Mark Halperin Opens Up About His Career and Political Views, Plus the Truth About Media Bias, with Drew Holden

Hey everybody, welcome in Mark Halpern here. This is next stop, the program that tells you what's gonna happen next up on Mark Halpern. As I said, Editor-in-Chief of the Live Interactive video platform two way, you can see me there,

but also right here where I guide you through to the future. A fun show today, a little surprise for you coming up

on our first guest, the way that segment works will surprise you.

And then we're gonna talk about the media and how the media could be better.

“It's a frequent topic here and it's an important one.”

And we're gonna have Drew Holden here who's gonna explain better than I think you've ever heard what's wrong with the media, what the liberal media bias is caused by and how we might fix it. So say tune for a little switcher who's surprised

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This is next up on Mark Kauper and two segments coming up in this show. One, I don't want to say much about.

It's why I wanted to be a surprise for you.

All I can tell you is it's one of our greatest guests of all time. It's all I can say. Fantastic booking, difficult to pull off. But I think you will enjoy it.

And then after that, Drew Holden will be here. Drew is one of the best media analysts in America. And he's good for a bunch of reasons. He understands the media. He's got a big heart.

He doesn't bring to his media criticism and analysis negativity or hatred or disdain. He really wants the media to be better. So he's not in the media criticism business to make the money or to tear people down

or to get clicks off of negativity. He's there to put in sharp relief the problems with the media, particularly the liberal media bias. And he's really one of the most talented at doing that as I've seen.

And whenever I talk to him, I learn a ton and you will too. So in a moment, our surprise guest. And then after that, finishing off the program, Drew Holden will be here to talk through the latest in liberal media bias and other problems

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There's a serious business. This is your life we're talking about. 120 life can help. (upbeat music) Welcome back to Next Up.

I'm Emily Dushinski, and for the next segment, things are gonna look a little different. Usually when I'm on this program, I'm the one in the hot seat, but for the moment we're flipping the script,

I am the captain now, as they say. Mark Halpern has spent the better part of four decades as the ultimate fly on the wall of American power. He's been the guy in the room for the biggest moments

in modern history. And today, we aren't talking about the news. We're talking about the man behind the news, which every good newsman hates. So it's bound to be a great time.

This is a special all axis.

We're going into the origin story, Mark's Life in New York, and what actually makes him tick with the cameras aren't rolling. So Mark, you have spent your career being the one

with the Notepad. I've actually seen you in action before,

“but today are you ready to be the one answering the question?”

- I'm afraid I've heard a lot of great things about the program, so I'm excited to be part of it. And thank you for having me on. - Oh, it's a real honor to have you here, Mark. - Thank you very much, sir.

- So talk to us about the Halpern name.

This is going to be the first question.

Your dad was such a significant figure in foreign policy. You grew up in Bethesda of all places. Was the dinner table just a non-stop seminar on the Pentagon papers, were you just a regular kid? Maybe a little bit of both, Mark.

- I mean, a little bit of both, because although my hometown paper was the Washington Post, my favorite section was the sports section, at least growing up. But definitely, I cover politics and government and campaigns,

most of it, my conversations with my dad, and my brothers were about government and about policy. So less, who's going to be the next nominee for whatever, and more national security policy, economic policy, civil rights.

But yeah, I would say, although there was plenty of normal, definitely a heavy dose of policy and kind of Washington seriousness in my childhood. - Did you have a moment where you realized who your dad was and like you put that piece

into the bigger puzzle of policy and politics? - You know, he was friends with a lot of reporters, friends with a lot of diplomats, friends with a lot of people in government, some friends with some more famous people.

And you know, when I was born, he taught it Harvard, then he worked in the Pentagon, then he worked in the White House. So if your dad's office is the Pentagon and the White House, it's pretty clear

there's something different going on. That's not a normal, normal experience for a kid. And then probably the seminal thing was in, let's see, and when I was about how old would I have been, about eight, we found at our home phone

had been wiretap for 21 months by Nixon and Kissinger. So that initiated a 21-year lawsuit against Nixon, Kissinger, or the FBI whole bunch of other people, that didn't end with the millions of dollars. I thought we were gonna get, but that lawsuit,

being the plaintiff and a lawsuit against a president, the United States and a former secretary of state, that was a, I'm the, I'm the present reality of my childhood. - Do you think Nixon had wiretap tapes of you being like, "Yes, Bob, I will meet you for the basketball."

- They did, the FBI did. And the poor FBI agents had to actually sit and listen to all these things and then read the transcripts of them. And I was on the phone all of my,

my younger brother was friends with a little girl across the street, and they were like three years old during the wiretap. And they would, they would call each other on the phone and look at the window across the street and just look at the window and sort of,

Google got back and forth to each other. And when we found out our phone was wiretap, I wondered how those agents justified their existence on the earth that they had to listen to that.

- Incredible, last question on this front.

- A lot of whippersnappers like me come into Washington. You have this unique vantage point because you were in Washington as a kid. So what would you say has changed most about the culture of kind of inside Washington

“since you were growing up in Bethesda watching your father?”

- Well, the sudden related government in politics, but certainly the culture of Washington, one of my favorite lines for President Kennedy, it a lot of good jokes. But one was at Washington as a city,

he said of northern charm and southern efficiency. And it's still true as compared to Tokyo where there's a great service economy and people are super friendly. But it's not as true.

They're good restaurants. If you go to a dry cleaner or get an attacksy,

they don't act like it's their very first day of business

and they don't like their jobs. At least not as much as they did. So I think that's the biggest change. It's a more sophisticated city. It's a more cosmopolitan city.

It's a more, it's a city that's more cake that caters more to consumers than it did when I was growing up. - Okay, I had a lot of one more question on this. Caitlin Flanagan has a great short of great long piece

“about once her father, who's, I think a professor at Berkeley,”

bringing Joan Didion to dinner. Is there a memory you have as a kid, Mark? I'm sure there are many, many people, many, many notable features who came in and out because there are memory of someone there. - There's a bunch, but the one,

the one I liked the most, it's a Daniel Ellsberg, it was a very close friend of my dad's.

had a favorite Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, and then we went elsewhere in the strip mall to the Basque and Robins. And Dan, who had lived a very cosmopolitan life,

acted like he'd never been to an ice cream parlor before.

And like, I ordered bubble gum ice cream,

“and he's like, huh, could I order bubble gum ice cream?”

