09/05/07 – Eric Boehlert – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Eric Boehlert from Media Matters for America.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, yeah, well, I saw this great piece that I got in my email box this morning about news coverage of the war, and I admit, I'm spoiled rotten.
I read antiwar.com every day.
I got all the news from every newspaper in the world that matters about anything, and I forget sometimes what it's like to be the average American who relies on TV to tell them what's going on in the world, you know, 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there and so forth.
And you guys do a really good job at Media Matters, and I don't always agree, but I do always appreciate your work, and you really go through and break down all the statistics for us, and in your article today, you've got links to four or five different polls and four or five different studies by different universities and so forth backing up, counting the coverage for you and comparing that to people's attitudes and so forth, and it's a great piece of work, and it's a great example of the kind of work that you guys do at Media Matters, I think.
Thanks.
I appreciate it.
And you mentioned the 10 minutes that's probably being generous to the bits and pieces of television news coverage we've seen from Iraq.
I mean, you know, the headline of the piece is the Iraq News Blackout, how the press spent its summer vacation, and it's really amazing, and what I stumbled across were two separate surveys that are done in conjunction with each other.
One is from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the other is the Pew Research, and every week, Pew Research, it polls 1,000 adults and asks them what is the news story where they followed most closely the previous week, and Project for Excellence in Journalism monitors on a weekly basis, has its ongoing study, 48 major media outlets, radio, TV, network, cable, newspapers, and it documents exactly how much space editors and producers give each story, so it's a great way to tell what Americans are paying attention to and what the media is paying attention to.
I'm reminded of a Henry Kissinger quote, actually, where he said he watches the news every night, but with the volume off, he doesn't care what they're saying, but what matters is how much time they spend on each subject, and in which order they run.
Yeah, and television really is king in terms of, you know, communicating with Americans.
But if you look at the study, the disconnect between the amount of attention Americans are paying to the situation in Iraq, meaning reporting on the ground from Iraq, and the amount of coverage the press is giving it is sort of mind-boggling.
And in the column I go through every week of the summer, and on average during the summer, the situation in Iraq, that was one of the news categories, was far and away the most popular, the most closely watched news event of the summer, week after week after week.
And on average for the summer, 31% of Americans said they followed the situation in Iraq very closely.
The amount of news coverage it got week after week, the situation in Iraq represented 4.5% of all the news coverage.
And if it wasn't for the more aggressive coverage in newspapers online, that number would have been even lower, because cable and network news, you know, essentially boycotted Iraq during the summer.
And here we are with Americans, week after week, saying it's the most important story.
That's not really the most important, because that's a slightly different answer.
It's the story they're following the most closely.
And the press couldn't care less at this point.
And I write about how Iraq fatigue, the difference is how it affects Americans and how it affects newsrooms.
It hasn't affected most Americans.
They're almost just as interested today as they were four years ago.
But in newsrooms, they have just walked away from the whole thing.
Why have they just walked away?
I mean, you mentioned the costs of security, I mean, obviously they can't, it's hard to leave the green zone.
Patrick Coburn's got the courage to go riding around in the back of a taxi, but not too many of these guys do.
And I can understand that.
I don't want to go, you know, trolling around Iraq in a car and get my head cut off either.
But at the same time, I mean, hell, they could at least stand on the porch in the green zone and look out and tell us something, right?
That's right.
And we don't even see the, yeah, and I'm the last one, you know, to question the courage of any of these reporters, the fact that they're there is, I think, a testament to their professionalism and wanting to be at the center of the action.
But you're right, we don't even see sort of the rooftop reports from the green zone anymore.
It's been difficult and expensive and deadly to cover Iraq for years now.
But that really doesn't explain the precipitous drop we've seen this summer.
And the irony is, I let off the column, I noted, you know, Katie Couric is in Iraq and reporting from Baghdad.
And she said she went over there because she wanted to get more context.
She wanted to get, you know, a better sense of what was going on.
My point is, well, you know, if CBS had simply reported the story all summer, she wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to figure out what was going on in Iraq.
Yeah.
I mean, that's just the fact that Katie Couric is a news person.
I don't know.
I haven't watched the nightly news on the broadcast channels, you know, ABC, CBS, NBC.
I haven't watched those newscasts in so long.
I'm disconnected.
