Donald Trump and the broader movement he represents ([48:46]).
  • Media coverage, even unconsciously, becomes “a gut feeling about where someone is morally.”
• Newsrooms are “blinkered,” often unaware of the extent of their bias despite rare moments of self-reflection.

How Trump Changed the Media

• Trump’s presence “supercharged” pre-existing liberal bias. As president, Trump’s open antagonism and disruption of institutional norms led media to be both personally threatened and commercially attracted to critical coverage ([53:05]).
• “He represents a group of people that... most people in the legacy media and most legacy institutions don’t like and don’t respect” ([53:05]).

Interactions with the Subjects of Critique

• Holden explains most reporters privately thank him for exposing inconsistencies; editors less likely to respond or to change course ([56:52]–[59:21]).
  • “They would DM me and say, thank you. Thank you for doing this... I appreciate you saying nice things about me, but if we’re going to try and shift this thing... you’ve got to have those conversations [with editors].” ([57:11])

What Would Fix Major Outlets?

• For NYT’s Joe Kahn:
  • Step 1: Acknowledge and publicly address the trust gap between media and Americans. “Take that survey [about media trust] and print it up in the walls in the newsroom and say, how do we fix this?” ([60:16])
  • Step 2: Bring diverse ideological viewpoints into the newsroom to break the echo chamber and pause before going to press with politically-charged stories ([60:16]).

Notable Moment:

• Parodying media obituaries for extremists: “Hungry Wisconsin man has troubled relations with neighbors.”—Halperin on media headlines about terrorists ([63:08]).

Advice for Politicians Exploiting Media Bias (e.g., J.D. Vance)

• Holden: For those running for office, calling out legacy media bias “strikes a chord with voters.” Long term, however, for a better media ecosystem suggests:
  • Elevate new, non-legacy reporters and outlets.
  • Reduce focus on “cathedral” national media that’s losing trust.
  • “What we want is an American media that the American people can believe in. That is possible, that is doable.” ([68:39]–[70:53])

Final Thoughts and Resources

• Holden’s analysis available for free on his substacks (“Commonplace” & “Holden Court”) and on X (“@DrewHolden360”) ([71:01]).
• Halperin and Holden conclude with mutual appreciation and a commitment to ongoing, constructive criticism of the press.

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Key Quotes & Timestamps

• "I've never had a bad job. I had all good jobs, but I did have bad experiences." —Mark Halperin ([16:38])
• “If you go to a dry cleaner or get in a taxi, they don't act like it's their very first day of business, and they don't like their jobs, at least not as much as they did [when I was young].” —Mark Halperin ([10:53])
• “You can't do it for fun or because it’s interesting to elites. You have to do it to help the country understand itself and do better.” —Mark Halperin ([40:34])
• “The cherry picking is easy... It’s not going to solve anything.” —Drew Holden ([46:56])
• “Trump represents a group of people that... most legacy media institutions don’t like and don’t respect.” —Drew Holden ([53:05])
• “The bad has fallen away before, we can do that sort of thing again. What we want is a media that the people can believe in.” —Drew Holden ([70:53])

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Notable Segments & Timestamps

• Mark Halperin’s childhood/wiretapping: [08:40]
• Mentorship from Peter Jennings: [22:01]
• On today’s journalistic weaknesses (texting vs. reporting): [35:24]
• Ideal of journalistic public trust: [40:34]
• Beginning of Drew Holden interview: [44:06]
• How media bias is structured and incentivized: [46:56],[48:46],[53:05]
• Press conduct during terrorist obituaries: [63:08]
• Drew Holden’s remedy for legacy media: [60:16],[68:39],[70:53]

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Takeaways

• Mark Halperin’s career is defined by a steadfast commitment to nonpartisan, skeptical, and public-focused journalism—values that, he argues, are rarer among today’s more insular, tech-obsessed, institutionally biased media.
• He credits mentors and personal experiences (including family history and the mentorship of Peter Jennings) as foundational to his worldview.
• Both Halperin and Holden see media bias as multi-layered: not just “liberal,” but establishmentarian and culturally blinkered.
• Robust, honest criticism—exemplified by Holden’s “receipts” approach—remains essential, as is bringing new perspectives into top journalism outfits.
• The episode ends on a note of hope and challenge: fixing media bias will require both institutional reflection and elevation of diverse voices, as well as honest, productive engagement from critics and politicians alike.

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Transcript

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[Emily Drushinski]

Welcome back to Next up, Emily. I'm Emily Drushinski, and for the next segment, things are gonna look a little different. Usually when I'm on this program, I'm the one in the hot seat, but for the moment, we're flipping the script. I am the captain now, as they say, Mark Halperin has spent the better part of four decades as the ultimate fly on the wall of American power. He's been the guy in the room for the biggest moments in modern history. And today, we aren't talking about the news. We're talking about the man behind the news, which every good newsman hates. So it's bound to be a great time. This is a special biographical AMA Ask me anything session. We're going into the origin story, Mark's life in New York and what actually makes him tick when the cameras aren't rolling. So, Mark, you have spent your career being the one with the notepad. I've actually seen you in action before, but today, are you ready to be the one answering the question?

[Mark Halperin]

I'm ready. I've heard a lot of great things about the program, so I'M excited to be part of it and thank you for having me on.

[Emily Drushinski]

Oh, it's a real honor to be here, Mark.

[Mark Halperin]

Thank you for coming around my chat.

[Emily Drushinski]

So talk to us about the Halperin name. This is going to be the first question. Your dad was such a significant figure in foreign policy. You grew up in Bethesda of all places. Was the dinner table just a nonstop seminar on the Pentagon Papers or were you just a regular kid? Maybe a little bit of both, Mark.

[Mark Halperin]

I mean a little bit of both because, you know, although my hometown paper was the Washington Post, my favorite section was the sports section. At least growing up, but definitely I cover politics and government and campaigns. Most of my conversations with my dad and my brothers were about government and about policy. So less who's going to be the next nominee for whatever and more national security policy, economic policy, civil rights. But yeah, I would say, although there was plenty of normal, definitely a heavy dose of policy and kind of Washington seriousness in my childhood.

[Emily Drushinski]

Did you have a moment where you realized who your dad was and like you put that piece into the bigger puzzle of policy and politics?

[Mark Halperin]

You know, he was friends with a lot of reporters, friends with a lot of diplomats, friends with a lot of people in government, some friends with some more famous people. And you know, he worked when I, when I was born, he worked, he taught at Harvard then, then he worked in the Pentagon, then he worked in the White House. So if your dad's office is the Pentagon in the White House, it's pretty clear there's something different going on. That's not a normal, normal experience for a kid. And then probably this, the seminal thing was in, let's see, in when I was about how old would I have been? About eight, we found out our home phone had been wiretapped for 21 months by Nixon and Kissinger. So that initiated a 21 year lawsuit against Nixon, Kissinger, the FBI, a whole bunch of other people that didn't end with the millions of dollars I thought we were going to get. But that lawsuit, being the plaintiff in a lawsuit against a President of the United States and a former Secretary of State, that was omnipresent reality of my childhood.

[Emily Drushinski]

Do you think Nixon had wiretap tapes of you being like, yes, Bob, I will meet you for the basketball?