What would that be like? He had a lot of intellectual questions about the ice cream, and that has always been a running joke in my family about how Daniel Ellsberg didn't really, a quickly understand the concept

of the bubble gum ice cream. - That's a very good story, interesting. - It's hard. - Let's talk about Harvard Mark. So when you were at Harvard,

were you one of the many Harvard students who's already kind of planning to take over the world in your case, the world of media and journalism, or was there a version of Mark Halperon that could have become maybe a lawyer or a professor,

or something else entirely? - Yeah, I wanted to be a lawyer. I studied Japanese and college, Japanese, culture and society, and Japan was a very big thing then.

So I thought a lot of my family friends when I was growing up were lawyers at big DC firm. So I thought I'd be either a diplomat with a law degree, or a lawyer working on US Japanese business stuff. And that was true throughout college.

My roommates were all on the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper, the Crimson, and the Crimson is a really demanding extracurricular activity. And one of them literally flunked out of Harvard, which is hard to do, 'cause they try to not have people flunk out,

'cause they spent all this time writing newspaper stories. And so I didn't do any student journalism. And then when I graduated, I wanted to get into journalism. And I did an interview with the ABC News,

Washington Bureau Chief, guy named George Watson. And this is the pre-internet day. So if you're getting a job interview someone, it's hard to really look up, look them up in any way. So I didn't know much about him.

And so in the interview, he looked at my resume, and he said, "See you went to Harvard. "Did you write for the school newspaper?" And I said, "No," and I sort of got up in my high horse. And I said, "I'd roommate to write for the newspaper

"and it was just a huge waste of time

“"and I think in college, you should really focus on learning."”

And then afterwards, you can go into journalism. And he looked at the window, he said, "Huh, it's not the way I felt when I was president "of the Crimson." He did not hire me.

But someone else did. And I eventually went on to work for him and not appreciated his candor with me. But I did not think about journalism at all in college. - So what gave you the bug?

- I graduated, didn't really know what I wanted to do.

And I was always interested in presidential campaigns.

And so I graduated in 1987. And the two to 1988 campaign was sort of underway. And I thought, well, there'd be interesting to be in a big news organization and sort of see how it works. Again, no internet, no access to the associated press wire.

CNN existed, but there was no other cable news. And so, through family connections, I did get a job with ABC, not through George Watson, in Washington, but here in New York City. And I loved it.

I loved it from the first day. I loved seeing how the news got made. Back then, Dan Rather, Tom Brocon, Peter Jennings were everything. They were more famous, typically than the presidential candidates

they covered. And Peter became my mentor. And from the very first day, I got to work with him in the sense that I sat in the newsroom and photocopied and ran script packets around.

But I just learned a ton about right away about how the news business worked. And got to see 24 hour news. Again, pre-internet, but they had telex machines and they had wire services in the computer terminals.

And although I was interested in covering other stories, the presidential campaign was underway. And ABC had made a huge commitment to covering it. They had what were then called off-air reporters.

“I think there were like 16 presidential candidates in 1988”

because there was open race. So there were a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans. And I got to interact with all those young producers who were out in the field. And literally, I probably worked there for three weeks.

And I just said, this is what I want to do. I want to work for a big news organization like ABC. And I want to cover presidential campaigns. - Did you have a disastrous early job experience? Like a lot of people who are prominent can tell the story

about that one job. It was a disaster. And ultimately it teaches you about what you want to do or what you're best at. But did you have that mark early career?

- I've never had a bad job.

I had all good jobs. But I did have bad experiences. And one of them was, for a very first job, my assignment was to, one of the things I did was, there'd be a script, a correspondent would write a script

in the computer and they'd print it out. And then you'd need to photocopy it. And you'd need to make like 70 copies. And then make a script packet, right?

what the announcer would say, what all the correspondent scripts,

it'd be like under 50 pages. And yet to assemble them, yet to print them out as they came in. And then it had to assemble them into 50 page packets. And then he had to run them all over the building because different people needed them.

They needed them in a graphics department, the tape department, the control room. They needed them in a round world news tonight. And I have a great sense of direction normally. I really do.

It's one of my probably strongest things that I could not figure out this building. I would just, I would be, I would be get lost. I'd go down the wrong corridor. Because it was a long walk.

Like if you did it without getting lost, going from where world news tonight was to all the places you needed to drop these script packs, it probably 15 minutes. But I would get lost and my colleagues

said that thought that was ridiculous and not helpful to the cause. So I got a lot of anxiety about it.

And this was my first job.

And the anxiety did not make me focus and do better. It made me get more lost. So that's still, as you can tell from the tone in my voice and a little sweat breaking out here, it's still a pretty traumatic experience to me.

And then I worked in that building for many years and I still found it a little confusing. Even though again, I have a very good sense of direction normally. - Yes, I did sense you actually having some traumatic flashbacks.

You were telling that story, Mark. When you were a young journalist, how aware

“were your, maybe some of your mentors, not your peers?”

How aware were they of your father, how aware were your sources of your father? How did you navigate that? That must have been hard. And I'm just thinking about this.

- Really not. Some of the, there were a couple of correspondence

at ABC, a married couple who had been network correspondence

for a very long time, Richard Threll, Kel, and Betsy Aaron. They had been a long time friends of my dad. They actually helped me get the job interview. So they knew my dad and, but, you know, my dad, my dad used to have a button that said,

almost famous person, he's not super famous. If you're interested in sort of the parts of history that he touched, you know, he's famous and in Washington he was. But I was based in New York for most of my career,

except for five miles in DC. Most of my colleagues had no idea. And I did, there was no reason for me to flaunt it. And again, the stuff my dad was sort of expert in and big in, not typically the stuff that gets covered

by the network news. And then when I started covering politics in '91, when I got assigned to Bill Clinton, my dad really was not a big player, except in policy, in presidential politics.

- Washington and New York might as well be a world of parts of the world. So you are a work of hallic, your workhorse, what though happens when you close your laptop and you're off? Is there one thing, a hobby, a genre of music,

“a niche obsession you have that would shock the audience?”

- Well, I play with my son. So that crads have next to everything. Love Legos. - Those are nice. - Yeah, he's past Legos though, thank goodness,

'cause I'm not a huge Lego guy. He's got lots of different interests. Right now, we're doing very intense thumb fights. And I invented a thing where you can take this finger and bring it around and say rare double team

and use the other finger to bring him down. So we do a lot of thumb fights. He just learned how to count in Japanese. So I'm very excited about that 'cause I speak a little Japanese.

I took it for many years and only speak a little. And he loves comedy, he loves music, he loves sports, so stuff with him. Separate from that, you know, he's busy, if he's doing something and I have free time.

