JOE MADISON: I've got a quote here that I saw the other day from Ted Koppel and would love to see if you talked about this in Killing the Messenger. And someone asked him what do you think about the news media today, and I'll ask you the same thing, but this is Ted Koppel, he said “too much of the media looks upon their goal as giving the public what it wants. The television networks do it because they're desperately trying to hold on to an audience, and the way to hold on to an audience is to give that audience what we think -- meaning the media -- what we think they want to hear, and that's not doing democracy any favors.” Do you agree with that statement?
DAVID BROCK: Absolutely. You know I take on directly The New York Times' coverage of the Clintons in this book, and particularly their email coverage --
MADISON: But they're considered to be “liberal,” the conservative groups would say that they're liberal.
BROCK: That's right and it is a little counterintuitive because their editorial page does follow a liberal line, but the point is that they've been taken advantage of, they've been manipulated by the Benghazi committee into two stories about her email that were just absolutely wrong, the first one that she [Clinton] broke the law when she used her personal account and the second one that she was the subject of a criminal referral and I'm asked, “why would the Times do this?”
MADISON: And how would they do this? How do they get manipulated? Go ahead, why and how?
BROCK: This goes to Ted Koppel's quote, the how is, they're dangled a piece of information, and the Clinton beat is so competitive that they're afraid that they're going to lose the story if they don't rush it into print and on both of these occasions it appears that they didn't hold themselves to the gold standard that they are, they rushed it into print. And why, it's not ideological, the Times is not partisan. But it goes to what Ted Koppel is talking about: other than Donald Trump maybe, the Clintons are great for ratings, they're great for click-throughs. And so, it's a very hot beat. And she is the number one target. And so, all the incentives are to try to get her, to try to get something on her, to try to bring her down and of course this goes all the way back, as you know, to Whitewater and the failed efforts to bring down Bill Clinton in the 1990s. We see a very similar phenomenon playing out here with this committee and their leaks, leaks that then blow up in the face of the newspaper running them.
