JOY REID (HOST): Eric, you have Paul Manafort, speaking of media, getting back on board with the Trump campaign after leaving over those nefarious ties and checks being written to him by pro-Russian forces meddling with Ukraine. He slips back into the campaign, and the story about him slipping back into the campaign was kind of a footnote in the story after the election. How did Paul Manafort manage to jump back into the campaign and almost no one noticed?
ERIC BOEHLERT: Well, when you create this much chaos, no one is going to notice these small things, right? If this would have been a traditional transition, Trump being a traditional president, this would be a glaring problem. How do you drop someone with pro-Russian ties during the summer and then he sort of just slips right in and joins the inner circle? The press is -- this stuff is coming over the transom so quickly, but it's up to the press to up its game, right? If they're going to be throwing all this chaos at you, you need to cover it just as aggressively. You can't just have stuff like this sort of be swept under the rug. Look how aggressive they were what the WikiLeaks, look how aggressive they were covering --
REID: You mean with reading WikiLeaks --
BOEHLERT: Typing them up as news, endless nonstop news in order to give Hillary Clinton a hard time during the general election. So they are interested in certain elements, but they are not interested in others, and that's a pretty glaring double standard.
REID: I'm just curious on your take, should we be reading Donald Trump's emails, the fact that the only communication you can get from him since he doesn't give press conferences is emails. Your take, should the media be reading them at all, or starve him of attention?
BOEHLERT: You mean the tweets and stuff?
REID: The tweets, I'm sorry. The tweets, I apologize.
BOEHLERT: Yeah, no, this is the problem. The last press conference he had was late July when he said Russia, please hack more emails. They said, you are never having a press conference again. He's not going to have a press conference until next July, I'm serious, he's just not going to do it. Look, he's starving the beast and now they're reduced. The New York Times on several occasions, front page stories, all they do is report his tweets. I can read his tweets, I don't need The New York Times to read them for me.