I still like sports. Stunt nearly as much as I used to watching professional and college sports. I do that at fair amount. And I like comedy a lot too.

I'm really interested in the craft of comedy. So I watch a lot of stand-up. I watch a lot of, like, of on guard type experimental comedy stuff. My friend, no one who's been on the program

to warm in owns the comedy seller. And so I go there and I just, like I said, I like humor, like most people. But I like the craft of comedy. I like understanding the cadence of it,

the craft of it and the production of it, whether it's live or recorded. I'm really interested in that. And I like to, I'm not a natural broadcaster. I currently host three shows or four shows.

But I'm not a natural broadcaster. It's not my strength. Peter Jennings was a great mentor to me and taught me a lot and I'm so grateful to him because he was one of the greatest broadcasters

“I think literally in the history of television.”

And he was generous with his time. So one of the things I do, you say it's not my spare time. It's work. But I really am fascinated by great broadcasters, whether there are comedians or musicians

or news people. And so I study the, I like saying the craft, both of performance and then also production. - How hard was the loss of Peter Jennings for you, Mark?

Peter, as I said, was my mentor and so generous to me.

And I could tell you a million stories.

“I won't about all the things he did for me.”

I did a lot for him to, we worked really well together. He had a great competition with Brocott and Rather. And again, if you're a younger person, it's hard to appreciate. They were just such titans. They were, they were, you know,

heading shoulders above every other journalist in terms of their fame and their influence. And those two guys had covered American politics. Dan was from Texas, Thomas, from South Dakota. Peter was from Canada.

So they were Americans and they were rather North Americans. And they had covered presidential campaigns. Peter really had and he'd mostly been a foreign correspondent. So he needed help navigating the personalities and all that. And I was honored and delighted to be able to be part of his team

to help him do that and he supported my career not just as a broadcaster, but help me get the job I'd wanted from early in my career to be the political director. He lived right across the street from me.

“I could actually see his apartment from the window of my apartment.”

And I really, you know, ABC was very competitive than Runearlage legendary president of ABC News. He said, basically, he was going to build the best news division with the biggest stars and that their competition was not going to be NBC and CBS, but each other.

And so Peter competed fiercely with Ted Coppel and did I enjoy her and Barbara Walters for bookings and stories and access to the best correspondence. And I was a Peter person. And even though when I was political director,

I suppose to work for all the shows. And all the anchors, I was a Peter person. So that's the predicate of why he meant so much to me.

And again, I could tell you a million stories

about working with him and just how extraordinary it was. I'll just say the night of the 2000 election. We were in Times Square broadcasting. And everybody was saying that Gore won and then the Bush won. And then when Bush got glory to everybody,

saying it's over Bush won. And Peter really trusted me to say, no, don't say it. Yeah, everybody else is going to say it, don't say it. And sadly, I haven't been able to find the full coverage that we did on YouTube or anywhere else.

I should probably go to some archive and yet it. But I didn't-- I wasn't watching the competitors. But I know from some of the accounts I've been given, we really were more willing to stand up to our decision desk and the polling and the sort of the conventional wisdom.

And say, it's not fair to say the Bush won. So it's Mark Alphan. We haven't talked about it for many hours. The possibility of tampering with the vote of fraudulent voting is very alive in the party's minds.

We're talking again, as we said earlier, in the evening, over 100 million transactions and all likelihood by the end of the night in terms of how many people voted. Their mistakes made all of us know when you go and vote sometimes

there's something wrong. That's just accidents. Every election, there's some sort of fraud. It may not be almost certainly, I would say, not directed by the two presidential campaigns.

But you've got local races where people are trying to help themselves goes on all the time in American politics.

“This time, unlike 1960, again, I think the lawyers”

will want to at least take a look at it. Thanks, Mike Flom, a great Democratic experiment. Thank you very much. We'll be back to continue our coverage of election in 2000 in just a moment.

That night really bonded us quite a bit. Because I pushed him to not do what the others were doing. And he trusted me. And we would have been somewhat rewarded for it, although we should have been more rewarded.

In any event, then 9/11 happened. And on the day and 9/11, I woke up in New York City and I had meetings in Washington. So I took the six AM flight from New York to DC before the planes did. And so I'm one of the few people who were in both cities on 9/11.

And Peter was here. And I was desperate to get back to be with my wife, but also to be sitting on the set with Peter. And I couldn't get back for a couple days. And so that was very frustrating.

And then, as you may not know, we may know, he started smoking again after 9/11 because of all the pressure and anxiety and the impact of it. He had smoked when he was younger, but like most sensible people he'd stopped. And so, probably a longer answer than you wanted.

But one of the reasons is still very tough on me is he got sick. And he had to go for medical treatment.

And I never really got to say goodbye to him.

Because no one knew when he left abruptly to go deal with his health that he would never come back. Not only not come back on the air, but not come back to be seen. And he wasn't talking to anybody.

And you know, you think about incredibly famous powerful rich,

handsome, extraordinary voice.

“And that's how I had experienced him as everyone had experienced him.”

And then the cancer took him so quickly and so thoroughly that the only reason I was one of the few people who had to talk to him is I was going away to Japan on a fellowship. And I forget exactly what happened. But the thought was, Peter wants to talk to you before you go

because you're going away for three months and he'd like to talk to you. So we had a very short phone call, very emotional. He sounded, I can't imitate it. And I can't really describe it that well. But it didn't sound like himself.

It was weak almost, almost comical, almost like a Disney character. This person had this incredible broadcaster voice. We talked very briefly. He said, I know you're going to Japan. I think you're going to have a great time.

“You haven't been overseas enough to because he was big on how”

he teased me about how little foreign coverage I had done. I had done next to none and he thought that was a hole in my resume. So very short call, very weird to hear his voice that way. And that was it.

Never talked to me again.

He died shortly thereafter and I'm haunted by two things. One is, it's hard for me to conjure up, I had a thousand conversations with a thousand's of conversations. It's hard for me to conjure up any of them because when I tried to, I just think about that one horrible last call and how his voice sounded.

And then the other thing is, and this is obviously very common when you lose someone, is, you know, for years after, because I lived right, I lived right next door to him across the street and we lived two blocks from ABC. So I'd see him all the time. For a long time, I would think I'd see him in the neighborhood.

