Coming Soon

Sharyl's New York Times best selling books

• Stonewalled
• The Smear

Sharyl's Sunday morning news program

• Full Measure

Peter: You're listening to the PK Experience Podcast. My name is Peter King. I'm the host of the show, and I've got a very special guest on today's episode. She is a multiple award, Emmy-award winning investigative journalist. Her name is Sharyl Attkisson. She's been an anchor and correspondent at CNN. She's also worked at CBS News for many years, and was a correspondent there. And during her time there, she faced some things that were quite alarming for somebody who was just honestly pursuing the truth as it unfolded.

Peter: I get into that in the call. It's the subject matter of her two books, the first of which was called "Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington." The second one was called "The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote."

Peter: Both became New York Times bestsellers, and she's now the host of Sinclair's "Full Measure," which is a Sunday morning news program that reaches about 43 million households per week. Sharyl has obviously a wealth of experience and also wisdom that is the reason why I wanted to have her on the program because I feel like things are really, in the last decade and a half or so, have really shifted in the media from really being a government watchdog, being a watchdog for the people, and instead really shifting into more of a manipulator and influencer of public ideology. And basically producing stories, some might even say propaganda, to advance special interest agendas.

Peter: So anyways, we dive into all that in this call. It's a great ... If you haven't heard of Sharyl before, I highly recommend that you check out her two books. She is a honest seeker of truth as far as I can see, and we could certainly use more of that. So enjoy the call. Let me know what you think. I am now on Apple iTunes podcast directory, if you want to download your podcast app on your smartphone. You can find me on there. Just do a search for PKX, and the program will pop up. I appreciate your support.

Peter: Here we are with Sharyl Attkisson. She is the host of Sinclair's Sunday TV program, "Full Measure." Sharyl, thank you so much for joining me on the call today. I appreciate it.

Sharyl: Thank you for having me.

Peter: I wanted to talk to you today obviously about your message, your primary message of truth essentially and just where things are at right now with the media and how we can actually trust what the media is telling us. You have a book about fake news. Tell us what, first of all, how you define fake news and how the average person can decipher what's fake and what's actually authentic.

Sharyl: Well, I learned something pretty surprising when I wrote my book, "The Smear," which came out last year because I wanted to know when that phrase originated. And if you understand when I write, how, I believe, based on people who operate in this universe I've interviewed, nothing happens by accident. That phrase, "fake news," was put there for a reason by somebody.

Sharyl: So, not knowing the answer, I researched it. And it turns out, you'll be surprised by this, I think, the phrase wasn't used as a popular context until ... When do you think it first arose, just a wild guess? Was it like the 2012 election? 2016 election? What is your guess?

Peter: Well, I've had the advantage of seeing some of your stuff online, so I know the answer to that. But if I didn't know that already, I would have said that it was a little while ago. It seems like fake news has been around, you know [crosstalk 00:03:54].

Sharyl: Forever.

Peter: On the internet. Yeah.

Sharyl: You know, and when I ask audiences that, most of them guess at least as far back as about 2012. And in fact, the first popular use of it that you probably saw if you have looked at my internet stuff, was September 13th, 2016, almost at the very end of the presidential campaign. And it was put out there by a non-profit called First Draft, which said it was gonna get behind an effort to stop fake news and malicious hoaxes.

Sharyl: And then within about a month, President Obama gave what I thought at the time, not knowing any of this, was an odd speech at Carnegie Mellon. And he said we needed to tackle this wild, wild west media environment and somebody needed to curate out information so we would know what to believe. And I remember thinking at the time, "Hmm, that's really strange because that's gung for a reason. That wasn't an off-the-cuff remark."

Sharyl: And nobody in the public, if you can get your mentality back to before this time, nobody was saying, "Oh, there's fake news, and we need the government to curate our information our Facebook to censor our information for us." That just wasn't happening. But it was soon followed by just that, after President Obama spoke about it. Suddenly headlines, as if we had our marching orders, you know. Every day it's "fake news this and fake news that."