[Mark Halperin]

They, they did, the FBI did. And, and the poor FBI agents had to actually sit and listen to all these things and then read the transcripts of them. And, and I wasn't on the phone all that much, but my younger brother was friends with a Little girl across the street, and they were like 3 years old during the wiretap, and they would call each other on the phone and look out the window across the street and just look at the window and sort of goo goo gaga back and forth at each other. And when we found out our phone was wiretapped, I wondered how those agents justified their existence on the earth that they had to listen to that incredible

[Emily Drushinski]

last question on this front. Lot of whippersnappers like me come into Washington. You have this unique vantage point because you were in Washington as a kid. So what would you say has changed most about the culture of kind of inside Washington since you were growing up in Bethesda watching your father?

[Mark Halperin]

Well, this doesn't relate to government and politics, but certainly the culture of Washington. One of my favorite lines from President Kennedy, he had a lot of good jokes, but one was that Washington is a city, he said, of northern charm and southern efficiency. And it's still true, as compared to Tokyo, where there's a great service economy and people are super friendly. But. But it's not as true. There are good restaurants. If you go to a dry cleaner or get in a taxi, they don't act like it's their very first day of business, and they don't like their jobs, at least not as much as they did. So I think that's the biggest change. It's. It's a more sophisticated city. It's a more cosmopolitan city. It's a more. It's a city that's more. That caters more to consumers than it did when I was growing up.

[Emily Drushinski]

Okay, I lied. I have one more question on this.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah.

[Emily Drushinski]

Caitlin Flanagan has a great. She wrote a great long piece about once, her father, who was, I think, a professor at Berkeley, bringing Joan Didion to dinner. Is there a memory you have as a kid, Mark? I'm sure there are many, many people, many, many notable figures who came in and out. Is there a memory of someone?

[Mark Halperin]

There's a bunch, but the one. The one I like the most is Daniel Ellsberg was a very close friend of my dad's, and he came out to dinner with us one night, our favorite Chinese restaurant in Bethesda. And then we went elsewhere in the strip mall to the. To the Baskin Robbins. And Dan, who, you know, had lived a very cosmopolitan life, acted like he'd never been to an ice cream parlor before. And like, I ordered bubblegum ice cream, and he's like, huh, could I order bubblegum ice cream? What would that be like? He had a Lot of intellectual questions about the ice cream. And that has always been a running joke in my family about how Daniel Ellsberg didn't really quickly understand the concept of the bubblegum ice cream.

[Emily Drushinski]

That's a very good story. Interesting. All right, let's talk about Harvard. Mark. So when you were at Harvard, were you one of the many Harvard students who's already kind of planning to take over the world, in your case, the world of media and journalism, or was there a version of Mark Halperin that could have become maybe a lawyer or a professor or something else entirely?

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, I wanted to be a lawyer. I studied Japanese in college. Japanese culture and society, and Japan was a very big thing then. So I thought a lot of my family friends when I was growing up were lawyers at big D.C. firms. So I thought I'd be either a diplomat with a law degree or a lawyer working on U.S. japanese business stuff. And that was true. Throughout college. My roommates were all on the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper, the Crimson. And the Crimson is really demanding extracurricular activity. And. And one of them literally flunked out of Harvard, which is hard to do because they try to not have people flunk out because he spent all his time writing newspaper stories. And so I didn't do any student journalism. And then when I got graduated, I wanted to get into journalism, and I had an interview with the ABC News Washington bureau chief, guy named George Watson. And this is the pre Internet day, so if you're get a job interview with someone, it's hard to really look up, look them up in any way. So I didn't know much about him. And so in the interview, he looked at my resume, and he said, so you went to Harvard. Did you write for the school newspaper? And I said no. And I sort of got up on my high horse and I said I had roommates who wrote for the newspaper, and it was just a huge waste of time. And I think in college you should really focus on learning, and then afterwards you can go into journalism. And he looked out the window, he said, huh? It's not the way I felt when I was president of the Crimson. He did not hire me, but someone else did. And I eventually went on to work for him and appreciated his candor with me, But I did not think about journalism at all in college.

[Emily Drushinski]

So what gave you the bug?

[Mark Halperin]

I graduated, didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I was always interested in presidential campaigns. So I graduated in 1987, and the 1988 campaign was sort of underway and. And I thought, well, it'd be interesting to be in a big news organization and sort of see how it works. Again, no Internet, no access to the Associated Press wire. CNN existed, but there was no other cable news. And. And so through family connections, I did get a job with abc, not through George Watson in Washington, but, but here in New York City. And I loved it. I loved it from the first day I, I loved seeing how the news got made back then. Dan Rather, Tom Brokan. Peter Jennings were everything, you know, they were more famous typically, than the presidential candidates they covered. And Peter became my mentor. And from the very first day I got to work with him in the sense that I sat in the newsroom and photocopied and ran script packets around. But I just learned a ton about right away about how the news business worked and got to see 24 hour news again. Pre Internet, but they had telex machines and they had wire services in the computer terminals. And. And although I was interested in covering other stories, the presidential campaign was underway and ABC had made a huge commitment to covering it. They had what were then called all fair reporters. I think There were like 16 presidential candidates in 1988 because it was open race, so there were a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans. And I got to interact with all those young producers who were out in the field. And literally I probably worked there for three weeks and I just said, this is it, this is, this is what I want to do. I want to work for a big news organization like ABC and I want to cover presidential campaigns.

[Emily Drushinski]

Did you have a disastrous early job experience? Like a lot of people who are prominent can tell the story about that one job that was, it was a disaster. And ultimately it teaches you about what you want to do or what you're best at. But did you have that mark early career?

[Mark Halperin]

I've never had a bad job. I had all good jobs, but I did have bad experiences. And one of them was in my very first job. My assignment was to. One of the things I did was there'd be a script. A correspondent would write a script in the computer and they'd print it out and then you'd need to photocopy it and you'd need to make like 70 copies and then make a script packet, right? So the scripts of a show with the. What Peter Jennings would say, what the announcer would say, what the. All the correspondent scripts, it'd be like, I don't know, 50 pages. And yet to assemble them, you had to print them out as they came in and they had to assemble them into 50 page packets, and then he had to run them all over the building because different people needed them. They needed them in the graphics department, the tape department, the control room. They needed them around. World News Tonight. And I have a great sense of direction, normally. I really do. It's one of my probably strongest things. But I could not figure out this building. I would just. I would be. I would be get lost. I'd go down the wrong corridor because it was. It was. It was a. It was a long walk. Like, if you did it without getting lost, going from where World News Tonight was to all the places you needed to drop these script packs, it probably 15 minutes. But I would get lost. And my colleagues thought that was ridiculous and not helpful to the cause. So I got a lot of anxiety about it. And this is my first job. And. And the anxiety did not make me focus and do better. It made me. It made me get more lost. So that was that. Still, as you can tell from the tone in my voice and the little sweat breaking out here, it's still a pretty traumatic experience to me. And then I worked in that building for many years, and I still found it a little confusing, even though, again, I have a very good sense of direction normally.

[Emily Drushinski]

Yes, I did sense you actually having some traumatic flashbacks as you were telling that story. Mark, when you were a young journalist, how aware your. Maybe some of your peer, your mentors, not your peers, how aware were they of your father? How aware were your sources of your father? How did you navigate that? That must have been hard. I'm just thinking about this, really.