I would imagine I'd see someone in an animation B.P., or I'd think I'm going to turn around and he'd be there. So you can tell, it's still hard for me. And although other people have helped me in my career and I've had other people who've been really positive impact on me and generous with helping me, no one close since, in

terms of how much he helped me and what a, what a, aberration it was. And I'll say just because I'm telling you the whole story now, Peter is pretty tough on people. He was pretty tough on colleagues and correspondence and, and he'd make people cry, you

know, because he was so powerful and famous and demanding, he was so nice to me.

And part of why I was resented by some of my colleagues was because it was like, you know, why was Peter so nice to me. And, you know, it was just a, it was a unique relationship in my career and in my life. And I, I think all the time about what he would think about next up and what he would think about two way and, and what he would think about the fact that I, you know, I became

a broadcaster. And I was good at being a broadcaster as I am at about 20 other things, maybe 50 other things. But to extend time and decent broadcaster, it's because of Peter. Thank you for sharing.

“I'm sorry to dredge that up, but I'm really glad you should have found that very interesting.”

Sure. Oh, heavy stuff, well, we were just talking about you going abroad from New York and you've been in New York forever, but if you did have to pack up and live somewhere else in the world with no professional obligations attached to it, where would you go? Would it be Japan?

Would it be somewhere else? It's Tokyo or London. It's probably Tokyo, but if, if you said, it was forever, it probably be London. Just because my Japanese is not great. And I find being in, in other countries where I can't speak the language, I can't watch TV.

I can't, ease drop, I can't, you know, ask anybody for anything directions. I can't order everything on the menu easily. I just find that a little alienating. So it be London, but if it were for just over a few years, it'd be Tokyo. I love Tokyo, I love love love, I love all of Japan, but it would be to, it would be

Tokyo. When did that start for you? When you were a kid, do you be teaching? My dad did a lot of stuff with Japan when he was in the government. So we had Japanese people around us, we would eat Japanese food.

And then in high school, just a fluke, a confluence of three things. One is my family's connection to Japan. Two is Japan was a really hot story that kind of the way China is now. There was a book called Japan is number one. They bought Lincoln Center, or Rockfeller Center.

And it seemed like just as now, a lot of people frame the future of the United States

Back then it was existential struggle with Japan. Even though Japan was our ally and we had a strong relationship with them there, their economic model and their cultural influence seemed like it was going to be something the United States was going to have to grapple with.

And then third, and this really was an essential element.

The woman who was the head of the language department at my high school was a French teacher, but she, as a young woman, had been one of general MacArthur's translators in Japan during the immediate aftermath of the World War II. And so she decided to give it all the interest in Japan to start teaching Japanese. So from 10th to 11th, 12th grade in high school, public high school, I took Japanese.

And that helped me get into Harvard, I'm sure, because I was probably one of the few people applied to Japanese, and that was considered the way Arabic is now, or Mandarin is now. It's something valuable and not very common amongst high school students. And I just stayed in Boston and I've been there 30 times or so, and I just love everything about it.

That's, wow, 30 times. That's a long trip for 30 times. Yeah.

Is it a trillion dollar question? I'm increasing it from million a trillion because of inflation.

This is the ultimate question about Mark Alperon, after 40 years of being the ultimate referee of the American political process. Do you actually lean one way or the other politically, or have you truly managed to kind of scrub the rooting interest out of your system? I mean, I've used about things, and some positions that would maybe put me more left

“or right, but I really think my obligation is, as a member of this small group of people,”

is to hold all powerful interests, accountable to the public interest, and to keep my opinions out of it. You know, there's asymmetries that sometimes cause people to think on one of the other. The dominant media is liberally biased, they're not conservatively biased, they're not sometimes liberally biased, they're liberally biased, so I call that out.

There are people, not just in social media, but people who know me well, who are Republicans who sound liberal in Democrats who sound conservative, so I'm really not, it's not a game, it's not a trick, it's not a, it's not some hide-the-ball effort, I just, I'm essentially interested in holding everybody accountable, telling everybody's story, and I really do define anyone.

Some people say to me, "I watch your show, and you're such a big liberal, I watch your show, and you're such a big conservative, and I do the same thing every time." I say, "Give me some specifics, show me something I said that makes you feel confident

that you know my politics, and I never get any response that's credible."

“So there are individual things I say, or it even believe that I think we've caused someone”

to say, "Well, on that issue, you seem to have a point of view, but mostly I'm just for everybody and against everybody, I'm just, for holding everybody accountable and trying to help all voters, and all citizens understand the stories and the personalities of our time." You have seen generations of reporters come and go, so I'm...

Mostly go. Mostly go. In your view, though, what is the most dangerous process trap that you've seen young political reporters today falling into that actually will obscure the truth rather than revealing it?

Oh, don't talk to anybody. All the young reporters do is text people, or I am them. And I mean, pick up the phone, forget it, but really forget it, go see someone, go see someone in person, go to their office, talk to their assistant, talk to their colleagues. Like, that to me, I deal with all these other reporters, they just like, "It's, they can't

imagine what it means to talk to someone in person." Oh, no, I can, I am them. On any of a thousand social media platforms, I mean, it works for some things, but I can just tell you the best sources I've had in my career. I've met most of them, some of them I haven't, but I've met most of them.

And so that'd be, it's easily number one for me, trying to think of anything that would you can come close to that. The other thing is storytelling, like, people are an interesting process stories. There's all this coverage, oh, when's the next hearing going to be or whatever, like, real people don't care about that, they care about characters and storytelling.

So whatever your beat, whatever your platform, tell great stories with great characters, and again, a lot of younger reporters and older reporters, they don't seem to understand that. Well, actually, on that point, has your definition of, quote, success changed from when you

“were the king of the note in your 30s to where you are now?”

What does it kind of good day look like for Mark Halperon in 2026? As a journalist? Yeah. No, hadn't changed all, two things, whole powerful interests, accountable to all, cold, all powerful interests, accountable to the public interest and tell the great stories of our

time in an interesting way. Has it changed at all? So now it's doing at the beginning of my career, it's what I do now and to make sure they're

Yeah. Well, that's important. But don't you think there are a lot of reporters who are kind of, they may not be conservative or liberal or progressive or whatever, but they are sort of institutionalists. And that pushes them to be more deferential to power than reporters of your generation

where just trained naturally to be skeptical of. I feel like maybe that's, it's not a partisanship because there's not a party of power. Yeah. But there's something about that. Well, I definitely think that's a problem.