Sharyl: So I went back to follow the money to see who was behind that non-profit that originated the phrase in its modern context, First Draft. And I called them because they don't have any paperwork filed as a non-profit or a charity yet. And they said they got their funding from Google. And Google, as you may know, their parent company is Alphabet, who was run at the time, by Eric Schmidt, the top Hillary Clinton donor. And he started or providing the funding to start First Draft around the start of the election cycle.

Sharyl: So it starts to look sort of like the rollout of a campaign to, in my view, control information people were getting. And the last place that it is sort of a wild, wild west, on the internet, where you can get views maybe other people don't want you to see, or facts that other people are trying to shape.

Sharyl: So long story short, this was a liberal effort that ultimately Donald Trump co-opted in the way only he can, by calling ... You know, the people calling him fake news, he called them that back. And now people mistakenly believe he was the one who thought up the phrase.

Peter: Right. So how does one decipher what's actually fake or not?

Sharyl: Well, it depends on your view of fake. So there's two definitions. The left says it's ... They're pointing to just made-up websites and there's examples in my book, fabricated news that's entirely false, such as the Pope endorsed Bernie Sanders. Or whatever it is, stuff that never happened. And then Donald Trump and his supporter or maybe conservative views are the notion of mainstream outlets, New York Times, Washington Post, the networks making unprecedented mistakes of sloppiness and fact errors born of what he would say is a bias against him.

Sharyl: So there's two definitions of fake news. And between the two of them, there has been, I'm sure, more media mistakes by formerly top well-respected media outlets, like the ones I named, than ever before in the past two years. I mean major mistakes that would have put them out of business ten years ago, if they had such a series then. It would have drummed the reporters out of journalism. And yet, now they're so commonplace, that it's hard to know what to believe.

Sharyl: If you're like me, no matter what I hear reported by anybody, no matter how many sources, no matter who's saying it, I don't, on its face, automatically believe it till I know more. It doesn't mean it's false. It doesn't mean it's not true. But it might be out of context or it might be false. And you just can't tell these days. You just have to suspend your belief system for the moment until you know more.

Peter: Yes. I mean, I used to think that with the advent of technology and everything, a lot of people were calling this the information age and the truth age. There's transparency with technology and we can find out what anybody said whenever. And it seems to be almost the opposite, where the technology has actually been a tool for manipulation and channeling the narrative in a way that serves an agenda, as opposed to actually telling the truth.

Peter: It only seems like it's gonna get worse. I've seen videos where you can fake ... where people can basically pretend like they're Trump or somebody else, and even with their own voice, they can make them say essentially whatever they want. How do we, moving forward, what is the future of journalism and how do we protect the truth so that we can make sure that we're not being manipulated?

Sharyl: Well, you make really good point. And I think you're right about all of what you just said. One thing I want to mention is, when you say, "How to recognize what to believe," it's almost counterintuitive. But when I hear everybody on the same narrative, discussing the same story out of a thousand other stories that could be told in a given day, when everybody's on point with two or three. And I'm talking MSNBC, Fox, CNN, it doesn't matter right or left.

Sharyl: If they're all talking about the same couple of stories and almost nothing else, that makes me suspicious. My automatic thought is not, "Hey, that's true" or "Gee, that's a burning news topic." My automatic thought is, "Hmm. Who's putting that out? Who wants this narrative to be furthered?" That's my initial knee-jerk response after studying this phenomenon for a couple of years. So that's one way to look at it.

Sharyl: For the future, you say, "What are we gonna do?"

Sharyl: Well, I think the media, and I wrote some of this, needs to fix it, needs to recognize the problem. And by and large, we don't. By and large, we say, "One side will say the other's fake news, but we're good." And the other side will say, "They're fake news, but we're factual. Nothing wrong with what we're doing." So we haven't come to grips yet with the idea that we have a national ... It's become an international problem. How are we gonna fix it?

Sharyl: I think that out in the public, when I travel around and meet people and report, the public is desperate to have a source like I would say CNN was when I worked there back in 1990. But more or less, at least I think we did at it, called things down the middle, did not have an agenda. Just reported the facts.

