YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Bai

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70
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2017-02-06
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2017-02-06
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  1. “Astounding. I mean, I was in Australia last summer, and people there, the politicians and the business leaders were saying, getting very angry at me. You know, they were saying, don't you people know what you're doing is before he was elected? You know, you're messing around what you're messing around with isn't just your government. We're scared to death. Everybody's reliant on American leadership economically, militarily in Europe, in Australian, among... In the Western Hemisphere. And so I think the world is shaken. And I think one of the points I made in this column, I think, is true is we could come to a sobering, we could say, you know, four years from now, well, that was a mistake. We still want to be the leader of the world, right? We still want the American century. But the world will move on. The world has had its faith shaken.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And Trump's philosophy really, his election, we've been getting there slowly, but his election really is the repudiation of that. It is the end of the American century. It is, no, no, we've done enough. We're not expanding anymore. We're coming home. NATO, you're going to have to do this for yourself. We are not going to be this phrase you've heard in politics now for 30 years. We're not going to be the world's policeman. He means it. We're not going to be all over the world. We're treating from markets. We're not expanding. We're literally going to have a big, beautiful wall that locks us in. Right or wrong, his philosophy is. As he said America first, and we will be powerful, but we will not be the prime power in all things in the world. And that is a real retreat from everything we grew up with.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “President Trump in the end of the American century and the day before the inauguration. And my point was not that, you know, oh my God, we're now going off a cliff. It's over. My point was in every way in this philosophy you're describing, he repudiates what has been the guiding vision of American government since Franklin Roosevelt, right? The American century, the 20th century, really begins with the end of World War II. And it is based around the idea that we are primary in the world, that we are our responsibility to defend much of the world, that we will be the main actor on the global stage.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, TPP is a great example. I mean, there was a lot of Republican support for that, even if they didn't want to necessarily give President Obama, including the speaker.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And the a lot of the left backs on. Yes. I mean, there was a lot of praise for his scrapping TPP, which, I mean, that was a very big deal.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Radical rethinking of American policy since I've been alive and he's diving right in. He's not shy. I think that is the piece he really believes quite strongly.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Deregulation. I mean, I don't, a lot of it's been, you know, intentions, right? My intention is to reform or scrap the ACA. My intention is to build a wall. You know, the executive orders that are a little bit more show than reality. But on trade in particular, I think where he's dove right into, I want to renegotiate NAFTA.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Take stock of our role in creating this moment because it's easy to demonize him, right? It's easy to talk or demonize as too strong a word. It's easy to call him out for dishonesty and exploiting the moment and entertaining demagoguing people. He does those things. But I'm not sure we've yet come to grips with how that was possible and the decisions we've made over the last twenty or thirty years that led us here. Because if that lesson is lost on us, and I don't know where we get the time or the breath to do that, but if that lesson is lost on us, then I think we are not going to be able to contribute in a more constructive way.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Can we cover him fairly? Once we've decided he lies because he has lied, once we've accommodated ourselves to saying a president lies to our readers, are we capable of being fair? I think we have to be really conscious of the fact that if he were different tomorrow, if he didn't lie again, if he achieves things, if he succeeds, if he makes a case that makes sense. We can't allow as you start out talking about we can't be cynical about this, right? We still have to cover him as a president. And I think we have to cover the White House as objectively as we can while holding them to account. And I think I would hope that in the process of this, we as an industry”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Stipulate, you know, so the times, the post, they were formative years. I look at what the TVs are doing. I mean, the idea that this word liar is in so many headlines, it says, or says baseless claims. My wife works online. She's an executive editor with CBS News.com, and I see her wrestle with this all the time, you know, at home at night, you know, going through the posts, how do you headline this? How do you cast a story when we know it's not true? And I think we're doing a really good job of being challenging him and being transparent and not allowing sort of this stasis to set in where he goes on challenged. I think we have a little danger in that too, which is, you know,”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It is, I think, you know, just judging from the first week, it was a very eventful tumultuous week for both him and the media, you know, I think we're doing as an industry a really good job. When I say we, and I always looked at the New York Times where I was for so long because that to me is a benchmark. That was among the 11 years.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And who said just that? I saw it out of the corner of my eye the other night nearly take Jeffrey Lord's head off. I don't know what was being said, but the body line. Well, this was part of the...”