I'm not sure it's a bigger problem now. It may be less of a problem now because the institutional bias is not as pernicious in some ways as the liberal bias, but not understanding America is a huge problem. And I put that as a corollary to go see people in person, which is realized that not all wisdom in America is found or all great stories are found in Washington and New

York. I've covered politics in all 50 states and not many reporters have. The reason I knew Donald Trump might win in 2016 was because I went to Trump rallies in more than 30 states and talked to voters and all of them. So there is an institutional bias towards the establishment towards, you know, the wealthy.

Most reporters have health insurance, not all, but most, too. And so they don't understand fully what that means to not have health insurance if you've got a kid in particular. Most reporters don't experience illegal immigration in a way that is negative in their lives.

Not all, but most, most reporters don't know someone who's died from a fentanyl overdose.

So that establishment bias that buys towards wealth, well connected, it's always been

around.

“So I could say, I'm not sure I think it's new, but it's definitely pernicious.”

And it's definitely something that's given me an advantage. And there's an irony there, of course, because I grew up in Washington, in privilege. I went to Harvard in privilege. I live in Manhattan. But I think I do a good job of thanking relentlessly about what's going on in the rest

of the country. Hmm. Yeah, I can see other that would actually be an advantage. We know the types of people that you respect in politics, who is the person in your life, maybe outside of your family, who gave you a piece of advice or inspiration that changed

the way you treat people. Change the way I treat people. Um, a lot of people with the negative examples, uh, you know, Charlie Gibson, who also was a mentor of mine at ABC, longtime anchor of Good Morning America, Charlie's very famous, very powerful, great journalist.

He treated people everyone in such a lovely way, unlike some network anchors. He treated everyone in such a lovely way.

Always had time to talk to them, always spoke to his fans, asked them questions, made them

feel good, and, um, and, uh, I should have learned the lesson more thoroughly from Charlie than I did. But he said a great example for me, and it's very resonant for me now. Hmm. So if 50 years from now, people don't remember a single poll that you analyzed or a single

book that you wrote, what is one character trait you would want your kids and colleagues to remember you for Mark? Uh, again, I'll just always go back to great dad, but that's probably not what you mean. Um, uh, that, that, uh, journalism, uh, particularly including, not particularly, journalism,

including political journalism is, um, is, uh, is a public trust, and you can't do it

“for fun, or because it's interesting to elites, you have to do it to help the country”

understand itself and do better. And, uh, I've really tried to do that my whole career.

I don't always succeed and, and I like fun stories too, but really trying to be respectful

of the role the founder saw for journalists, the, the key role and, uh, and live up to the obligation to do it correctly. Hmm. I think great dad would have been an acceptable answer to Mark. Okay.

Well, that's more important to me, for sure. Well, Mark Halberen appreciate you, uh, sharing today. This has been very, very interesting and I know the audience is going to love it. So grateful to you. Thank you for sitting in, uh, my recommendation now would be I'll take it up with

making. Kelly, is that you should do every other show you should host.

“We'll book it for you, uh, because just you should host every other show, you don't have enough”

to do. Uh, well, hey, I'm just here in my house, so anytime you all need me, I have a here, uh, but I'll gladly pass the baton back to you, Mark. All right, Emily, thank you again, very grateful to you for joining us, making the show. It's probably this will probably be our Emmy episode would be my guess, uh, we'll submit it, uh,

for your consideration. Uh, grateful to Emily, grateful to you for watching. And, uh, Emily, of course, it's the host of After Party with Unlegious Hensky, it's on MK Media.

Mondays and Mondays and Wednesdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, 9 p.m. You can watch it live on YouTube or on demand and, of course, is a podcast on Apple, Spotify, and, like with all of our programming now on Series XM, channel 1111, the Megan Kelly, channel Emily, super great for you. Thank you, Mark.

All right, next up, Drew Holden, managing editor of Common Place, the author of Holden Court, to Great Substax, Drew Holden is next up. Going online without express VPN is like printing your social security number right on your business card, you're just putting way too much personal information out there for bad actors

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months. Again, expressvpm.com/nextup. All right. Welcome back. Next up in joining me now, Drew Holden is the managing enter of common place.

The author of Holden Court, both excellent substance, which I recommend to you and Drew and I talk about the questions of round the media, particularly as questions of bias

and the media, quite a bit and always glad to reconnect to do it again and talk about, not

just the problem but the solution. Drew, welcome and thank you for being here. Mark, the pleasure of mine, sir. Really appreciate it. I'm in that problem.

You are in every time we appear together on any show, I say this. You are one of the best analysts of the media, a particularly liberal bias because you do it with receipts as the kids say. And you do it with that ranker and you don't go for the cheap score.

“I remember early in my career, the Brent Bozell organization, where they call media research”

center. This is pre-interdit, pre-social media. They had a newsletter that they did, they came out on a monthly, hard copy, showed up in the mail, and they were indiscriminate in my view. Some of the things they called out dead on.

Some of them were just cheap and inaccurate and we used to do fact checks at ABC after debates or big speeches and I had the same problem that's just like if one candidate in the debate lies a hundred times of that serious stuff and one tells two trivial lies, don't do a segment that says, here's two lies from candidate and here's two lies from candidate like total past some standards and part of why I just think you're so talented at this

is I read all your stuff and it's always fair, it's not cherry-picked, it's not exaggerated,

it's not at a context, it's just, it is what it is and it's done with great sophistication. So I'm just I'm just so impressed with how you do it and you have colleagues who do it too, who do it the wrong way and you do it the right way, so great for you as a consumer for that. I appreciate that mark.

“I think you are as ever being far too charitable about what I choose to pick and what”

I write about but it's kind of you and I do I say one of the things that I think is so wrong and so much immediate criticism and one of the reasons why we talk about so many of these issues so frequently is that the cherry-picking is easy, right? The nut-picking is as former Senator Ben Sass calls it, just picking the worst examples of your opponent doing something wrong and bad, it's going to score clicks, it's going

to drive eyeballs, it's going to get attention, it's not going to solve anything, right? And I think at bedrock I'm really, really honestly concerned, we're trying to make the a better and I think by taking media criticism in a different direction and trying to focus more earnestly on the sort of thing that that outlet maybe in ways it doesn't understand is is way more valuable.

Yeah, we could go through and we'll talk about some examples but we could go through if you and I sat together read the New York Times or watch the today show. We'd find a million examples and some of them are extremely subtle, word noise, what's not included, how far down something is. But some of them are not subtle at all.

The fact that Melania Trump has never been on the cover of Vogue is not subtle, there's

nothing subtle about that, it's definitely not that she's not pretty enough, it's definitely

a political figure on the cover of Vogue, so that one's not subtle.