But the idea that Americans are turning to Katie Couric to do the hard news at night, wasn't that Dan Rather's?
Is she in Dan Rather's chair or Brokaw's or one of those?
Dan Rather, right.
Oh, man.
Well, okay.
That is what it is.
I don't want to go too far down that rabbit trail.
I could lead all kinds of nightmares.
But yeah, you know, see, here's the thing, though, Eric.
I'm a real free market kind of guy.
I'm a, you know, plumb line libertarian.
And it seems to me like the free market is demanding Iraq coverage.
Why aren't we getting it?
Well, interesting.
You know, and as I point out in my piece that said, you know, I mean, journalism is a public service, but it's also a business.
So, you know, editors and producers are always trying to match up what they cover with what people are interested in.
I mean, you'd be a fool to devote all your time and resources consistently to stories that research shows news consumers have no interest in.
I mean, you've got, there has to be a cross-section.
But here we're seeing the exact opposite.
I mean, we're seeing news consumers telling pollsters week after week after week the most important news story in Iraq, and we have the mainstream press just walking away from it.
So the question is, you're right, why is that happening?
Well, as I mentioned, there's a lot more news from Iraq online and in newspapers.
And I think if you focus on online, I think it's just another example, a lot more and more people are getting their news online.
It seems to be, in this specific case, it seems to be a better reflection in terms of what people want and what they're getting, and they're finding it online.
For whatever reason, the news people in charge of the sites that are being monitored online are doing a better job there.
Yeah, well, and maybe the TV people realize, well, the people who actually want real news are now reading it, and so we're only left with the audience that wants to hear about the gay Republican senator or whatever.
Well, that might be.
But again, I mean, Iraq has been such an important story for so long, it's sort of amazing that particularly television producers came to the decision this summer, that they're just not going to cover it.
For a quarterly, in the second quarter, MSNBC, for instance, devoted 1.5 percent of its entire news coverage to events in Iraq.
And the amazing thing is, there's all this hype about the Petraeus report coming up, and there's obviously going to be a heated debate in Washington about, you know, troop levels and America's continued presence in Iraq, and how are we supposed to, how are we supposed to, how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions, you know, about our future in Iraq, if we can't even get news coverage?
I mean, and again, look at these polls.
They're begging for more news coverage from Iraq, and they're just not getting it from the mainstream press.
As you mentioned, I think it's another reason that people are sort of slowly but steadily walking away from the mainstream press as their number one news source.
And you know, the amount of coverage that there actually is, is mostly a bunch of ridiculous hype anyway.
I mean, I've been hearing for, you know, two or three months that the liberal media just won't report it, but the surge is going well, and yet that's all I hear from anybody.
Right.
I mean, we're only going to see more of that as, you know, the hype of the report comes up.
But, yeah, I mean, that certainly is the conservative talking point that the press won't, the press won't report.
Even the liberal one.
I mean, this is what I see on, you know, basically every news source.
And you know, it's funny, I'm sorry, I just want to pick on MSNBC here since you mentioned them.
I'm sure that you're aware, you'll remember exactly what I'm talking about.
There's this clip that they play as their stock news footage of the Iraq war on MSNBC that they've been playing for years now.
And I, as far as I can tell, I believe it's from the original invasion and it's a picture of a tank round.
It's actually a few different clips, but the one that's the most memorable is I guess a tank round or something hitting this kind of pale red building and the whole building is just kind of destroyed and collapses in and so forth.
And so very old looking structure.
And you know, they don't even have new pictures of things exploding to show us at all.
Like, they don't even have a cameraman on the ground.
I'm going to sit here and as Chris Matthews or whoever it is, is spending his, you know, one minute per show on Iraq and I'm going to sit here and I'm going to watch this same building get shot by this same tank ground that I've been watching for years or four and a half years.
Well, you know, they just don't, they literally can't even cover most of the country.
And you know, I referenced that if folks remember on August 14th, there were the five synchronized suicide bombers in northern Iraq by the Syrian border that killed over 500 people.
The attack on the Yezetis.
Yeah, exactly.
And they just, obviously they could only send stringers up there because no American journalist could survive a trip up to the border and back.
And it was the 500 people, more than 500 people were killed.
It was the second deadliest terror strike ever, only behind 9-11, were more civilians killed in a terrorist attack.