[Mark Halperin]

Not some of the. There were a couple of correspondents at abc, a married couple who had been network correspondents for a very long time. Richard Threlkeld and Betsy Aaron. They had been longtime friends of my dad, and they actually helped me get the job interview. So they knew my dad. But, you know, my dad. My dad used to have a button that said, almost famous person. He's not super famous. If you. If you're interested in sort of the parts of history that he touched, you know, he's famous and in Washington, he was. But I was based in New York for most of my career, except for a brief time I was in D.C. most of my colleagues had no idea, and there was no reason for me to flaunt it. And again, the stuff my dad was sort of expert in and big in, not typically stuff that gets covered by the network news. And then when I started covering politics in 91, when I got assigned to Bill Clinton, My dad really was not a big player, except in policy, in presidential politics.

[Emily Drushinski]

Washington and New York might as well be a world apart.

[Drew Holden]

World apart.

[Emily Drushinski]

So you are a workaholic. You're a workhorse. What, though, happens when you close your laptop and you're off? Is there one thing, a hobby, a genre of music, a niche obsession you have that would shock the audience?

[Mark Halperin]

Well, I play with my son, so that crowds out next to everything.

[Emily Drushinski]

Do you love Legos, is what I mean?

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah. He's past Legos though, thank goodness, because I'm not a huge Lego guy. You know, he's got lots of different interests. Right now we're doing very intense thumb fights and I invented a thing where you can take this, this finger and bring it around and say rare, double team and use the other finger to bring him down. So we do a lot of thumb fights. He just learned how to count in Japanese. So I'm very excited about that because I speak a little Japanese. Took it. Took it for many years and only speak a little. And he loves comedy, he loves music, he loves sports. So stuff with him separate from that, you know, if he's busy, if he's doing something and I have free time, I still like sports. Not nearly as much as I used to watching professional college sports. I do that a fair amount. And I like comedy a lot too. I'm really interested in the craft of comedy, so I watch a lot of stand up, I watch a lot of like avant garde type experimental comedy stuff. My friend Noam, who's been on the program, Dwarman, owns the comedy seller. And so I go there and I just, like I said, I like humor like most people, but I like the craft of comedy. I like understanding the cadence of it, the craft of it and, and the production of it, whether it's live or recorded. I'm really interested in that and like to. I'm not a natural broadcaster. I currently host three shows or four shows, but I'm not a natural broadcaster. It's not my strength. Peter Jennings was a great mentor to me and taught me a lot. And I'm so grateful to him because he was one of the greatest broadcasters, I think, literally in the history of television. And he was generous with his time. So one of the things I do you say it's not, it's. It's not my spare time, it's work. But I really am fascinated by great broadcasters, whether they're comedians or musicians or news people. And so I, I study the. I like studying the craft both of performance and then Also of production.

[Emily Drushinski]

How hard was the loss of Peter Jennings for you, Mark?

[Mark Halperin]

Really hard. Peter, as I said, was my mentor and so generous to me, and I could tell you a million stories I won't about all the things he did for me. I did a lot for him, too. We worked really well together. He had a great competition with Brokaw and Rather. And again, if you're a younger person, it's hard to appreciate they were just such titans. They were head and shoulders above every other journalist in terms of their fame and their influence. And those two guys had covered American politics. Dan was from Texas. Tom was from South Dakota. Peter was from Canada. So they had. They were. They were Americans and they were rather than North Americans, and they had covered presidential campaigns. Peter really hadn't. He'd mostly been a foreign correspondent, so he needed help, you know, navigating the personalities and all that. And. And I. I was, you know, honored and delighted to be able to be part of his team, to help him do that. And he supported my career, not just as a broadcaster, but. But helped me get the job I'd wanted from early in my career to be the political director. He lived right across the street from me. I could actually see his apartment from the window of my apartment. And. And I really, you know, ABC was very competitive then. Bruno, legendary president of ABC News, said basically he was going to build the best news division with the biggest stars and that their competition was not going to be NBC and cbs, but. But each other. And so Peter competed fiercely with Ted Koppel and Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters for bookings and stories and access to the best correspondence. And I was a Peter person. And even though when I was political director, I was supposed to work for all the shows and all the anchors, I was a Peter person. So that's the predicate of why he meant so much to me. And again, I could tell you a million stories about working with him and just how extraordinary it was. I'll just say the night of the 2000 election, we were in Times Square Broadcasting, and everybody was saying that Gore won and then that Bush won, and. And then. And then when Bush got Florida, everybody's saying, it's over. Bush won. And Peter really trusted me to say, no, don't say it. Yeah, everybody else is going to say it. Don't say it. And sadly, I haven't been able to find the full coverage that we did on YouTube or anywhere else. I should probably go to some archive and get it. But I. And I didn't. I wasn't watching the competitors. But I know from, from some of the accounts I've been given, we really were more willing to stand up to our decision desk and the polling and the sort of the conventional wisdom and say it's not fair to say that Bush won. MARK halpern, we haven't talked about it for many hours. The possibility of tampering with the vote, of fraudulent voting is very alive in the party's minds. We're talking again, as we said earlier in the evening, over a hundred million transactions in all likelihood by the end of the night. In terms of how many people voted, there are mistakes made. All of us know when you go and vote, sometimes there's something wrong that's just accidents. Every election there's some sort of fraud. It may not be, almost certainly, I would say say not directed by the two presidential campaigns, but you've got local races where people are trying to help themselves. Goes on all the time in American politics. This time, unlike 1960, again, I think the lawyers will want to at least take a look at it. A slight flaw in the great democratic experiment. Thank you very much. We'll be back to continue our coverage of election 2000 in just a moment. That night really bonded us quite a bit because I had pushed him to not do what the others were doing and he had trusted me and we had we would been somewhat rewarded for it, although we should have been more rewarded in any event. Then 911 happened and on the day of 911 I woke up in New York City and I had meetings in Washington. So I took the 6am flight from New York to D.C. before the planes hit. And so I'm one of the few people who were in both cities on 911 and Peter was here and I was desperate to get back to be with my wife, but also to, to be sitting on the set with Peter. And I couldn't get back for a couple days. And so that was very frustrating. And then as you may not know, may know, he started smoking again after 911 because of all the pressure and anxiety and, and you know, the, the, the, the impact of it. He had smoked when he was younger, but like most sensible people, he'd stopped. And so probably a longer answer than you wanted, but no, I'm so glad I asked this. One of the reasons it's, it's still very tough on me is he got sick and he had to go for medical treatment and I never really got to say goodbye to him because no one knew when he left abruptly to go deal with his health that he would Never come back. Not only not come back on the air, but not come back to be seen. And he wasn't talking to anybody. He lost his voice almost entirely. And, you know, you think about incredibly famous, powerful, rich, handsome, extraordinary voice. And that's how I had experienced him, as everyone had experienced him. And then the cancer took him so quickly and so thoroughly that the only reason I was one of the few people allowed to talk to him is I was going away to Japan on a fellowship and that, you know, I forget exactly what happened, but the thought was, Peter wants to talk to you before you go because you're going away for three months and he'd like to talk to you. So we had a very short phone call, very emotional. He sounded. I can't imitate it and I can't really describe it that well, but didn't sound like himself. It was weak, almost. Almost comical, almost like a Disney character, this person who had had this incredible broadcaster voice. We talked very briefly. He said, I know you're going to Japan. I think you're gonna have a great time. You know, you haven't. You haven't been overseas enough, you know, to, you know, because he was big on how. How he teased me about how little foreign coverage I had done. I had done next to none. And. And he thought that was a hole in my. In my resume. So very short call, very weird to hear his voice that way. And that was it. Never talked to him again. He died shortly thereafter. And. And. And I'm haunted by two things. One is I. It's hard for me to conjure up. I had a thousand conversations with thousands of conversations. It's hard for me to conjure up any of them because when I try to, I just think about that one horrible last call and how. How his voice sounded. And then the other thing is. And this is obviously very common when you lose someone is, you know, for years after, because I lived right. I lived right next door to him across the street, and. And we. We lived two blocks from abc, so I'd see him all the time for a long time. I would think I'd see him in the neighborhood. I would. I would imagine I would see someone. I'd imagine be Peter or I. Or I'd think I'm going to turn around and he'd be there. So you can tell it's still hard for me. And although other people have helped me in my career and. And I've had other people who've. Who've been a really positive impact on me and generous with Helping me. No one close since in, in terms of how much, how much he helped me and, and what a. What a aberration it was. And, and I'll say, just because I'm telling you the whole story now. Peter was pretty tough on people. He was pretty tough on colleagues and correspondents and, and he'd make people cry, you know, because. Because he was so powerful and famous and demanding. He was so nice to me. And part of why I was resented by some of my colleagues was because it was like, why was Peter so nice to me? And it was a unique relationship in my career and in my life. And I think all the time about what he would think about next stop and what he would think about two way and what he would think about the fact that I became a broadcaster. I'm not as good at being a broadcaster as I am at about 20 other things, maybe 50 other things. But to the extent I'm a decent broadcaster, it's because of Peter.