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Producing Well, and that's why he gets away with him. What Trump is effectively saying and what Sean Spicer, his press secretary in his first week is effectively saying to the country is, or to me what he's, what they're effectively saying to the American media is, go ahead, it's our word against yours. Go to town. And they know that the facts aren't with them, but they also know that we enjoy no trust. And this is the first time we've basically had a political operation at this level say to us, go ahead, jump up and down. Nobody cares what you think.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I do think not only while we're on the subject, because I think this matters is it wasn't just the decision of who to put on television. If you recall, this is the first time I ever saw, and I'm sure you'd say the same, because the field was so large for the debates. Not only did they cut a bunch of people out of the debates and put them at the kitty table, but they arranged the candidates on the stage by their polling numbers. So Trump was standing in the middle of every debate stage and getting the first question and the line share the questions. And John Kasich, in his second term as a highly popular governor of one of the largest states in the country, is on the edge of the stage trying to elbow his way into the conversation. That sends a signal to viewers. That had an impact.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And nobody even knows. The public doesn't even know. And I do understand that for Sunday shows and cable shows, they're selling ads against those ratings. And those ratings matter. But I think we lost, we got lost. And you're right, part of the reason we got lost is an industry is because we didn't think it mattered and it did.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Oh, absolutely. Nominee or the president? If you could strap the media executives to polygraph, I think that's what you would find out. They understood that it was out of all proportion, but nobody thought he could win. And so they weren't really undermining democracy. They were just making money while it was out there to be made. And I don't even know if they're making money. They're just building ratings. Sometimes I wonder if the whole ratings game and the circulation, all of it is really about what you monetize or if it's just about pride and competition and industry lore, right? We beat you. And we're obsessed in my business with being first. There's always been a thing I never understood. We got it first and they should credit us because we had it 10 minutes. I lack that gene. I was born without it. I do not understand why it matters who got there 10 minutes earlier. And in the same way, I think this obsession with ratings is often just driven by sheer industry competition.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We got into trouble. So, you know, look, if you're running a network and Donald Trump is great for your ratings, I can see why you want to have him on and I can see why you pay attention to your ratings and you can't ignore what your audience wants. But the audience doesn't drive news coverage. News coverage is based on a whole series of factors and most often it's about what's important and you have a responsibility, particularly in the process of choosing a president to inform people and make sure they have all the information and all the knowledge they need. And I don't think that balance was anywhere near the 2015 into the 2016 primary season. I don't think there was any balance on television certainly.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And harder to monetize. I mean, it's very, very hard to make money at. So, you know, there's no, I'm not a big, I don't generally believe in hard and fast rules for things that I think they tend to get you into trouble. And there's no hard and fast rule for how to handle a candidate like that. But I think you have to use, you know, generally my feeling about journalism as a business has always been that you have the right and the responsibility to make money and to be conscious of your market, but you also have the responsibility not to make all the money you possibly can at the expense of everything else. There is a balance. This is not a business you get into to maximize profit. It should not be a business you get into to lose money. We can't be naive about it. But the best media ownership we've had in this country, I think, are the families who wanted to make money but understood that they could be making more money doing something else and that they had a public trust. And when they started to sell and become public corporations, I think.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, it's always a balance, and it always has been a balance, Trump didn't invent that. I mean, we've been dealing with this for a long time in our industry.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Does and he's a provocateur, and he knows how to knows that. Attention is, you know, there are people who say there's no such thing as bad PR. There's no such thing as bad attention. He subscribes to that and he learned this in the hardest media culture in the world, in New York. And he didn't become the most famous land developer in New York and then the country because he built more beautiful buildings than everybody else because he knew how to create this persona. He knows how to get everybody jumping up and down. How can Donald Trump say that? He knows that it doesn't matter what matters is that he's getting the attention. Whatever he says just kind of slides off, goes away. So he's pretty brilliant. And even now we see him today, just today. You know, he'll declare war. I'll talk about what a terrible, how the media is the worst people on earth. And he hates the New York Times. But, you know, there's Maggie Haberman in The Times today with a whole conversation with him about what it's like living in the White House. He's always playing this game of cultivating individual reporters while simultaneously declaring war on the institutions they work for. And it's just worked really well for them.