As you understand it, and I've worked in Newsrooms more than you have, but you're a great student of this and you talk to a lot of people.

“As you understand it, and I get asked this all the time and as much as I think about these”

things, I don't know the answer fully, where does this come from, what generates ridiculous subtle or big things, is it, is it, well, just break it down, where does it come from, the liberal media bias? So I think particularly in the last decade or so, still much of it has come from the way the media thinks about Donald Trump in the private of their own mind, right?

It's not just, I don't think it's necessarily a newsroom dynamic or a conversational sort of thing, but I think you have this kind of monochromatic mentality around the way members of the media see Donald Trump, his movement, and people who support him. And I think there's all sorts of problems with that, but what media is concerned, I think one of the biggest problems is that that sort of thinking, right, that kind of impulse

gut feeling about where someone is morally is, I think, leading their coverage as soon as things happen, as soon as events happen, before facts are known, before the justice settled, there is just almost iron-clad belief that something that happens, Donald Trump is the culprit, directly or indirectly, maybe there's more research on these than we done to figure out how he's connected to it, but somehow he is at the heart of this,

he is the problem, he is what is driving this, whatever this new horrible thing is. And I think that's the fundamental problem, but a connected problem to all of that is, I don't think the media sees it, right, I think, I know you have had a lot of conversations with members of the media who say, we're not actually interested in conditioning our coverage to a liberal audience, that's just the audience that we have, right, that the Washington

“Post, we're not fact checking because we think that's what liberals want to hear, it's”

just that those are the facts and those are our readers, we connect the two. And so I think the media is really, really blinkered in the way that it thinks about all these issues, the way it's self-understanding, right, I think the media doesn't get that it's doing this, and it tries sometimes really, really hard to not do that in some of these kind of apocalyptic moments where like Barry Weiss got hired at the New York Times

in 2016 because the newsroom kind of woke up after the election said, oh, we don't get something here. We fundamentally don't understand half this country and the way they vote and the things they care about, and then they forgot three weeks later when Trump said or did something they didn't like, and I'm worried that for the last 10 years, we've just repeated cycles

of that, and you don't have any real attempt from media, from outlets, from individuals to really reckon with the fact that their views are radically different from lots of people, and that they are obsessed, absolutely obsessed with the person of Donald Trump and all those people connected to them.

I almost never take notes for variety of reasons.

I wish I'd taken notes during that answer because there's like a 40 things you said I want to pick up on. But I remember the big ones, there was, there was, there was, there was liberal media biased against previous Republicans, be sure Donald Trump, but you're right that Trump, like he's done with so much of our political media culture, he's super charged in.

But here's, here's the confusion to me, at least partly, Trump's gotten great political coverage, pre-being a candidate, he got great coverage, he got a lot of coverage, he understands the media really well, he solicits the media, Donald Trump, I cite this all the time because it's so illustrative of his mentality and the mentality of the press before he became president, Donald Trump during the transition in 2016 gets elected November to enterization.

He went and did editorial board meetings at the New York Times in Kondeynast. That's, that's not, no Republican would do that. No president would, no president to like would do that. So the media love Trump, Trump love the media and in 2016, although there was access Hollywood, Biden, and plenty of negative coverage, I really do think Trump got on balance more

favorable coverage in Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton would agree with me. So this guy who was able to get all this positive coverage for a long time then gets elected, goes to Kondeynast, goes to New York Times. And then is a great story and there's, there's liberal media bias, there's establishment bias, there's the bias towards great stories, even liberal reports, loved great stories.

So why, why is it that shortly after taking office, Donald Trump started to get the most negative and, and, and most biased coverage against him. What, what happened to that guy who had relationships with the media who, the media love,

“producing great content for them, how could they suddenly start to treat him differently?”

Yeah, it's a good question. So I think it comes down to two things.

The first is that he was a threat to the institution of the media and kind of a lot of old,

If Donald Trump comes in and says he wants to, you know, throw out these, these kind of esteemed institutions that have set America on this kind of comfortable trajectory for a lot of upper middle class and upper upper class people, I think day on like an individual level felt threatened by that, right? And so I think that's one angle of it.

The other angle that I think is really, really important is that the media recognize and at least continues to believe even as the powers diminish a little bit that there is nothing

that is going to drive more attention to them than by being critical of what Donald Trump

does, right?

“He is a phenomenon, I think, to the media beyond being the person, right?”

And what he represents isn't just a president. It isn't just the Republican Party. It isn't just a changing kind of system in trade or in foreign relations or in military or anything else. He represents a group of people that I think at bedrock most people in the legacy media and

most legacy institutions don't like and don't respect and don't care about. And there's been a cheapening, I think, in the years since of what that looks like, right? You had the 20, it was a 2024 GOP convention was that the forgotten man. And I think there's a lot of kind of astroturfing around that of people who are like, well, now there is political cachet to saying we care about these people and so we are going

to put on a good show of saying that we care about these people when it's not really true. But I think the media at no point recognize that what the other half of the country who didn't think like them, who didn't go to the schools that they went to, who doesn't go to the general parties that they go to, that doesn't have the same kind of cocktail conversations that they have seized this man, not as the opposite side of a coin.

But as something fundamentally different to that coin altogether. And so the media, I think, has tried to take on this thing that is from right the dragon, a little bit of trying to figure out the ways that they can monetize from him the way they can combat him that will be attractive that the audience is, they're still trying to do that. But he's used to be any sort of embodied person in their mind, I think, in the years since

that.

“And that's what it's playing, I think they're approach to covering him.”

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, if Drew Holden sounds like he's making sense to you amongst other things besides subscribing to his sub-stacks, follow him on X, because his X account is where he'll often, for all, his famous threads, a series of tweets with the receipts that show an example of I.

So Drew will say a downtrop just walked on water, similar to the way Barack Obama walked on water, let's see how various news organizations covered Obama walking on border, walking versus Trump walking on water.

When I read these threads, again, I'm always impressed by how rigorous they are, how fair-minded.

You don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you just say here's what they said. You let the receipts speak for themselves. And I know exactly how Chris Laussevita or Caroline Levitt or anyone in Maga or anyone with a brain, fair-minded brain. I know how they're reading those. They're reading them exactly the way I am.

Which is, this is, this is shocking, but not surprising. This is Mark for the course. Do you ever hear from the news organizations or the specific reporters whose work you are putting in sharp relief is being blatantly unfair? And if so, what did, did they say, well, yeah, that was, that was unfair, or did they push back?