[Emily Drushinski]

Mark, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry to dredge that up, but I'm really glad you shared because I found that very interesting.

[Drew Holden]

Sure.

[Emily Drushinski]

Heavy stuff. Well, we were just talking about you going abroad from New York and you've been in New York forever. But if you did have to pack up and live somewhere else in the world with no professional obligations attached to it, where would you go? Would it be Japan? Would it be somewhere else?

[Mark Halperin]

It's Tokyo or London, it's probably Tokyo. But if you said it was forever, it'd probably be London. Just because my Japanese is not great and I find being in other countries where I can't speak the language, I can't watch tv, I can't eavesdrop, I can't ask anybody for anything. Directions. I can't order everything on the menu easily. I just find that a little alienating. So it'd be London. But if it was for just for a few years, it'd be Tokyo. I. I love Tokyo. I love, love, love Tokyo. I love all of Japan. But it would be to. Excuse me, it would be Tokyo.

[Emily Drushinski]

When did that start for you? When you were a kid, you became.

[Mark Halperin]

My dad did a lot of stuff with Japan when he was in the government. So we had Japanese people around us. We would eat Japanese food. And then in high school, just a fluke con. Confluence of three things. One is my family's connection to Japan. Two is Japan was a really hot story. That kind of the way China is now. Just. There was a book called Japan is Number One. They bought Lincoln center or Rockefeller Center. And it seemed like just as now, a lot of people frame the future of the United States as an existential struggle with China, back then it was existential struggle with Japan. Even though Japan was, was our ally and we had a strong relationship with them, their economic model and their cultural influence seemed like it was going to be something the United States was going to have to grapple with. And then third. And this really was an essential element. The woman who was the head of the language department at my high school was a French teacher, but she as a young woman had been one of General MacArthur's translators in Japan during the immediate aftermath of World War II. And so she decided, given all the interest in Japan, to start teaching Japanese. So from 10th, 11th, 12th grade in high school, public high school, I took Japanese and, and that helped me get into Harvard, I'm sure, because I was probably one of the few people who applied who had Japanese and that was considered the way Arabic is now or, or Mandarin is now as something valuable and not very common amongst high school students. And, and I just, I just stayed involved in, and I've been there, I've been there 30 times or so and I just, just love everything about it.

[Emily Drushinski]

That's. Wow, 30 times. That's a long trip for 30. Mark. This is a trillion dollar question. I'm increasing it from million to trillion because of inflation. This is the ultimate question about mark Halperin. After 40 years of being the ultimate referee of, of the American political process, do you actually lean one way or the other politically or have you truly managed to kind of scrub the rooting interest out of your system?

[Mark Halperin]

I mean, I have views about things and some positions that would maybe put me more left or right, but I really think my obligation is as a member of this small group of people is to hold all powerful interests accountable to the public interest and to keep my opinions out of it. You know, there's asymmetries that sometimes cause people to think I'm one or the other. The dominant media is liberally biased. They're not conservatively biased. They're not sometimes liberally biased. They're liberally biased. So I call that out. But there are people and people, not just in social media, but people who know me well, who are Republicans who say I'm liberal and Democrats who say I'm conservative. So I'm really not, it's not a game, it's not a trick, it's not a, it's not a, it's not some hide the ball effort. I just, I'm Assiduously interested in holding everybody accountable, telling everybody's story. And. And I really do defy anyone. Some people say to me, I watch your show and you're. You're such a big liberal. Or I watch your show and you're such a big conservative. And I do the same thing every time. I say, give me some specifics, show me something I said that makes you feel confident that you know my politics. And I never get any response that's credible. So there are individual things I say or even believe that I think we cause someone to say. Well, on that issue, you seem to have a point of view, but mostly I'm just for everybody and against everybody. I'm just for holding everybody accountable and trying to help all voters and all citizens understand the stories and the personalities of our time.

[Emily Drushinski]

You have seen generations of reporters come and go.

[Mark Halperin]

Mostly go, mostly go.

[Emily Drushinski]

In your view, though, what is the most dangerous process trap that you've seen young political reporters today falling into that actually will obscure the truth rather than revealing it?

[Mark Halperin]

Oh, don't talk to anybody. All the young reporters do is text people, or I am them. And, and I mean, picking up the phone. Forget it. But really, forget it. Okay, Grandma, go see someone. Go see someone in person.

[Emily Drushinski]

Yeah.

[Mark Halperin]

Go to their office, talk to their assistant, talk to their colleagues like that. To me, I deal with all these young reporters. They just, like, it's unheard that they can't imagine what it means to talk to someone in person. Oh, no. I can IM them on any of a thousand social media platforms. I mean, it works for some things, but I can just tell you the best sources I've had in my career. I've met most of them, some of them I haven't, but I've met most of them. And so that'd be. That's easily number one for me. I'm trying to think of anything that would come close to that. The other thing is storytelling. Like, people aren't interested in process stories. There's all this coverage, oh, when's the next hearing going to be? Or whatever. Like, real people don't care about that. They care about characters and storytelling. So whatever your beat, whatever your platform, tell great stories with great characters. And. And again, a lot of younger reporters and older reporters, they don't seem to understand that.