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “In a constant state of reinvention, I first met him in nineteen ninety. Nine when he was considering the reform nomination for President Jesse Ventura was trying to build a national party and I spent some time with Trump and then he was like a good government, non-party reform candidate and decided not to run. And I frankly thought he would never run, but he is temperamentally in by career an entertainer and it gives him, I think he's judged by the public in an entirely different way.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And he is because of that, he has been consistently, and I would argue to this day still is, not judged as a politician, he is judged as an entertainer. He's judged by an entirely different standard. And people used to say, and they still, you know, how can he say one thing and then say another 48 hours later? How can he say he was against the war in Iraq when we're showing this clip that he's for the war in Iraq and nobody cares? Well, politicians can't get away with that. Hillary Clinton can't get away with that. Barack Obama can't get away with that. And Jeb Bush can't get away with that, right? A career politician, we always suspect of, you know, we call that a flip-flop. We always suspect that they're changing with the winds of public opinion. But entertainers do it all the time. Entertainers take on roles. They change characters. They change personas. They have fallen redemption stories. They fall out of favor. They come back. Entertainers are constantly reinventing themselves.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “But if you were watching cable news or Sunday shows in this country, you would have sworn he had fifty plus percent of the vote and was steamrolling his way toward the nomination. He was on all the time, to the extent where I think it made it hard for other candidates to even be heard, to even introduce themselves. And partly, you know, I think this was the fault of a process, a Republican Party should have got control of this. I think the super PACs contributed to this mightily because they enabled everybody to stick around, to get in and stick around if they had one friend who could write a check. But, you know, when you have seven governors in a race, which we've not seen before, seven current or former governors, and the public doesn't know any of them are, it's very hard to break out. And there you had Trump just dominating. And part of it gave him credit. He showed up because he loves the media, he loves the attention. I mean, he was ubiquitous.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “You know, I wrote about this For most of the primary season, in late 2015, through the summer, the summer into the fall of 2015, Donald Trump was polling 20 to 25 percent, never really higher than 30. He was a very fractured Republican feeling, so he was actually leading the polls, but he was leading with a very modest percentage, and largely because he was a celebrity and he probably came into the race just based on TV Stardom alone with 20%.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Cameos, but he's not possible. Trump is not possible in a world where we don't. principally the media but also political parties and also the public where we don't view our politics through the prism of entertainment and heartwarned very clearly about this when he got out of the race in 1987 he gave what i think is one of the most precious speeches in the history of american politics i consider it up there with the the withenhauer's military industrial complex speech no one remembers it in fact it was entirely mocked and dismissed at the time but he said take it from me politics in this country is on the verge of becoming a kind of athletic competition or sporting match and he said i tremble for my country he said he said we'll all be he said i tremble for my country to think we'll all be rephrasing jefferson to say or rather go back saying he says he says uh i fear we'll all be uh rephrasing jefferson to say i tremble for my country when i think we may in fact get the leaders we deserve”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, his transition was a reality show, right? He'd march everybody in front of the camera. Is it going to be this guy? Is it going to be that guy? It was literally like the apprentice, you know, eerily.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “But you know, I argue and have argued, David, that it's not a mistake to look at it through the prism only of scandals and sex, although, you know, I do think. There is a line from Hart to Clinton and where we are with Trump, and it's more complicated than people think it is. But what really happened in 1987, more so than just being about sex or about personal lives, is that is a shift to me from a media and a political process focused on ideas and worldviews and agendas to institutions focused on personalities and entertainment. What that really was was the beginning of politics as soap opera and politicians as celebrities in a way that only celebrities had been treated before that. And so when you look at it that way, this is what I argue in the book, there is a really direct line. In fact, I did not anticipate the book being quite as prescient as I think some people think it was. But when you draw that, I think you can draw a line from 1987 to Donald Trump in 2016. And there's a very clear evolution there because he represents really the”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Hart was embroiled in really the first modern satellite driven sex scandal. And he was literally put under surveillance. I think it would be shocking today. It was very shocking then. He was put under surveillance at his home by a team from the Miami Herald. They saw a woman coming in and out. They wrote about it. It exploded. It was a five-day televised national soap opera that ended not only in his withdrawal from the presidential race, which shocked a lot of people, but really his disgrace in public life, something from which he never really came back despite.