And the next night, it wasn't even the lead story on NBC Nightly News, it was on page six, the New York Times, page six of the Washington Post.
And I mean, if that, you know, if I'm sort of a historic, monstrous act of destruction like that, you know, can't, won't wake the press from its lumber, you know, I'm not sure, I'm not sure what will.
Yeah, but see, OK, here we got to get back to this thing about the boredom and the slumber and all that.
And pardon me for being, I really don't mean to lean conspiracy kook here, but I kind of imagine, you know, somebody in the White House or, you know, on the National Security Council or something making some phone calls to some newspaper editors and some TV producers and telling them, hey, look, we're working on this whole surge is working great thing and you're not going to screw it up for us, you understand?
Or maybe not, maybe more subtle than that, just, you know, hey, this is what the White House wants.
This is what the White House gets.
It can't just be that all these reporters are this bored with the story.
I mean, I have to tell you, I'm sick and tired of it myself, but that's not the same as bored.
Right.
And I still cover it every single day.
Right.
So, you know, I don't know.
I just I guess the easy answer is, hey, they're all these reporters, they're all just individuals and they can only do what they can do and they're just not interested.
But, you know, when you the way you lay it out in this article where, you know, the casualty rates are going up this much, the the interest in the news stories goes up this much while the the coverage is a perfect sine wave go in the other direction.
Yeah, right.
You know, is is there is it possible that there's something behind this?
Well, the only thing that I could think that the correlation would be is that the press, you know, there certainly are the talking points coming out of the White House.
The surge is working.
Republicans are making that case.
You know, my only thought was that the press doesn't want to be caught, you know, on the wrong side of the story.
They don't want to much like they did want to be caught on the wrong side during the run up to the war.
And you know, they don't want to wake up one day and suddenly, you know, obviously it's not going to happen.
It doesn't happen overnight.
I was literally, you know, you know, the surge has been victorious and we won the war.
They don't want to be out there being portrayed or seen as being negative because that liberal media bias charge still carries a lot of weight.
I don't know if that's why it's happening, but, you know, there is a political element here and the political element is, you know, the surge is working and the press is reporting all the good news.
I mean, we've heard that mantra literally since March two thousand three.
Absolutely.
All the way through.
The funny thing is, though, I guess that kind of leads to a separate question, which is the ignorance of these reporters.
I mean, I'm here to tell you that anybody who says the surge is working is on the wrong side of the story.
You know, the fact that they recruited the Sunni insurgency to fight Al Qaeda when they were already had already turned on Al Qaeda and that all they're doing really is arming the Sunni groups who still refuse to submit to Maliki's government and training them just guarantees more bloodshed later and more fighting later on.
This is no this surge is a joke.
This is a temporary thing.
It's just another one of these, you know, six month turning point things that we're just supposed to hang on six more months and six more months and six more months forever.
Anybody who in the press who's actually a reporter who's supposed to be covering this story, who's worried that they might be on the wrong side of it if they don't report that everything's hunky dory is a fool and doesn't shouldn't be reporting on this in the first place.
Well, the good news is the reporters who are actually in Iraq, you know, when they're on TV and, you know, in the major newspapers, I think they do a pretty good job of giving a clear picture, you know, as they see it.
The problem is, particularly on TV, they're simply not on.
I mean, the reports are simply not aired.
I mean, if MSNBC devoted 1.5 percent of its news hole to Iraq.
So I think that I trust the people on the ground.
I've always trusted the reporters on the ground almost since day one.
But the problem we're having now is that their editors and producers back in New York and Washington simply won't put them on the air.
I mean, they simply will not report Iraq as a substantial news story.
That now, what's different is they love reporting about, you know, Iraq policy.
They'll report the, you know, the Bellway debate, you know, the who's up, who's down to the Democrats have.
That's what they love.
They love just old-fashioned horse race politics.
And they'll spend all the time they need.
It's easy.
It's simple.
It doesn't cost any money.
You can get the talking hits.
It's all about politics.
That's separate.
That, the press has covered ad nauseam.
I don't think it's been very nuanced or insightful.
But they've spent a lot of time doing that because, as I said, it's easy.
The war reporting is a completely different story, and that is where the press has really walked away from it.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny.
I think of like a guy like Chris Matthews.
