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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host David Axelrod.

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You may know Brian Stelter as the tireless chief media correspondent for CNN, where he anchors the reliable sources show on Sundays.

He's also the author of a new book, Hokes, Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, which is already a bestseller.

I sat down with Brian this week to talk about the book, the turbulent relationship between Trump and the media, and also Brian's own unique story,

which in a few short years has taken him from Prokosha's schoolboy blogger to a central role in commenting on American media today.

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Brian Stelter, welcome. It's good to be with you. You've got this great new book, Hokes, Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.

And I want to talk to you about that, but we got breaking news as they say at CNN and elsewhere, breaking news. So I want to talk about that first.

Bob Woodward's book is out. As usual, he has some nuggets that are interesting, the most interesting of which, and the most sort of shocking of which, is the president on tape telling him that he is, that he knew, this was in early February, that he knew February 7th.

He knew that this was a grave perilous threat. And according to Woodward, he had been briefed 10 days earlier on that fact. This was at a time when he was downplaying the whole thing.

Kind of a remarkable story.

It is. It's filling in some of the gaps in our knowledge about what Trump was doing or not doing during those key weeks in January, February and March.

And if I may say, I'm glad Hokes came out before rage, Woodward's book rage, but they work well together because I talked about the Fox side of how Fox miss handled the pandemic.

And how Trump, you know, in some ways was reacting to Fox, Woodward is filling in a lot of key information about what was going on inside the White House at that same time in February.

I think we all know in our guts, David, that there's a lot of blame to go around, a lot of responsibility to be shared for what went wrong last winter, including with mayors and governors.

But Trump had the biggest megaphone by far in the same way the Fox had the biggest megaphone on TV. Trump had the biggest megaphone by far any any any misused it.

Yeah. Well, you know, very clearly he misled the American people about the gravity of the situation and and because of that and because he was intent on doing that, we lost valuable time and we know what the consequences of that.

Where you know, in your book, Hokes, which we will talk about in detail in a minute, you know, you suggest that Trump that there was this negative sort of feeding loop between Trump and Fox news on the pandemic and Fox news was playing down the pandemic.

This piece of news that and you suggest that not just on this, but on many things that that Trump basically takes cues from what he sees on Fox news as well as sort of I guess sending some back.

But on this on this, you know, clearly he wasn't taking cues from Fox news because he knew the truth, but he was letting them amplify his own attempts to downplay this so that he didn't have to interrupt what he felt was his calling card to get reelected, which was a strong economy.

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