Sharyl: When the president would speak back then, and we'd come out as the anchors and summarize it, we didn't put our opinion in there. We'd just go, "The president just spoke about X, Y, and Z, and here's his main two points." We didn't say, "That was the worst, more horrible speech I ever heard. Outrageous." You know-

Peter: Right.

Sharyl: It's all changed. And I think people, I would say, maybe it's one of the two. Even if people want to watch a left-wing source or a right-wing source, those same people still want to go to some place where they don't have to discount what they're seeing, where they can kind of just see the middle. And think to themselves, like it came down hard on one side or non-political reporting, that that's just kind of how it was. It's not because that's how that network or how that reporter wanted to make things seem.

Peter: Yes.

Sharyl: And that's what I've always tried to do. I mostly do non-political reporting. But to the extent that I touch on politics, I think people want to hear rational discourse, various viewpoints, and you just don't get that. You get talking points on the cable channels. Believe me, the propagandists have figured this out.

Sharyl: You get someone on the left, someone on the right. Often both of them hate Trump, by the way, so it's really necessarily fair. And you get them providing the talking points du jour. And they call it fair because you've heard from both sides. But in fact, all you heard, it's like state television. You become a facilitator of propaganda and state tv by saying, "We'll just put out your talking points du jour, left and right." And the public learns nothing because there's nothing unexpected.

Sharyl: There's nothing even necessarily real about what you're hearing. You're just a venue for propaganda.

Peter: Yes. I honestly don't know how you have any hair left because the stuff that you've been sharing ... Just hearing it from you drives me insane. And more than just getting emotional about it or frustrated about it, rather, this is such a profound piece to liberty, that if we don't have honest critical thinking from our media, we're in trouble. And state media is a real sign of that.

Peter: And it sounds like, from what I'm hearing from you and some of the stuff that I've researched about you and in your books, you're really saying that a lot of this narrative at the so-called media companies are driven by a handful of sources that's ... has an agenda, that's creating a narrative.

Sharyl: And they've learned how to ... They know how we work, so they've either been hired in our news rooms to influence us, or they understand how to put us on lists and talk to us in such a way, through third parties and non-profits, that maybe we're not suspicious enough of. And it all, as you say, furthers to propagate the narrative du jour. Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. Obviously you've experienced this first-hand. Your first book, "Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington" really details several of the stories that you started to dig into. And before actually we get into that, for the average person, of which I am one, in this case, can you explain from a bird's-eye view, what's the start to finish for a story? Where do you get a lead? How does it start? And what is the process through which it goes through at a media company?

Sharyl: All I can do is give you an example because there are as many different ways as I can possibly describe. So there's no standard way. But for me, let's talk about an investigative story, not, as we call, a "same day" story or a quick story. I try not to take stories in general that are brought to me, and that's basically become a huge phenomenon.

Sharyl: Stories are brought to reporters through what look like charities or non-profits or PR firms or certain sources, and they're speaking on behalf of paid clients in ways they don't always disclose. I don't want those stories. Those are people trying to put forth narrative. I want to peek behind the curtain, and I want to-

Sharyl: -the people trying to put forth narratives. I want to peek behind the curtain, and I want to put forth stories that they don't want us to hear. So that requires a whole different process of thinking and deciding what's real. So I may look at the news, and I look behind it and see who can tell me something about who wanted a certain narrative about. Now that I've lived in DC for so long and worked in national news for so long, I've cultivated a pretty wide body of people who've proven reliable on certain topics, that I can believe because they've given me information in the past that's proven, and it's borne out to be correct. And they can refer me to other sources. And I'm constantly going to different people, being referred to people. I know who to call if I have a question about our intel agencies and what's really going on. I have people who will tell me that.

Sharyl: So I may poke around about a story for six months or a year, gathering, as they say, little bits of string before I find enough to do something with. Or I may turn something pretty specific because within a period of a week or a couple weeks, I may locate a whistleblower, or a contact, or a source on something that's fairly time-sensitive that I'm able to confirm and move more quickly. At any given time at CBS, I'm currently at FullMeasure.news, our TV show, but there's a website too.