How did the people you critique when you hear from them? How did they respond? Yeah, I get asked that a lot, Mark. I think there was a period of time during COVID, in particular, where everyone was kind of in their own little silos, where I'd hear more regularly from the people who wrote for

the outlets I was critical of, or whose colleagues I was critical of.

And they would say, thank you, right? Like, this is, I don't know why we publish this. I don't know why we don't have this headline. I don't know why we frame this story this way. And I appreciate you calling it out.

And I think one of the other things to, to your point, and I don't want to, I don't want to buy on her and get her too much, but I think one of the values of the receipts is that I'm not trying to avoid imbueing my own personal perspective in what these headlines say, or what they might say, or how they might be taken.

“And I think where my threads are the worst is when I try and do that, right?”

When I'm trying to really read into it, I'm trying to hold up a mirror to these outlets, these reporters, these editors, and say, look at this. And a lot of the time, in the live day, right, two years later, three years later, a lot of it, post-COVID has been, look what you wrote at this time. I must be working on a piece to try and explain this more broadly of like, look how lost

we were, you were, your outlet was. What do you have to say for yourself and retrospect, and why haven't you said that publicly otherwise? Right? And so for a period of time out, have people who would come up to me and they would ask,

they'd come up to me. They would, they would DM me, and they'd say, thank you. Thank you for doing this.

Every so often I get pushback from editors on the pieces, I would say, well, you know, that's not what they meant.

“I think that's what speaks to the benefit of the screenshots, right?”

This is what you said. These are your words. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. I think media criticism on the right has failed for a long time, has failed to break through with media outlets in large part because we did try and put words in their mouth.

We did try and extrapolate from ideas and headlines and thoughts, things that weren't necessarily fair, or even if they were fair, the people in the room would not think they were fair. The editor who wrote that headline would not think it's fair. And so I did get a little bit of that, but it's been interesting, you know, in the last few years, that I've had a considerable drop off from everyone but those individual reporters.

I'm so people who will DM me and say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this up. Thank you for flagging this topic.

And I'm always trying to tell them, you know, as subtle and kind of ways I can, to

these talk, to have this conversation with your editor too, like I appreciate you saying nice things about me, but if we're going to try and shift this thing so that the product of journalism is something that the American people can rely on, you've got to have those conversations. Yeah.

I can't. Joe Conne of Runsen, New York Times, he's my college classmate. I don't know him all that well, but he's not a crazy liberal, he's a fair-minded guy. And we've seen in some of his public comments that he's made, doesn't talk often. But a suggestion that he gets it, that the New York Times doesn't want to be liberally

biased. And yet, it is, it is because it's so powerful, it is, and because they are liberally biased, so incitiously and so often.

It is Exhibit A, almost always, and so two questions.

One is, let's say Joe, here's the episode, because we name-checked him in the algorithm, picks it up in his PR department, says he got to watch this, and he says, I want that drew hold in here, and I want him to address me and all the top editors here with the goal of stamping out the perception that we are liberally biased here.

“What would that, what would that professor Holden's course consist of?”

Yeah, that's a, it's a good question. I would start by saying, a long time reader, really, like you guys, your newspaper when it does good things. First time caller, I have some concerns here. What I wish they would do, I think there's two big things I wish they would do.

One is, and I know they've tried this before, and I know it's failed miserably before, I actually, you know, a piece of a little while ago in the Washington Examiner about yellow journalism, and how I think today's era of yellow journalism is leading in bad reporting. Might end.

And I think the rise of the New York Times, when it first came into, you know, wide circulation and well-known kind of a household name, was because it was pushing back on yellow journalism at the time, which is partisan reporting, it's, you know, trying to take little interesting details and make them these big explosive stories. I think the New York Times has a unique position in the institution of media to do a step

back and say, "We are not doing this thing well," and even if we think we're doing it well, we're not doing it in a way that the people trust.

And that, you know, 26 percent metric or wherever the legacy media is at with their trust

from, the trust among the American people, that should hit him and his editors more, like you would more force than anyone else in this country. They should take that survey and print it up in the walls in the newsroom and say, "How do we fix this?"

“And I wish they would try and do that, as point one, point two is, "I think they need”

more diverse viewpoints in their newsroom," because as much as they can say this, as much as they can say, "Well, we want to get back to, you know, doing that kind of reporting that we could, as much as we want to be more down the middle on reporting." What they really need is to have more people in the room who will stick up a hand and say, "This is wrong.

This is not the right way to frame it. This is an accurate or two older horses. We shouldn't go out with this story so quickly. We shouldn't be the first ones in print to say that, you know, this thing that happened that was bad was the fault of Donald Trump or the fault of anyone.

We are uniquely positioned to say, "We don't have to run for the clicks, we don't have to run for the headlines, that we don't have to run for the add dollars. We can be, you know, the actual judges of all the news that's fit to print and I wish they would do that." So one thing that occurs during war is, not just war, but you saw it with Ben Laden.

You see it now in the context of the Iranian conflict. They write these obits or these bios of horrible people and the headlines or the lead paragraphs or even any paragraph, you know, "Oh, he loved poetry, he was a, you know, he was a community leader. You know, the one I wrote on Twitter the other day, the parody this is hungry.

You know, about Jeffrey Dahmer, hungry Wisconsin man has troubled relations with neighbors." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How does that happen?

Because when it, it's happened for years and when it happens, people are outraged and rightfully so.

How could an editor sign off on a headline of, you know, calling a terrorist who's killed

“Americans, you know, a spiritual leader with great influence?”

Yeah. It's funny, you know, that this is actually how I started doing the threats. It was back when I'm forgetting his name, the old radio, oh, Don I miss. When Don I miss died, he was torched in the media and after himself, well, why are they doing this?

And do they always do this?

And so I went and I looked at some really awful people who would also recently died. Terrorist, you know, Al-Bagdadi had just been killed. He was the, I think, a revered scholar was how the Washington Post described him when Soleimani, the Iranian general was killed.

I think the New York Times headline was something like, "How are full master?" He was a man or a man who was killed by Trump. And I think I think applied to those sorts of people, which almost universally are terrorists and other evil figures. They did it for Castro and Cuba, too.

It's, they don't want to appear as if, even though we know all the facts, even though we know all the information, we don't want to be dancing on somebody's grave.

We don't want to be taking the death of someone as an excuse to punch down at them.

“You know, in this case, literally, I think probably punched down at them because that would”

be mean-spirited or bad or lack the kind of context of why other people might see them differently. And I really do believe the media believes that. Like, I really do think they see that Soleimani is dead, but like, they see Soleimani gets killed.