He was an aide to Tip O'Neill, right?
Right.
I mean, that's where a lot of these guys come from is they are the kind of rubber meets the road electoral politics kind of people in the first place.
Right.
That's what really gets them excited.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, to them, that's everything is Obama said this and then Hillary said that back.
Right.
What do you make of it?
I think it's on this hour to talk about the back and forth between Hillary and Obama.
Right.
And you're right.
That is, I don't know why that's easier.
I'd have more trouble trying to keep track of that stuff.
Yeah.
But you just sit around and sort of jabber.
Right.
You don't have to leave your studio.
It's simple, and it's easy, and it's inexpensive.
Covering a war is a whole other story, and that's where the disconnect has come.
And if you look at, again, if you look at these surveys that I cite in my article, in terms of viewer interest, not nearly as interested in the Beltway debate about the war.
It doesn't rank nearly as high.
Americans have been consistent through the whole summer that their interests should specifically in the situation in Iraq, they don't really care about the wrangling in the Beltway.
That's not a story that interests them.
What's happening with the troops in Iraq is far away, the most important story to news consumers.
And it's a story that the press, particularly TV, you know, all but boycotted all summer.
I like how in your article here you list some other topics that Nightline covered instead of the war.
The popularity of organic pet food.
The favorite songs of Pete Wentz, bassist for Fall Out Boy.
The folding of supermarket tabloid The Weekly World News.
Oh, man.
The rise of urban McMansions.
The death of the postcard.
The commercial battle between Barbie and Bratz dolls.
And the nerd stars of the movie Superbad.
That was on Nightline?
Seven weeks.
Last seven weeks, Nightline, you know, they do three segments now, so they've done over a hundred segments since mid-July, and they haven't done a single report about the situation in Baghdad.
But as you said, those are some of the stories they did do during that seven-week stretch.
You know, I'll tell you something, somebody sent me a link the other day, I'm not sure if you saw this footage, but there was a protest up in Canada at some meeting of capitalists and bureaucrats or something, and the lefties were outside protesting, and there were three guys with the black masks and so forth dressed up like they were anarchists, but it was obvious that they were cops, that they were middle-aged, you know, weightlifting cops.
They didn't look like skinny little anarchists at all, you know?
And so everybody called them out, and it was the cop who had the rock in his hand, and it was this big thing.
Anyway, the point of the story is that somebody sent me a link to news coverage of this going on in Canada, and it was a national news network, I forget exactly, but it was a national news thing.
And it was the top story of the show, apparently, and they spent 15, 17, 20 minutes explaining, here's the footage, here's our reporter on the scene talking all about it, saying every single thing that there is to report about this case, having time to say every single thing he knows, questions and answers from the anchors back.
And I thought, you know what, this reminds me of watching TV news in like 1982 or something.
I can't believe, you know, wow, look, mainstream media spending 15 minutes on an important news story, and actually trying on TV, and actually trying to get every bit of information that they can, even if it makes the government look bad, and, you know, that to me was the most impressive thing.
Of course cops throw rocks and pretend to be anarchists, who does anybody think starts all these riots?
Of course it's them.
You know, never mind that.
The news story here is that there was a news story, a real honest-to-goodness news story about it.
Was this Canadian news?
Yeah, yeah.
Canadian news.
That would do great.
Yeah, I just, you know, I'm not sure, yeah, it very well may have been the CBC, but yeah, I was shocked, and it really, it was like watching the news 20 years ago or something, where I was a little kid.
Right, right.
They took a long time to do an important news story and weren't afraid of, you know, being a hack or being a liberal or whatever it is.
I mean, the press is just scared out of its wits, and that has been for, you know, the last six years.
Yeah.
And that's the part I can't understand, is what's to be scared of?
So they're going to call you names, you know?
Well, it's profession, it's careerism.
It's your job, it's your career path.
That's what, unfortunately, too many of these journalists sort of hold near and dear to their hearts, and they've seen it quite, I mean, they're very smart people, and they see the career trajectory and they understand what the pitfalls are, and you just, you know, that's why you write about John Edwards' haircut, and you sort of chuckle and laugh, and everyone's sort of at each other on the back because they're so savvy and sophisticated, and it's, you know, it's a boys' club, and you can get a very good living out of it.