[Emily Drushinski]

Well, actually, on that point, has your definition of, quote, success changed from when you were the king of the Note in your 30s to where you are now? What does a kind of good day look like for Mark Halperin in 20 as a journalist?

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, no, it hadn't changed at all. Two things. Hold powerful interests accountable to all. Hold all powerful interests accountable to the public interest and tell the great stories of our time in an interesting way. Hasn't changed at all. It's what I was doing at the beginning of my career. It's what I do now. And, And. And to make sure there are a lot of jokes.

[Emily Drushinski]

Yeah, well, that's important. But don't you think there are a lot of reporters who are kind of. They may not be conservative or liberal or progressive or whatever, but they are sort of institutionalists, and that pushes them to be more deferential to power than reporters of your generation were just trained naturally to be skeptical of. I feel like maybe that's. It's not a partisanship because there's not a party of power.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, but it's.

[Emily Drushinski]

There's something about that.

[Mark Halperin]

Well, I definitely think that's a problem. I'm not sure it's a bigger problem now. It may be less of a problem now because the institutional bias is not as pernicious in some ways as the liberal bias. But not understanding America is a huge problem. I put that as a corollary to go see people in person, which is realize that not all wisdom in America is found or all great stories are found in Washington and New York. I've covered politics in all 50 states, and not many reporters have. The reason I knew Donald Trump might win in 2016 was because I went to Trump rallies in more than 30 states and talked to voters in all of them. So there is an institutional bias towards the establishment, towards, you know, the wealthy. Most reporters have health insurance. Not all, but most do. And so they don't understand fully what that means to not have health insurance if you've got a kid in particular. Most reporters don't experience illegal immigration in a way that is negative in their lives. Not all, but most. Most reporters don't know someone who's died from a fentanyl overdose. Right. So that establishment bias, that bias towards wealth. Well connected. It's always been around. So, like I said, I'm not sure. I think it's new, but it's definitely pernicious, and it's definitely something that's given me an advantage. And there's an irony there, of course, because I grew up in Washington in privilege. I went to Harvard in privilege. I live in Manhattan. But I think I do a good job of thinking relentlessly about what's going on in the rest of the country.

[Emily Drushinski]

Yeah, I can say where that would actually be an advantage. We know the types of people that you respect in politics. Who is the person in your life, maybe outside of your family, who gave you a piece of advice or inspiration that changed the way you treat people?

[Mark Halperin]

Change the way I treat people. A lot of people with the negative examples.

[Drew Holden]

Yeah, that'd be easy.

[Mark Halperin]

You know Charlie Gibson, who also was a mentor of mine at ABC and longtime anchor of Good Morning America. Charlie is very famous, very powerful, great journalist. He treated people, everyone, in such a lovely way. Unlike some network anchors, he treated everyone in such a lovely way. Always had time to talk to them, always spoke to his fans, asked them questions, made them feel good, and. And I should have learned the lesson more thoroughly from Charlie than I did. But he set a great example for me, and it's very resonant for me now.

[Emily Drushinski]

So if 50 years from now, people don't remember a single poll that you analyzed or a single book that you wrote, what is one character trait you would want your kids and colleagues to remember you for?

[Mark Halperin]

Mark, Again, I'll just always go back to Great Dad. But that's probably not what you mean, that journalism, particularly, including, particularly journalism, including political journalism, is a public trust. And you can't do it for fun or because it's interesting to elites. You have to do it to help the country understand itself and do better. And I've really tried to do that my whole career. I don't always succeed. And I like fun stories, too. But really trying to be respectful of the role the founders saw for journalists, the key role, and live up to the obligation to do it correctly, I

[Emily Drushinski]

think Great dad would have been an acceptable answer, too. Mark.

[Mark Halperin]

Okay, well, that's more important to me for sure.

[Emily Drushinski]

Well, Mark Halbrin, appreciate you sharing today. This has been very, very interesting, and I know the audience is going to love it. So thanks for doing it.

[Mark Halperin]

Grateful to you. Thank you for sitting in. And my recommendation now would be, I'll take it up with Megan Kelly, is that you should do every other show you should host. We'll book it for you. Just you should host every other show. You don't have enough to do.

[Emily Drushinski]

Oh, well, hey, I'm just here in my house, so anytime you all need me, I'm here. But I'll gladly pass the baton back to you, Mark.

[Mark Halperin]

All right, Emily, thank you again. Very grateful to you for joining us. Making the show. This will probably be our Emmy episode would be my guess. We'll submit it for your consideration. Grateful to Emily. Grateful to you for watching. And Emily, of course, is the host of After Party with Emily Jasinski. It's on MK Media. What night's you on now? Emily Mondays and Mondays and Wednesdays 9pm Mondays and Wednesdays 9pm you can watch it live on YouTube or on demand. And of course there's a podcast on Apple Spotify and like with all of our programming now on Sirius XM Channel 111, the Megyn Kelly Channel. Emily, super grateful to you. Thank you.

[Emily Drushinski]

Thank you, Mark.

[Mark Halperin]

All right, next up, Drew Holden, managing editor of Commonplace, the author of Holden Court two Great Substacks. Drew Holden is next up. Going online without ExpressVPN is like printing your Social Security number right on your business card. You're just putting way too much personal information out there for bad actors to exploit using a vpn. It's essential when connecting to unencrypted networks in cafes, hotels, airports, or anywhere where your online data can be exposed to hackers who target passwords, bank logins, credit card details and more. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet with reliable coverage across all your devices. That includes phones, laptops, tablets and more. U.S. plans also include their Identity Defender. It's a new suite of tools to get your data removed from data brokers, alert you when your data appears on the dark web, and ensures you against data theft for up to $1 million. Offered now at their lowest price ever planned start at just $3.49 a month. So secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com NextUp again, that's exp r e s s v p n.com NextUp to find out how you can get up to four extra months again. ExpressVPN.com NextUp behind every health care statistic is a person's face paying the price.

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We see you. There are countless reasons to learn a new language. Whether you have an upcoming trip planned or you simply want to learn a new skill. Rosetta Stone breaks down your new language into bite sized pieces and focuses on speaking practice or real conversations. Rosetta Stone's True Accent feature even helps you perfect your pronunciation. I mean pronunciation. Visit RosettaStone.com today. Rosetta Stone How Language is learned. All right, welcome back. Next up and joining me now, Drew Holden. He's the managing editor of Commonplace, the author of Holden Court. Both excellent substacks which I recommend to you. And Drew and I talk about the questions of around the media, particularly as questions of bias in the media quite a bit. And always glad to reconnect to do it again and talk about not just the problem, but the solution. Drew, welcome and thank you for being here.

[Drew Holden]

Mark. The pleasure of mine, sir. I really appreciate you having me back on.

[Mark Halperin]

You are. And every time we appear together on any, any show, I say this, you are one of the best analysts of the media and particularly liberal bias, because you do it with receipts, as the kids say, and you do it with that rancor and you don't go for the cheap score. I remember early in my career, the Brent Bozell organization, what do they call Media Research Center, Research Center. This was pre Internet, pre social media. They had a newsletter that they did that came out, I don't know, monthly hard copy showed up in the mail. And they were indiscriminate in my view. Some of the things they called out, dead on. Some of them were just cheap and inaccurate. And we used to do fact checks at ABC after debates or big speeches. And I had the same problem. That's just like if one candidate in the debate lies 100 times about serious stuff and one tells two trivial lies, don't do a segment that says, here's two lies from candidate A and here's two lies from candidate B, like, have some standards. And part of why I just think you're so talented at this is I read all your stuff and it's always fair. It's not cherry picked, it's not exaggerated, it's not out of context. It's just, it is what it is and it's done with great sophistication. So I'm just so impressed with how you do it. And you have colleagues who do it too, who do it the wrong way and you do it the right way. So grateful to you as a consumer for that.