Sharyl: I'm working on at least 40 stories right now, so they're all in various stages of development, some that are due Sunday, some that will go on and be researched, some that will never come to fruition, they'll just sort of be chewed on. So there's just sort of a constant process of talking to people, reading, gathering information, and looking for that bit of information that someone's trying to hide and why, why they don't want it in our information landscape.

Peter: Sure. So when, just so that I understand, so when you were at, say, CBS News, you would get a lead. You would start to dig. You'd find the things that other people weren't willing to really report on or to continue to search deeper into. And then does that go through a regulation process or some type of oversight? How does that go up the chain of command to ultimately getting on air?

Sharyl: When I was at CBS, I worked my way into the investigative reporting position. Investigative reporting cannot go through the same process as normal vetting a story ideas and assignments. It just doesn't work. In fact, if it did, most of these stories would never get done because of the bureaucracy. So for me at CBS, my ideas I submitted directly to, for many years, the Executive Producer, directly put them to the top of the program. And once he signed off, you're good to go. And he almost always signed off on them. And when they didn't, most of the time it was just something they didn't think was as interesting as all the stories I had. He'd take four out of five.

Sharyl: So that was my process. And then once I'm done, I'll enlist a producer along the way to help with technical things. They will be on board with it. It will go through a Senior Producer's review in Washington just to look at the script. Do they understand it? Does it make sense? I always had my controversial stories reviewed voluntarily. It was not part of the process, but I would ask for legal review from our lawyers at CBS. And then it would go up to the show for the Senior Producers and Executives to review. And typically almost no changes. The changes I would expect back then in the good days were if they didn't understand something complex and I hadn't done a really good job of making it clear in the short time we have. We'd revise that, or if they were unsure what a sound byte meant from an interview, we'd revise that. And there you have it. That was the basic process.

Peter: So, but in your book "Stonewalled," you talk about several stories that met all your criteria as an investigative journalist that I'm assuming got green lights from your various producers, and then at some point you'd always hit a brick wall or what, I think you called it the light switch would go off. Can you give us an example? First of all, I think it was Fast and Furious. Did you break that story, by the way?

Sharyl: Well I did. I think The Washington Post had a blurb before me, before it was really big news, so I can't say I had the very first story mentioning it. But I guess the story mainly broke when I did a piece, my first piece that had people from inside, maybe a dozen people that had given me information about a [inaudible 00:18:19]. And then my second story, which kind of blew the roof off of it, was the key whistleblower at ATF. I did a big interview with him leading the CBS Evening News, the sitting ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) agent telling the government, who's been denying this, that I've been doing it for you every day since I was hired here. So you can't deny it now. So that was big news.

Sharyl: And that was one, just to back up a little, CBS often assigned me to investigate stuff. So they came to me before Enron and said, "Something's going on with Enron. Can you look into it?" And I broke a lot of news with Enron. They did that with Ford and Firestone Tires. I ended up breaking a lot of news that they assigned me with that. They assigned me to Benghazi three weeks in. They assigned me to the BP oil spill three weeks in.

Sharyl: When they would sense, the Executive Producer for example, that there was more to a story and it just wasn't being fully covered, or as deeply as we thought there was to cover, by the regular press, they would bring me in and say, "What can you find out?" Fast and Furious was something I brought to them because my producer and I got a tip on that. And they liked that story, too, for a while.

Sharyl: And then, who in the process, yes, all the lawyers loved the story. We proved it, no legal problems, we proved it at the [inaudible 00:19:34] level, no problems, everybody loved it. But it hit roadblocks in New York with the anchor Scott Pelley and the new Executive Producer Pat Shevlin, to the point where, and we got a lot of pushback, in fairness to them, we always get pushback for these stories that people don't want on. And if you're a strong Executive Producer, you know that's coming, and you withstand it. You think that means usually you're probably onto something.