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I thought President Obama's election was an excellent example of, by the way, of how Washington is the last to get the news. I remember writing in 2008, I had an ongoing argument at the Times magazine with some of the writers who were writing about it about whether an African American candidate could get elected president. And I remember saying, hey, guys, I wrote this. I said, you know, there's this show called 24. It had not one but two black presidents now in a row. Its ratings are among the highest in the country. Nobody sits around saying that's not believable. That's not plausible. Only in Washington and in the media where people still say America's too racist to elect a black president. But the cultural markers were all there. In fact, that was not an instrumental hurdle. And I always believed that was the case.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Well, I've never spent, you know, my weeks at reporting dinners, media. I don't go to parties and book parties. I've got my family. We live in the suburbs and are, you know, close in in Bethesda. I've got my kids. I go to the bus stop every morning. I talk to other parents about their kids, what we watch on TV. My existence, I think, you know, is very normal. My friends are not in politics. A lot of them are not in media. So I think that's an especially the experience of people who come in with a president and leave with a president or with a senator and leave with a senator. But I think, you know, part of the problem is that that furthers the impression that people who live in Washington work in a variety of sectors or in government or in the federal government in civil service jobs or in the media can't understand the lives of normal Americans. And I think for many of us who are there over a long period of time and forge real ties, our lives are actually quite normal.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, it depends how you live in Washington because I've always taken issue with consultants, you know, aides like yourself who came to town and proclaimed Washington a Potemkin village and wanted and talked about, they did this, the Bush people did this how much they wanted to go home. I mean, you know, I've never spent”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Which I Well, it's designed that way. I've written about this a couple times that it's, you know, the system is designed to be responsive. That's the nature of the republic. We don't actually want Washington forging ahead in creating our cultural trends. Every other sector of the society gets hit by cultural upheaval first. It's Hollywood, it's business, it's sports. It's always filters to Washington last because the system is designed to be very responsive to what's going on out there. And so I think Washington is always catching up to the cultural trends after everybody.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “We have, and we're going to still. And that's what really got me thinking about the deterioration of institutions, which is a theme I think I got too much sooner than other people. In fact, it's frustrating to me now that it's so mainstream because, you know, later when I was at the Times, because that experience really opened my eyes to what was really going on in American politics that people in Washington really were very slow to understand”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Who were important? I spent a lot of 1999 with Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. And not only was that a fascinating story and a great experience and forged a lot of my views about the potential of breaking the two-party paradigm in American politics and what was going on with the electorate that still informed my views. But it also showed me what was going on with the elector, what was going on, what was coming in American politics. People used to say I was crazy when at the early 2000s, you're going to get an independent presidency in this country. You're going to see the deterioration of the two parties.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “and state issues. It was tough to get it in the magazine Newsweek was always a frustrating writing experience for me. It's why five years was about as much as I think I could have done. But because the space was so tight, the format was so restrictive and it was tough to get in the magazine. But I really learned about local politics. I had worked for a couple of mayors before when I was a kid just in summers or whatever. But to understand all these local and state issues, I still to this day give me an opportunity to spend time with any politician. I'll go to a governor and a mayor and heartbeat. And I got to know a lot of politicians.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Well, that's when I started covering politics. But interestingly and importantly, you know, for me. Howard Feynman had the national, the Washington beat kind of to himself, and we had a pretty good political team. And my thing was mayors and governors.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Heroin, as you remember, there was no GPS. So I had a stack of maps as tall as I am. And before I got on a plane, if I remembered, I grabbed them out. And they were, by the time I, you know, a couple years into that job. There were half a dozen cities in America I could land in with no map and I knew where I was going because I had spent so much time traveling around. It was tremendous experience.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “At the end of the campaign, I said to her, I have no interest in not writing. I love that part So two years in, she called me and she said, All right, look, you know. We're offering a job as a national correspondent. We want sort of people. We want to set a model of people who will go out and do the reporting and the writing because, you know, with the news magazines, they had always been separate. She said, I cannot offer you a better job. It's the best one I'm ever going to be able to offer you if you want to do national reporting. Now is your moment. And it was not an easy decision because I hadn't been at the Globe that long. I had great friends and a girlfriend and I love the newsroom and all that. But I did want to do that national thing. And that was tremendous. I was at Newsweek for five years at the tail end of the golden era. And I saw just every part of the country twice over. I was on the road so much I was sick of being on the road. But I had never been anywhere. Bridgeport was my world. Trumbull, Bridgeport, Fairfield County, whatever, New York. But, you know, I hadn't seen Boston until I went to college. I'd never seen the West Coast till I was in my twenties, and I really was not well traveled. And that was my five years to really understand the country.