[Drew Holden]

I appreciate that, Mark. I think you are, as ever, are being far too charitable about what I choose to pick and what I write about. But it's kind of you and I do. You know, I'll say one of the things that I think is so wrong and so much of media criticism and one of the reasons why we talk about so many of these issues so frequently is that the cherry picking is easy, right? The nut picking, as former Senator Ben Sasse calls It just picking the worst examples of your opponent doing something wrong and bad. It's going to score clicks, it's going to drive eyeballs, it's going to get attention. It's not going to solve anything. Right. And I think at Bedrock, I'm really, really honestly concerned we're trying to make the media better, and I think by doing, by taking media criticism in a different direction and trying to focus more earnestly on the sort of things that, that ail it, maybe in ways it doesn't understand, is, is, is way more valuable.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, we, we could go through and we'll talk about some examples, but we could go through. If you and I sat together, read the New York Times or watched the Today show, we'd find a million examples. And some of them are extremely subtle. Word choice, what's not included, how far down something is. But some of them are not subtle at all. The fact that Melania Trump has never been on the COVID of Vogue, it's not subtle. There's nothing subtle about that. It's definitely not that she's not pretty enough. It's definitely not that she's not. Doesn't have a glamorous job. It's definitely not that they've never put a political figure on the COVID of Vogue. So that one's not subtle, as you understand it. And I've worked in newsrooms more than you have, but you're a great student of this and you talk to a lot of people as you understand it. And I get asked this all the time. And as, as much as I think about these things, I don't know the answer fully. Where does this come from? What generates ridiculous, subtle or big things? Is it, Is it. Well, just break it down. Where does it come from? The liberal media bias.

[Drew Holden]

So I think, particularly in the last decade or so, so much of it has come from the way the media thinks about Donald Trump in, like, the private of their own mind. Right. It's not just, I don't think it's necessarily a newsroom dynamic or conversational sort of thing, but I think you have this kind of monochromatic mentality around the way members of the media see Donald Trump, his movement and people who support him. And I think there's all sorts of problems with that. But where media is concerned, I think one of the biggest problems is that that sort of thinking, right, that kind of impulse, gut feeling about where someone is morally is, I think, leading their coverage. As soon as things happen, as soon as events happen, before facts are known, before the dust is Settled. There is this almost ironclad belief that something bad happens. Donald Trump is the culprit, directly or indirectly. Maybe there's more research that needs to be done to figure out how he's connected to it. But somehow he is at the heart of this. He is the problem. He is what is driving this, whatever this new horrible thing is. And I think that's the fundamental problem. But a connected problem to all of that is I don't think the media sees it. Right. I think, I know you've had a lot of conversations with members of the media who say we're not actually interested in conditioning our coverage to a liberal audience. That's just the audience that we have right at the Washington Post. We're not fact checking because we think that's what liberals want to hear. It's just that those are the facts and those are our readers. We connect the two. And so I think the media's really, really blinkered in the way that it thinks about all these issues. The way. And it's self understanding. Right. I think the media doesn't get that it's doing this. And it tries sometimes really, really hard to not do that in some of these kind of apocal moments where like Barry Weiss got hired at the New York Times in 2016 because the newsroom kind of woke up after the election, said, oh, we don't get something here. We fundamentally don't understand half this country and the way they vote and the things they care about. And then they forgot three weeks later when Trump said or did something they didn't like. And I'm worried that for the last 10 years, we've just repeated cycles of that and you don't have any real attempt from media, from outlets, from individuals to really reckon with the fact that their views are radically different from lots of people and that they are obsessed, absolutely obsessed with the person of Donald Trump and all those people connected to him.

[Mark Halperin]

I almost never take notes for a variety of reasons. I wish I'd taken notes during that answer because there's like a 40 things you said I want to pick up on. But I remember the big ones.

[Drew Holden]

They're yours. They're yours.

[Mark Halperin]

There was, there was liberal media bias against previous Republicans before Donald Trump. But you are right that Trump, like, he's done with so much of our political media culture. He supercharged it. But here's, here's the confusion to me, at least partly, Trump's gotten great political coverage pre being a candidate. He got great coverage. He got a lot of coverage. He, he Understands the media really well. He solicits the media. Donald Trump, I recite this all the time because it's so illustrative of his mentality and the mentality of the press before he became president. Donald Trump, during the transition in 2016, gets elected in November. During the transition, he went and did editorial board meetings at the New York Times and Conde Nasty. Yep, that's, that's nuts. No Republican would do that. No president would. No president elect would do that. So the media loved Trump. Trump loved the media. And in 2016, although there was Access Hollywood and plenty of negative coverage, I really do think Trump got, on balance, more favorable coverage than Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton would agree with me. So this guy who was able to get all this positive coverage for a long time, then gets elected, goes to Conde Nast, goes to the New York Times, and then is a great story. And there's liberal media bias, there's establishment bias, there's a bias towards great stories. Even liberal reporters love great stories. So why is it that shortly after taking office, Donald Trump started to get the most negative and most biased coverage against him? What, what happened to that guy who had relationships with the media, who the media loved, producing great content for them? How could they suddenly start to treat him differently?

[Drew Holden]

Yeah, it's a good question. So I think it comes down to two things. The first is that he was a threat to the institution of the media and kind of a lot of old, you know, old guard institutions across the United States that the media is very bound up in. Right. If Donald Trump comes in and says he wants to, you know, throw out these, these kind of esteemed institutions that have set America on this kind of comfortable trajectory for a lot of upper middle class and upper, upper class people, I think they, on like an individual level felt threatened by that. Right. And so I think that's one angle of it. The other angle that I think is really, really important is that the media recognize and at least continues to believe, even as the powers diminish a little bit, that there is nothing that is going to drive more attention to them than by being critical of what Donald Trump does. Right. He is a phenomenon, I think, to the media beyond being the person. Right. And what he represents isn't just a president, it isn't just the Republican Party. It isn't just a changing kind of system in trade or in foreign relations or in military or in anything else. He represents a group of people that I think at bedrock. Most people in the legacy media and most legacy institutions don't like and don't respect and don't care about. And there's been a cheapening, I think, in the years since of what that looks like. Right. You had the 20. What was the 2024 GOP convention? Was that the forgotten man? And I think there's a lot of kind of astroturfing around that of people who are like, well, now there is political cachet to saying we care about these people. And so we are going to put on a good show of saying that we care about these people when it's not true. But I think the, the media at no point recognize that what the other half of the country who didn't think like them, who didn't go to the schools that they went to, who doesn't go to the dinner parties that they go to, that doesn't have the same, you know, the same kind of cocktail conversations that they have, sees this man not as the opposite side of a coin, but as something fundamentally different to that coin altogether. And so the media, I think, has tried to take on this thing that is Trump, ride the dragon, a little bit of trying to figure out the ways that they can monetize from him, the way they can combat him, that will be attractive to the audiences. They're still trying to do that, but he ceased to be any sort of embodied person in their mind, I think, in the years since then. And that's what explains, I think, their approach to covering him.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, if Drew Holden sounds like he's making sense to you, amongst other things, besides subscribing to his substacks, follow him on X, because his X account is where he'll often unfurl his famous threads, a series of tweets with the receipts that show an example of bias. So Drew will say, donald Trump just walked on water, similar to the way Barack Obama walked on water. Let's see how various news organizations covered Obama walking on border versus Trump walking on water. When I read these threads again, I'm always impressed by how rigorous they are, how fair minded. You don't, you don't gild the lily. You just say, here's what they said. You let the receipt speak for themselves. And I know exactly how Chris La Civita or Caroline Levitt or anyone in MAGA or anyone with a brain, fair minded brain. I know how they're reading those. They're reading them exactly the way I am, which is. This is shocking, but not surprising. This is par for the course. Do you ever hear from the news organizations or the specific reporters whose work you are putting in sharp relief as being blatantly unfair. And if so, what do they do? They say, well, yeah, that was unfair, or do they push back? How do the people you critique, when you hear from them, how do they respond?