Sharyl: But when you have weaker people or they're getting pressure from a lot of different places, and the Obama Administration was relentless with the phone calls every day to different people at CBS to try to stop these stories, and the emails ... I don't know all their reasons, but at some point they didn't want any more stories on Fast and Furious. So I published them all on the web, probably 100 of them.

Peter: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I can, as someone who's trying to understand human behavior and understanding that not everyone thinks the same way, whatever, I can understand to some degree why a story like that might hit a roadblock or whatever, especially if there's pressure, etc. And I'm assuming that all administrations give ... They want to show themselves in the best light possible. So I'm assuming they put pressure regardless of who's in power at the time, I'm assuming that they put pressure on the various media companies to put out a story that favors them.

Peter: But there was a pattern, especially with you during the Obama Administration, that these stories consistently, the light switch consistently got turned off. So is this a case of somebody at the upper echelons that just didn't align with the ideology of the story because it was painting somebody in a bad light? Or do you believe something potentially even more nefarious?

Sharyl: It's hard to say, but I think it's a mix. Because it wasn't just closed stories, it was stories about certain corporate interests. They killed the Boeing Dreamliner story they assigned me to do, when I turned up a story we all thought was amazingly important, all the way up the line. That never aired. So it got to be almost anything that was beyond what you could read on the wires or in a paper. They didn't have anything original. And they just got very skittish. And that's where it comes into play when I'm thinking, now why is it even contrary to the interests of our viewers and ratings? They were turning stuff down for mundane, repetitive news items. What would make them do that? What was at play?

Sharyl: And I realized part of this was sort of this slow industry takeover, where again, we were inviting people into our newsroom that worked for special interests and political interests, not always disclosing who was behind them. One example, Mike Morell was hired at CBS before I left. And I did lodge a complaint, not against him personally. But we would use him, at the same time he worked for a PR firm started by Hillary Clinton loyalists who was Former Assistant CIA Director. He was intimately involved in controversy over providing false information in Benghazi when he was working for the Obama Administration, yet we hired him and let him distribute talking points, and not say who was paying him in the PR firm he worked for.

Sharyl: And I felt like these disclosures were important if we're going to use people on either side. But CBS didn't agree. But this is pervasive. Sometimes it's disclosed, sometimes it's not.

Peter: How did they not agree with that? Because it violates the very integrity from which you're existing. They hired-

Sharyl: I found, without knowing, when I lodged a query about this, first of all I was told that they didn't know he did work for a ... We hired him right after he'd been hired by this Clinton-associated PR firm. So it looked like a placement in the media, to me, by them.

Sharyl: When I drew this to their attention, because my sources knew this and they felt skittish about talking to me. Because I was amongst Obama Democratic officials that were sources of mine and didn't like that this guy was going to be in our newsroom. They were skittish about talking to me.

Sharyl: And we claimed, at least at the executive level, that we didn't know that. Well how do you not know when you hire somebody? Don't you ask? You have to ask if they have other financial conflicts and ties. But apparently we hadn't.

Sharyl: But even once they knew, they argued that it was not important for the viewers to know unless he was commenting on Clinton. And I said, "Well, that's not true. I mean, there's all kinds of ways opinions can be shaped in less overt ways. He's not going to say, 'Vote for Clinton,' necessarily, but the information he gets when you ask him about Benghazi or political issues, people have a right to understand where he's coming from so that they can weight his information accordingly. It's not that we shouldn't use him, we just have to disclose." And they simply disagreed.

Peter: Of course. I mean, I think this really gets to the heart of the whole matter and the manipulation that is occurring at a very root level in today's media, and the so-called telling of the truth. One of the most powerful things that you say in one of your books was the idea of planting a seed such that somebody believes they came up with the idea themselves.

Peter: And with the amount of ... I've done some other interviews with big data experts and things like that. The amount of data that technology presents today for the news, and corporations, etc. and the amount of analytics that they can extract on it, the possibility for manipulation and the possibility for channeling thought is very, very high. Because you can psychologically step people one tiny, small step at a time to where you wake up 10 years later and there's a whole new cultural belief around certain ideas like fake news, like the idea of fake news, and who came up with it, and things like that.