So, that's what they're afraid of.
That's the fear.
Not being called names or anything like that, it's, you know, how's it going to affect my career path?
Yeah, that's funny.
I kind of, I guess I've never really thought before of ranking media people, you know, news anchors in there with, on the list, you know, with magicians and stand-up comedians and TV actors and movie actors and whatever, and the little rank of celebrity.
I guess the TV news anchors fit in there somewhere, I don't know, between magicians and comics.
Yeah, I mean, you were mentioning Katie Couric.
I mean, in the last year since Katie Couric has been on as CBS.It's been a year?
Yeah.
I think it was a year this week.
I mean, between the New York Times and the Washington Post, I guarantee they've written 50 articles.
Oh.
And she reads the news off the teleprompter for 22, not even 20, I mean, she's actually on camera about eight minutes a night.
I mean, it's a complete cult of personality, and I mean, it's a whole separate topic, but the press has become convinced that, you know, TV anchors are important, influential people that should be covered as if they're world leaders and politicians.
I mean, it's a joke.
Yeah, they're their own news stories.
I like that.
And what's funny, too, is, you know, when they really started the cable news channels, really, first with CNN, and then, of course, everybody racing to catch up, I thought, you know, the promise there was that we were going to finally have, you know, front-line style documentaries and real investigative news reporting, you know, because now they have all the time in the world.
All the time in the world, right, unfortunately, you know, the cable producers view the world in 15-minute segments, because that's how you're rated.
So you're right.
I mean, the idea was, you know, 24 hours, look at how we're going to possibly fill all this time.
Well, we'll fill it with interesting, innovative news, and as we've seen, it may not all just sort of copycat stuff.
And sometimes there really is investigative reporting, but then it's...
And then it just makes you wonder why is it only three times a year when they have to fill up about 800 hours a year, or whatever it is.
Or sometimes, you know, I'll be amazed to see how much work they'll put into telling the story of a murder that took place in some American city, you know.
I mean, they will really investigate and do a substantial report about this guy killed his wife, you know, and wanted some money or something.
You know, like Bill Curtis on investigative reports on A&E, he used to actually cover real stories.
Now it's all just true crime nonsense.
Right.
Yeah.
As if people have never killed each other in passion before.
I know it's treated as wildly important, but unfortunately it's pretty common in America these days.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so what would you do about it?
I don't know.
I'd buy out Rupert Murdoch with my newfound treasure chest, and I'd put you in charge of...
Well, I won't put you directly in charge of Fox News.
That wouldn't be fair to the guys, but I'd put you in charge of, you know, parts of the media empire.
I'd like you to make some changes, some systemic changes, some structural changes that will guarantee that things are tilted more toward what's important.
How do you do it?
What changes would you make?
Well, I mean, you know, it's a tough business because, you know, people make changes and then the ratings, you know, dip 3% and everyone freaks out and runs back to the old formula.
But you know, the hope would be that, A, you wouldn't play copycat, specifically if you don't chase Fox.
You know, you talked about libertarian and filling the marketplace.
Look at Keith Olbermann.
I mean, his show is far and away the most successful cable news show of the last year.
His audience is double.
Oh, really?
And Olbermann has mentioned a couple times, he's been shocked that no one has come after his audience, which is, you know, essentially, you know, liberal and progressive and anti-war.
I mean, he's obviously made that a cornerstone of the show.
The show has doubled, his ratings have doubled in the last year, no other show comes close.
And no one, not one show, has tried to go after his market.
And he's mentioned a couple times he's been shocked that no one has tried to, you know, sort of make a run at his territory.
But for some reason, you know, if you have a progressive agenda and your show doubles, all the producers who normally are so quick to copycat, just sort of look at it and say, no, well, no thanks.
We're not interested in those rating gains.
I mean, you know, it's really unusual, because the cable news business is absolutely no for its copycat approach.
And here's Olbermann with the most successful show, and no one's interested in copying it.
Right.
And, you know, it seems like if these executives want to keep their jobs eventually denying their stockholders money they could be making, it's supposed to, you know, have some backlash there.
And that, you know, CNN continues to carry, you know, right-wing talk shows like Glenn Beck, whose ratings have been on decline all year.
I mean, some nights, I mean, he gets like 50,000, 50,000 viewers in his demo.