[Drew Holden]

Yeah, I get asked that a lot, Mark. I think there was a period of time during COVID in particular, where everyone was kind of in their own little silos, where I'd hear more regularly from the people who wrote for the outlets I was critical of or whose colleagues I was critical of. And they would say, thank you.

[Mark Halperin]

Right?

[Drew Holden]

Like, this is. I don't know why we published this. I don't know why we went with this headline. I don't know why we framed this story this way. And I appreciate you calling it out. And I think one of the other things to your point, again, I don't want to toot my own horn here too much, but I think one of the values of the receipts is that I'm not trying to imbue. I'm trying to avoid imbuing my own personal perspective in what these headlines say or what they might say or how they might be taken. And I think where my threads are the worst is when I try and do that, right? When I try and really read into it. I'm trying to hold up a mirror to these outlets, these reporters, these editors, and say, look at this. And a lot of times, in the light of day, right? Two years later, three years later, a lot of it post Covid has been, look what you wrote. At this time, I'm actually working on a piece to try and explain this more broadly of, look how lost we were. You were. Your outlet was. What do you have to say for yourself in retrospect? And why haven't you said that publicly? Otherwise, Right? And so for a period of time, I'd have people who would come up to me and they would ask. They come up to me, they would DM me and say, thank you. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. Every so often, I get pushback from editors on the pieces that would say, well, you know, that's not what they meant. And I think that's what speaks to the benefit of the screenshots, Right? This is what you said. These are your words. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. I think media criticism on the right has failed for a long time, has failed to break through with media outlets in large part because we did try and put words in their mouth. We did try and extrapolate from ideas and headlines and thoughts, things that weren't necessarily fair, or even if they were fair, the people in the room would not think they were fair. The editor who wrote that headline would not think it's fair. And so I did get a little bit of that. But it's been interesting in the last few years that I've had a considerable drop off from everyone but those individual reporters. So people who will DM me and say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing this up, thank you for flagging this topic. And I'm always trying to tell them in as subtle and kind of a way as I can, please talk, have this conversation with your editor too. I appreciate you saying nice things about me, but if we're going to try and shift this thing so that the product of journalism is something that the American people can rely on, you've got to have those conversations. Yeah, I can't.

[Mark Halperin]

Joe Kahn ever runs the New York Times. He's my college classmate. I don't know him all that well. But he's not a crazy liberal. He's a fair minded guy. And we've seen in some of his public comments that he's made, he doesn't talk often, but a suggestion that he gets it, that the New York Times doesn't want to be liberally biased. And yet it is because it's so powerful and because they are liberally biased so insidiously and so often, it is exhibit A almost always. And, and so two questions. One is, let's say Joe, here's this episode because we name checked him and the algorithm picks it up at his PR department, says, you got to watch this. And he says, I want that Drew Holden in here and I want him to address me and all the top editors here with the goal of stamping out the perception that we are liberally biased here. What would that Professor Holden's course consist of?

[Drew Holden]

Yeah, that's a good question. I would start by saying, you know, longtime reader, really like you guys, your newspaper when it does good things. First time caller, I have some concerns here what I wish they would do. I think there's two big things I wish they would do. One is, and I know they've tried this before and I know it failed miserably before. Actually a piece a little while ago in the Washington examiner about yellow journalism and how I think today's era of yellow journalism, of misleading and bad reporting might end. And I think the rise of the New York Times when it first came into, you know, wide circulation and well known, kind of a, you know, a household Name was because it was pushing back on yellow journalism at the time, which is partisan reporting. It's, you know, trying to take little interesting details and make them these big explosive stories. I think the New York Times has a unique position in the institution of media to do a step back and say, we are not doing this thing well. And even if we think we're doing it well, we're not doing it in a way that the people trust and that 26% metric or wherever the legacy media is at with their trust among the American people, that should hit him and his editors with more force than anyone else in this country. That they should. They should take that survey and print it up in the walls in the newsroom and say, how do we fix this? And I wish they would try and do that is point one. Point two is I think they need more diverse viewpoints in their newsroom because as much as they can say this, as much as they can say, well, we want to get back to, you know, doing that kind of reporting that we could. As much as we want to be more down the middle on reporting, what they really need is to have more people in the room who will stick up a hand and say, this is wrong. This is not the right way to frame it. This is inaccurate, or to hold your horses. We shouldn't go out with this story so quickly. We shouldn't be the first ones in print to say that, you know, this. This thing that happened that was bad was the fault of Donald Trump or the fault of anyone's right. We shouldn't. We are uniquely positioned to say, we don't have to run for the clicks, we don't have to run for the headlines, that we don't have to run for the ad dollars. We can be, you know, the actual judges of all the news that's fit to print. And I wish they would do that.

[Mark Halperin]

So one thing that occurs during war is not just war, but you saw it with bin Laden. You see it now in the context of the Iranian conflict. They write these obits or these bios of. Of. Of horrible people, and they. The headlines or the lead paragraphs or even any paragraph, you know, oh, he loved poetry. Oh, he was a. You know, he was a community leader. You know, the one I. The one I wrote on Twitter the other day to parody this is Hungry about Jeffrey Dahmer. Hungry Wisconsin man has troubled relations with neighbors.

[Drew Holden]

Yeah.

[Mark Halperin]

How does that happen? Because. Because when it's happened for years, and when it happens, people are outraged, and rightfully so. How could that happen? How could an editor sign off on a headline of, you know, calling, calling a terrorist who's killed Americans. You know, spiritual leader with great influence.