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “So I went up there, and Anna called me a couple times. And so she called me about two years in. In fact, they'd offered, they'd asked me if I wanted to cover the 96 campaign, but remember they had that project at Newsweek where you were only reporting but you didn't write part of the book project.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And Anne called me. She had offered me a couple of jobs after I went to the club. They wanted to keep me at Newsweek. And I did what was considered to a lot of people a crazy thing in going to the globe, but I wanted that daily experience. I remember somebody at the globe saying to me, you could have stayed at Newsweek and you came here. I mean, that was kind of nuts. I loved Matt Storren, who was then the editor of the Globe, and I thought it was going to be a great experience. And once I saw those trucks and the skyline out the newsroom window, I was kind of hooked.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Well, the truth is I had interned for Newsweek, and you probably knew Anne McDaniel at one time. Yeah, sure. So she was the Bureau chief and chief of correspondence, a very powerful person at Newsweek.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I was too. Yeah, I have the same feeling. I have to go through nights, and I did it for a while. I think we were short staffed, it was probably close to a year. And that was brutal.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “We did four to two, but they always called you in early because invariably you were a kid and invariably somebody left a story at 2 o'clock. So it was almost always two to two.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “If someone had given me a column at twenty two or blog if it had existed, if someone had let me vent my opinions at twenty two about politics or twenty five or twenty eight and without having covered it, I would have taken that. I once was in the running to be a metro columnist at the Globe after I had left. And I desperately wanted that job. I was too young. I wouldn't have known enough. But I didn't know that The thing is, they didn't give us those opportunities. They actually said to me, you know what? Just not yet. And the fact that we do now have a world where people cannot cover things, not learn them, not see them, and then just start offering their opinions to large audiences, that's a problem.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “But it's not just the digital pressure. It's the way people come up now. It's the pathway is different, right? You used to have to do a certain amount of reporting. You used to have to learn that lesson that I was describing. Before they would let you go out and write about the presidency. I hate to sound like they get off my lawn, an old guy, but I do think these kids are missing something when you get”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “You learn that you actually don't know what seems obvious isn't obvious and you don't know what goes on in people's heads. And I think that served me well later covering politics. I've never assumed the motives of people. I've never assumed that what went on just because it looks like the line went from point A to point B. I never assumed that it was that I worked.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “This guy, he only spoke to me. I had interviews with him, but we were all sure that he was the guy that he had been tried and convicted in the media. It turned out he wasn't the guy. I remember a story covering a story of a murder of a kid in Maine that no one could explain, and it turned out we found out much later on that he had actually killed himself, and his father was so ashamed that he'd moved the body and staged the murder. When you do, yeah, it was a horrible story, and I'll always remember it. But when you do these things, when you do these kinds of stories.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah, no, Robbie's a great guy. I knew all these guys. But, you know, when you cover it day to day really humiliates you, as you know from your experience. What you find out very quickly is that reality defies your easy armchair analysis and prediction of what's going on. I can remember very clearly a murder where everybody knew who did it, the guy who did it. It was a horrific murder of an au pair who'd been literally sought in half. It was just one of these crazy stories.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “That was fantastic. I really was. And I could have stayed at the globe probably my whole career, or at least it seemed that way at the time, not knowing all the economic changes that would come to the business. But I loved it. I was one of the youngest people in the newsroom. You know, I was very quickly doing breaking news. It was crazy hours and a crazy pace, but my job was to patrol all the worst neighborhoods, all the toughest neighborhoods in Boston, or if somebody got killed in some freak way in a suburb. It was news. The thing you learn, the reason I'm so grateful for that experience. Now, looking back, and I could have I could have been very happy doing a lot of things there and probably would have covered politics there eventually. But the thing I'm really grateful on the spotlight.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Lot of good work and that was actually a good experience. I thought briefly about staying in speech writing because at that time I thought, wow, you get paid six times what I was getting paid. Journalism jobs were $16, $17 grand a year and I had no money. And I certainly could have. Once you have the experience of speech writing for someone you don't respect as much, which is what happened to me after both the people I was writing for actually died around the same time, Audrey and Larry Bruce. And when you have the experience of writing for people who are not as admirable, you quickly realize, at least I realized that was not for me. And so I went back to graduate school in journalism at Columbia, then I went to Boston Globe. I was on the city desk for two years. What was that?”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source