You know, and this is a country of 300 million.
I mean, absolute dead weight for CNN, but, you know, he's been on it a year and a half.
There's no indication they're going to drop him, even though he's a ratings buff.
Huh.
So there seems to be a pretty clear double standard.
Yes, sure sounds like it.
And well, I don't know.
I guess if you want, we've got a little bit more time.
If you want to get into the presidential campaign a bit, I've noticed, and, you know, to be fair, I understand, you know, you have to kind of be in the polls to be in the polls and to get covered.
And once you get covered, then you get more ratings and so forth.
But it seems like so early on in the primaries, Greville and Kucinich on the Democratic side and particularly Ron Paul and even Tom Tancredo and some of those guys have been just so completely marginalized by the media that, you know, I think it was Howard Kurtz wrote a thing in the Washington Post after the first couple of debates saying we should get rid of all the dead weight now.
And they almost uniformly refused to cover the candidacies of these guys who, you know, Greville is a retired senator and a pretty successful one back in the day when he was a senator.
Paul and Kucinich both and, you know, members of the House of Representatives in good standing running for president of the United States.
And you know, what do you have to do to get some coverage of these people?
Well, basically, you got to, it's a catch-22, I mean, it's a catch-22 or a character, trigger the egg, whatever your analogy.
You know, you got to make a run in the polls.
I think you have to show the press that, you know, your ideas or your agenda has resonated with enough of voters to be taken seriously.
So, you know, for better or for not, I mean, you know, when a field gets too enormous, I mean, it's understandable that the press is going to sort of use, you know, a particular, you know, bar, in this case, it's polling, and it always has been.
And it would be nice, though, just to put it to the test, if we could see a candidate with one of those, with the same agenda as one of those candidates really break through, and then we would see if the press, you know, was comfortable covering candidates whose agenda was, you know, not such, you know, considered sort of a rubber stamp mainstream approach.
That would be an interesting test case, because right now, it's hard to argue, you know, that the press isn't given enough to candidates who, you know, are really quite, quite low on the polls.
And if they could move those ratings up, then I think they would have a better case in terms of complaining about the lack of coverage.
Right.
Yeah, that really is fair, and I guess we'll see, right?
It seems to me like a lot of these Republicans are on their way out.
And though Paul is not doing all that well in the nationwide polls, he's continuing to rake in the funds, and he's definitely, obviously, he's going to be in the race through the primary season.
Yeah, and those candidates you mentioned, he seems to have struck, you know, the biggest chord.
I mean, obviously, it's not on the same scale as any of the major candidates.
But his does seem to be the most interesting, and particularly online, he seems to have generated the biggest following and the most passion.
So it'll be interesting how, you know, his candidacy progresses.
Yeah, and it'll also be interesting to watch the dissonance on the faces of these news reporters when they do cover and trying to figure out, I guess Stephen Colbert made the joke out of it, the enigma wrapped in a sesame seed bun of mystery and all that, because they don't know how to deal with somebody who's anti-war and pro-capitalism.
No, right, right.
So you have these people who, sometimes they ask him, should he be running as a Democrat, you know, and I don't know, I like that.
I like watching their faces twist, you know, and just revealing how little the news anchors really understand about the world compared to some of the people in their audiences, you know?
Yeah, I think the press does prefer candidates to come in nicely wrapped packages that makes it easier for them to create a narrative and to sort of describe them in sort of a shorthand style.
And you know, even when they're just doing the banter about, you know, the back and forth about the candidates and, you know, a little bit of Iraq policy and this and that and there, I sometimes get the idea that a lot of these news people, the pundits on the cable news channels, but even the news anchors, I get the idea from their questions a lot of times that they get all their news from TV, too, that they don't read.
So I don't know.
Well, I'm sure it can be a self-fulfilling, you know, prophecy.
Yeah, I mean, if I got all my news from the radio, this would be the stupidest show in the world.
I mean, what would be the point of that?
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
You know, I just don't know.
You know, good TV people have staff and producers that read for them and, you know, help educate them.
Ah, some day.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Yeah, that would be nice.
All right.
Well, hey, I really appreciate your time today, everybody.
Eric Boehlert from Media Matters for America, their MediaMatters.org, really appreciate your insight today.
Sure thing.
All right, talk to you soon.