[Drew Holden]

Yeah, it's, it's funny, you know, that this is actually how I started doing the threats. It was back when I'm forgetting his name, the, the old radio host Don Imus. When Don Imus died, he was torched in the media. And I thought to myself, well, why are they doing this and do they always do this? And so I went and I looked at some really awful people who had also recently died. Terrorists. You know, Al Baghdadi had just been killed. He was the, I think a revered scholar, was how the Washington Post described him. When Soleimani, the Iranian general was killed, I think the New York Times headline was something like powerful mastermind killed by Trump. And I think, I think applied to those sorts of people, which almost universally are terrorists and other evil figures. They did it for Castro in Cuba too. It's. They don't want to appear as if, even though we know all the facts, even though we know all the information, we don't want to be dancing on somebody's grave. We don't want to be taking the death of someone as an excuse to punch down at them. In this case literally. I think probably punch down at them because that would be mean spirited or bad or would lack the kind of context of why other people might see them differently. And I really do believe the media believes that. Like, I really do think they see that Soleimani is dead. Like they see Soleimani gets killed. They see these giant funerary processions in the streets and they are earnestly asking the questions, why is he so liked by all these people? Maybe we don't understand them. It is the only time I think the media is willing to look at someone who they otherwise don't agree with and say maybe we should take more seriously their concerns. And I think one of the reasons that they do it is because it does kick up these weird firestorms where they get all the wrong people, or in their book, all the right people saying all sorts of mean things about them. And they're, and they can stand back and say, you know, with their, their kind of clipboard in their lab coat and say, we just did it the way we're supposed to. And it is mind bending that that only happens when it's a terrorist and not when it's like, I don't know, a conservative radio host.

[Mark Halperin]

Right. And I miss, of course, wasn't particularly conservative. I'll just I'll just say, I mean he, he, he was not as Liberal as some J.D. vance. There's all in every realm of politics and media, there's what's, what happens after Trump and nobody knows and I stay away from it. But Trump understands the media. Trump has in the last four years leading up to getting elected benefited, I believe, net net from negative coverage because he's turned the negative coverage into a plus for him. And people come on two way all the time during the campaign and said, I hate Trump, I don't like Trump, but I gotta vote for Trump to send a message to the media above, above the prosecutors, above the economy. So in my perfect paradigmatic America, my nirvana America, the press isn't liberally biased and Republicans no longer make hay out of saying we are. Because I just don't, I just, that's not good. I don't even need to explain why the press is still liberally biased. I look at J.D. vance, I don't think he understands the media quite as well as Trump does. Because Trump is, you know, because I don't think anyone. Yeah, but, but Vance understands it. You know, he was a CNN commentator, he has tons of friends who are journalists. He's a brilliant guy. So I, I would put him, I would put him right below Trump and ahead of almost every other Republican, including ones who go on conservative media or social media and attack the press to raise money and to score points with the base. They all do it. But Vance does it in a very sophisticated way. He also seems to have an extraordinary hair trigger to bring up liberal media bias. He went in the briefing room a few weeks ago, I forget the occasion, and his first framing was, well, liberal media bias, I think it was on Minnesota and the fraud there. And so he seems to either add some combination of principle and instinct and exploitation. He really turns to this thing. So here's my question. In the context of him maybe wanting to run for president, what's the right way for him and for America for Vance to approach this? In other words, he doesn't seem to really. Although he says to the press, you do better, he really doesn't seem to actually mean it. I think he wants to exploit it and he's certainly not giving them any constructive help. So if you're J.D. vance, if you're advising J.D. vance to say, Mr. Vice President, Mark, and I think your goal should be to make the media better rather than to wallow, you know, in a positive way and exploit their badness, what should he be doing if he wants to get to be president, but also actually change the coverage so it's not as negative because they don't like him.

[Drew Holden]

They don't. They certainly don't. And you know, I think one of the reasons I think he has an excellent sense of smell on this in the same way that Trump does. And I think Vance is probably more not battle tested, but he's probably more studied in the lead up to his national elevation in the way the press talks about things.

[Mark Halperin]

Right.

[Drew Holden]

He had a book tour of a bestselling book. And I think a lot of that goes into like, how are people thinking about me and the things I'm saying and how it is different from the things other people are saying. And so I think that gives him a unique insight into this sort of thing. If I were advising him to win the presidency, I would probably say keep doing this thing. It strikes a chord with American voters

[Mark Halperin]

and it would allow.

[Drew Holden]

I know, and it pains me to say, but I've got a follow up to it I think will pain you less. I would have to say keep doing this thing. It resonates with voters. If he got, you know, once he got there, hopefully he's become the president United States, he's got to deal with it. I think I'm becoming more sympathetic to the accelerationist idea of the media, of we should recognize that there are lots of people and lots of entities out there who are capable of reporting this thing, reporting on all the things that are happening in this country, all the things that matter. What all of our efforts I think should increasingly be directed at is breaking the cathedral of legacy media. And so if I were advising this president, I'd say go talk to like the Baltimore Banner here in like the D.C. area rather than, rather than Politico. Right. Or Washington Post. Go talk to not us, who hopefully will change their name sometime soon because it is a very bizarre name for a media institution. But go talk to them. Rather than talking to cnn, talk to these people outside of the legacy media. Like, yes, you can make hay, yes, you can have these fights. Yes, they will redound to your benefit of the minds of voters. Because no matter what they're reporting on, they will go overboard. And you can just point to the overboard and say, look at these lunatics. You can't possibly trust them. That's not as good. What we need, what we need is to elevate those new voices, talk to those people, recognize that in terms of their capabilities, a lot of these people are enormously capable. What they don't have is the legacy reach. That is increasingly being drained at these places because of their bad coverage. And so I think being able to elevate those voices once you have this enormous platform, once you don't have to worry about making quite so much hay the way that you have to in an election, I think that would be a valuable time to go back and say what we want is an American media that the American people can believe in. That is possible, that is doable. The bad has fallen away before we can do that sort of thing again. It's going to take being serious. It's going to be, it's going to take being, you know, I think more wedded to the facts than Trump has ever been or would ever be. But I think that's possible. And I think that's the sort of thing that long term would help someone like Vance get the FDR framing rather than type of framing that Trump has gotten.

[Mark Halperin]

Beautiful. Lovely. Lovely. Just said if somebody wanted to follow you on X and subscribe to your 2 substacks, what would that cost them total per year?

[Drew Holden]

Well, you are welcome to subscribe to my substack at no cost. Both mine and a commonplace where I'm the managing editor. I am free on Twitter. If you want to kick me a subscription, you certainly can. I think for about the price of a cup of coffee here in D.C. you can be a paid subscriber to me on Twitter. I'm taking a fast from posting on Twitter as much as I can during Lent here. In a couple weeks I'll be back. So I'm trying to do more kind of targeted stuff for people who are willing to kick me a little bit of cash.

[Mark Halperin]

Great. Again, the substacks are commonplace and Holden Court H O L D E N and your handle on Twitter is Drew Holden360. Drew Holden360. I should have grabbed that when I could. And I could have sold it to you at a premium. Drew, very grateful to you always for coming on and for sharing every bit of wisdom you have. Thank you for that.

[Drew Holden]

The pleasure is mine, Mark. Thanks so much for having me.

[Mark Halperin]

All right, that's it for today's program. We'll be back on Tuesday with a brand new episode. As always, don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel to make sure you share everything about how you like to next up with friends and family, make sure They've got the YouTube channel and also the podcast links always available to you to listen to the show on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcast and make sure you subscribe there to get the automatic downloads there. We love having you being in the next year. We love having you be part of this platform. So you always know what's coming next up. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you next week.

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