Sharyl: If you read Fahrenheit, what is it, 941 or 451, I watched the modern version of that movie and it was just about that. How if we give people ... It's tempting to say, yes, please control our fake news. But what you have to understand is whoever's doing that is a third party with an interest probably they're not disclosing. It'd be great if they were some neutral, honest third party that can just [inaudible 00:26:00] through all that for us, but I don't think it exists. Everybody's got subjective opinions, and money behind them, and so on.

Sharyl: And it gets to the point where if they can control what we see on Google, on the internet, which is what a lot of people are trying to do, and if they can then make us think that's the world we live in, that little box, "Don't look around, look in this little box," they can dominate social media through technical tricks, through propaganda tricks like you're talking about, and make you think a whole reality that doesn't exist does exist.

Sharyl: They can make you think, and this is their goal, that a majority of people feel a certain way on an issue by inundating social media and news with certain views, make you stop talking about it, kind of bully you into not wanting to give your opinion because you think, "Wow, I must be really horrible and crazy if I think this." And they've effectively manipulated the landscape, they've manipulated the history you can find about the topic.

Sharyl: So I think it's very dangerous, these efforts to supposedly call out fake news. There's new laws being passed to teach media literacy in schools, like we don't have enough we have to still teach our kids about basic reading and writing, they're mandating this now in schools. That's an organized effort to steer children and people toward certain sources. And it's usually, when I hear it, "Read The New York Times. Read The Washington Post. Don't read anything else. Don't believe it if it's in these other publications." But that's the opposite of what critical thinkers should be doing, especially with all the mistakes those publications have been making.

Peter: It's scary. It's a slippery slope. Can you ... What story was it that you were covering when you started to notice odd things happening with your computer when you were with CBS?

Sharyl: Well it's hard to say, because I didn't notice there was anything wrong. I never suspected it was the government. I just thought I was having computer glitches and that maybe spammers were trying to come in. But looking back, and when you say what story, I'm working on 40 at any given time and reporting on many different topics. I was covering vaccines and autism, the pharmaceutical industry was very-

Sharyl: I was covering vaccines and autism, the pharmaceutical industry was very powerful. I know from a corporate level they were very interested in trying to stop stories about pharmaceutical dangers and connections between vaccines and adverse events. But I was also doing political reporting. Actually I don't consider it political reporting, but I know that those it touched in the end, like the bait-and-switch the Bush administration pulled with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bank bailout, I'm covering that, Fast and Furious, of course, Benghazi.

Sharyl: And in retrospect that was probably going on, I can't remember, maybe around 2011 and forwards, where it got to a point to be so bad between Fast and Furious and Benghazi I couldn't even use some of my ... I couldn't use my phones, I couldn't use a lot of my equipment because it was just. It's been explained to me, when they put malware and spyware in your computers it can make other pieces of your equipment malfunction. That was just happening constantly.

Peter: I this wasn't just your work stuff. This was also your home equipment as well, correct?

Sharyl: Right. The forensics was able to find the same attempts to erase their tracks on the same dates, as well as a lot of the same shenanigans and date and time changes and peering around remotely, using remote access, which I never had for my personal computers. But somebody got it to look around and do all kinds of things. But my computer would turn on at night, and I would hear them try to connect to the proprietary CBS VPN because there's a noise that comes through when you don't put in the right password. And I would wake my husband up and go, “What do you think that is? Do you think spammers or foreign people are trying to come in the computer and take my email list?” And he was like, “Sure, whatever.” We never thought it was the government. And then it turns out a government source told me when I would hear the bong when they would try again with the CBS VPN, we later learned they did access the CBS system.

Sharyl: My government friend said that they can cut through all of those systems like butter. There's no point in even trying to put up encryption and security ware, that if the government wants to see your stuff they can see your stuff very easily.

Peter: Well, that's not creepy at all.

Sharyl: No, not creepy at all.