They see these giant, funerary, processions in the streets. And they are earnestly asking the questions, why is he so liked by all these people? Maybe we don't understand them. It is the only time, I think, the media is willing to look at someone who they otherwise don't agree with and say, maybe we should take more seriously, right, concerns.

And I think one of the reasons that they do it is because it does pick up these weird fire storms, where they get all the wrong people or in their book, all the right people, saying all sorts of mean things about them, and they can stand back and say, you know, whether they're kind of clipboard in their lab coat and say, we just did it the way we're supposed to.

And it is mind-bending that that only happens when it's a terrorist and not when it's like, I don't know, a conservative radio host. And I'm, of course, wasn't particularly a conservative, I'll just say, I mean, he, he was not as liberal in some, um, JD Vance, there's all at every realm of politics and media, there's what happens after Trump and nobody knows and I stay away from it, but Trump

understands the media, Trump has, in the last four years, leading up to getting elected,

“benefited, I believe, net net from negative coverage because he's turned the negative”

coverage into a plus for him, and people come on two way all the time during the campaign and said, I hate Trump, I don't like Trump, but I got a vote for Trump to send a message to media above, above the prosecutors, above the economy. So, uh, so in my perfect, uh, paradigmatic America, my, my, uh, Nirvana America, uh, the press isn't really biased, and uh, Republicans no longer make hay out of, uh, saying we

are, because I just, I just, I, that's not good, I don't even need to just be to explain one. The press is still liberally biased. I look at JD Vance, uh, I don't think he understands the media quite as well as Trump does, because Trump is, you know, because he doesn't want to judge.

Yeah, but, but Vance understands it, you know, he was a CNN commentator, he's tons of friends who are journalists, he's a brilliant guy. So I, I would put him, I would put him right below Trump and ahead of almost every other Republican, including ones who go on conservative media or social media and attack the press to raise money into four points with the base, they all do it, but Vance does it

in a very sophisticated way. He also seems to have an extraordinary hair trigger, uh, to bring up liberal media bias. Uh, he'll go, you went in the briefing room a few weeks ago, I forget the occasion, uh,

and like his first framing was, well, liberal media bias.

I think it was on Minnesota and the fraud there. Uh, and so he seems to either add it, some combination of principle and, um, instinct, uh, and exploitation, he really turns to this, this thing. So here's my question. In the context of him, maybe wanting to run for president, what's the right way for

him and for America, for Vance to approach us? In other words, he doesn't seem to really, although he says to the press, you do better. He really doesn't seem to actually mean it, and I think he wants to exploit it, and he's certainly not giving them any constructive help. So if you're JD Vance, if you're advising JD Vance to say, uh, Mr. Vice President,

Mark and I think, uh, your goal should be to make the media better, rather than to wallo, you know, in a positive way and exploit their badness, which should he be doing? If he wants to get to be president, but also actually change the coverage, so it's not as negative. Because they don't, they certainly don't, and you know, I think one of the reasons, I

think he is an excellent sense of smell on us in the same way that Trump does, and I think Vance is probably more not battle tested, but he's probably more studied in the lead up to his national elevation, in the way that press talks about things, right?

are people thinking about me and the things I'm saying and how it is different from the

things other people are saying?

“And so I think that gives him a unique insight into the sort of thing.”

If I were advising him to win the presidency, I would probably say, keep doing this thing. It strikes the court of the American voters, and it will allow us to see this. I know, and it pains me to say, but I've got to follow up to it, I think will pain you less. I would have to say, keep doing this thing.

It resonates with voters. Once he got there, hopefully he's become the president of the United States, he's got to deal with it. I think I am becoming more sympathetic to the accelerationist idea of the media of we should recognize that there are lots of people and lots of entities out there who are capable

of reporting this thing, reporting on all the things that are happening in this country, all the things that matter. What all of our efforts, I think should increasingly be directed at, is breaking the cathedral of legacy media. And so if I were advising his president, I'd say, go talk to like the Baltimore banner here

and like the DC area rather than rather than political, right, or Washington Post. Go talk to not us who hopefully will change their name sometimes soon because it is a very bizarre name for a media institution, but go talk to them rather than talking to CNN. Talk to these people outside of the legacy media, like yes, you can make hay, yes, you can have these fights, yes, they will redown to your benefit of the minds of voters.

Because no matter what they're reporting on, they will go overboard. And you can just point to the overboard and say, look at these lunatics, you can't possibly trust them. That's not as good. What we need is to elevate those new voices, talk to those people, recognize that in terms

of their capabilities, a lot of these people are enormously capable. What they don't have is the legacy reach that is increasingly being drained at these places because of their bad coverage. And so I think being able to elevate those voices, once you have this enormous platform,

“once you don't have to worry about making quite so much hay, the way that you have to”

in an election, I think that would be a valuable time to go back and say, what we want is an American media that the American people can believe in. That is possible, that is doable. The bad has fallen away before we can do that sort of thing again. It's going to take being serious.

It's going to take being, you know, I think more wedded to the facts than Trump has ever been or whatever be. But I think that's possible. And I think that's the sort of thing that long term would help someone like Vance get the FDR framing rather than type of framing the Trump has gotten.

Beautiful. Lovely. Lovely. While you are next and subscribed to your two substacks, what would that cost them total per year?

Well, you are welcome to subscribe to my substack at no cost, both mine and a comment place where I'm the manager editor. I am three on Twitter.

“If you want to kick me a subscription, you certainly can.”

I think for about the price of a couple of coffee here in DC, you can be a paid subscriber to me on Twitter. I'm taking a fast from posting on Twitter as much as I can during lunch. Here are a couple of weeks. I'll be back.

So, I'm trying to do more kind of targeted stuff for people who are willing to kick me a little bit of a calf. Great. Again, the substacks are commonplace in Holden, Court, H.O.L.D.E.N. and your handle on Twitter is Drew Holden, 360.

True Holden, 360. I should have grabbed that when I could and I could have sold it to you at a premium.

Drew, very grateful to you always for coming on and for sharing every bit of wisdom.

You have. Thank you for that. The pleasure is mine, Mark. Thanks so much for having me. All right.

That's it for today's program. We'll be back on Tuesday with a brand new episode. As always, don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel to make sure you share everything about how you like to next up with friends and family. Make sure they've got the YouTube channel and also the podcast links always available to you

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So, you always know what's coming next up.

Have a great weekend. Everybody.