Peter: Did you ever fear for your physical safety, at all?

Sharyl: I guess when you realize the government is actually doing this, which kind of shocked me, but when you have government insiders helping, turning up the information, and then there's forensics, and then you realize what's at stake, yeah, that's kind of scary. But then I would also tell myself that if they were going to do something to me, it would have been done by now. I think it was more an effort to monitor, to try to discredit and controversialize me personally so that people wouldn't believe my story. To know what was coming, and also to know who was talking to me, because this was at the height of the Obama administration, as they say, war on whistle blowers, when they were trying to identify all the people, and there were a lot of Democrats in the Obama administration who were speaking to me and providing me information.

Sharyl: So, the funny part is, they tried to controversialize me by saying this was all Republican reporting, when they knew that the sources were, by and large, Democrats. But that's a narrative that took pretty good hold. If you google me now, Media Matters tried to make that stick. They'll call me a conservative reporter, or they'll say that some of these controversies I reported on were conservative issues. Well, that was a propaganda effort. If you can divide the public by making them think an important news story is in fact left and right or political, half the country will discard it. And then it becomes politicized. And that's exactly what they're hoping for when they sink their teeth into a propaganda campaign about a story.

Peter: And you get into this more in your book, Smear, but I think that another tell-tale sign is when the reporters themselves are becoming the focus of the story, rather than the story that they're trying to purport. That at least might be a clue to, wait a second, why is this reporter trying to be discredited?

Sharyl: Exactly. I think that's one perfect sign to look for. When people are discrediting the news outlet, the reporter, they're using key phrases, tinfoil hats, crank, nutty, crank, advocate. They accuse you of being an advocate for the story. All of that to try to make it harder for you to cover it, because all of a sudden your bosses or the public or whoever else they sic on you will argue or believe that somehow you're conflicted, or that what you're reporting is irresponsible and wrong. And it can be very effective and it's hard to stand up against.

Sharyl: One of these smear artists I interviewed for the book said, specifically, “Journalists are easy to go after. They're very thin skinned, and they don't know what to do when they get hit with a social media campaign that's supposed to look organic, like a bunch of people fighting back over a story or hitting them personally.” Not only do the news media get squirrelly, because they don't fully understand the process, but then personally it's just hard. I think one quote said, “They just crumple.” And it's hard not to. It's a lot of pressure. From my standpoint, once I understood it, I find it intellectually fascinating and it's a little easier for me to withstand emotionally because I understand it, it's not just this random thing that's happening that I don't know what to do with.

Peter: Well, you bring up a really important piece right there, the compartmentalization between your intellectual facts and how you feel about certain things, and I think that's where a lot of people get lost in this, and why we're so susceptible to manipulation. Because most people are not doing that critical thinking to say, “Am I just feeling this? Am I reacting emotionally? Or where's the tangible, irrefutable facts?” And so we get swept up into these narratives, into these things.

Peter: And, you know, one of the things that I would love to see people do more of is just have a basic base-level understanding of psychology. If you understand psychology, if a thousand people are saying, “Hey, that person's nuts in their tinfoil hat and they're a quack,” and you understand that that isolates that person and the psychological side of it that says, “Well, I don't want not associate myself with a crazy person." That's very, very powerful on a psychological level that I don't know that the average person is really [crosstalk 00:34:40].

Sharyl: It is. And this language has been tested. This is all PR-tested language and, again, I studied that and I started thinking, one of the first stories, again, I was trying to cover vaccines and autism, and I heard that [inaudible 00:34:54] officials, like CDC officials calling parents quacks and it was unusual for me. I'm like, “Oh, that's kind of weird. An official is using this kind of terminology to these parents who genuinely believe, whether it's true or not, that their kids were injured this way.” And then I started looking back once I saw whistle blowers and studies and I understand there was something to this connection that was being covered up. I looked back at my own reaction when people would say these things to me about other people and I'm like, “Okay, why is it so effective when they told me this was a quack thing, like why did that word work on me at the time?" And it is. It's all psychological and tested, and most people are not, you know, I certainly wasn't read up on those tactics and techniques.

Peter: Yeah, it really illuminates. It helps you put up some defenses against this type of attack, really. I mean it's a psychological attack if you're not aware of what they're doing. How do you want to be remembered from a journalist standpoint?

Sharyl: Well, it's hard to say that there will be one way because again, everything's so polarized now, so there's been an effort to portray me, kind of hilariously, as some sort of right-wing, probably a Trump advocate at this point. Because one thing that's happened to me is, by not being against Trump in all my stories, you are therefor pro Trump, and that's the kind of pressure I face almost daily. I don't do a lot of political stories, but if you do a story where the president is mentioned and it's not in a negative context, it's just in passing, as I've always done with presidents, well, you're a Trump defender. You must support Trump and you're not fair. And it takes a lot to just ... I think a lot of reporters would be like, “Oh, I better say something negative because I don't want to be a Trump supporter.” Well, I've worked very hard to not let that influence my reporting, to not let that make me sway one way or another, have to feel defensive about it.

Sharyl: I would love to be remembered as somebody who brought to the public a lot of views, information, and facts, that others were trying to hide from them. And didn't try to shove it down your throat to make you believe something, but at least provided a resource where you could find information that others don't want you to find. And one example, I'll just give a non political example. MRI dye, I learned, was under safety questions for a long time. I never knew this, [crosstalk 00:37:24] chemical in it.

Peter: I'm sorry what?

Sharyl: MRI dye.

Peter: Okay.

Sharyl: You probably didn't know this either. Well, once I learned about it, I did a couple stories on Full Measure. Since I did those stories, not because of them, but since I did them, the European Union has banned this kind of dye, and many countries have, not in the US, but our FDA is supposed to issue warnings that you won't be able to find very easily. And this is stunning, this is important to millions and millions of people out there, this deadly material that's being injected in children and people, sometimes unnecessarily, that could ultimately result in their death. This is information that should be headline news everywhere, and you probably never heard it.

Peter: No.

Sharyl: These are the kinds of things that, at least this lives online as a resource for people who hunt around and find it won't show up easily on the FDA website, but maybe you'll see Sharyl Attkisson's story from Full Measure.

Peter: Well, I know you don't have a ton of time and I really appreciate you giving us a little bit today. I personally think that you represent the future of journalism, moving forward, because you've cut out the middle man in a lot of respects. And you've gone rogue and got independent. And I also think the level of emotional maturity that you bring to the table is very honorable compared to where a lot of, again, it seems just like there's a very reactionary echo chamber in a lot of these different media companies.

Peter: So, I only say that because I think that's something that people really need to consider what they're looking at, "Well, who's the source of this information?" And you have always seemed to be somebody that has been independent. The fact that I don't really know where you fall on the political spectrum is a good thing, in my mind. It means that you're reporting in a way that seems as least biased as possible. I mean, we're all human beings, we all have our own world views, et cetera. But, anyway, I think you represent the future of journalism and, frankly, ultimately the truth. Because I think the more technology comes out, the harder it's going to be to really get at the truth, and you provide 360 view of yourself and the truth, as you see it, which is I think very important.

Sharyl: Well, I appreciate that. That's very kind of you, and I'm glad if that's the impression you've got, because that's certainly a positive one that I would like to convey.

Peter: Well, I think that's something that people need to think about and look at, and who are the people that are giving these news sources, and you're an independent person, and so if somebody is interested in hearing more about you, of course you have your Sunday program at fullmeasure.news. Again, that's fullmeasure.news, and you can also find out more about Sharyl at her website at sharylattkisson.com.

Sharyl: Thank you so much.

Peter: Yeah, thank you so much.

Sharyl: No other pictures and promotions [inaudible 00:40:17] that's all covered. People can find all that stuff online if they're interested.

Peter: Yes, you probably have to use Google for that. Sharyl, thanks again, I appreciate it.

Sharyl: All right. Thanks a lot.

Peter: Take care. Bye, bye.