How to cover or how not to cover President Trump's latest conspiracy theory.

This is the story behind the story, the Reliable Sources Podcast. I'm your host Brian Stelter and this weekly

podcast is our chance to go in depth with media leaders and newsmakers talking

about how the news is made and how can we made better.

This week I'm thrilled to be joined by the Washington Post fact-checker columnist Glenn

Kessler.

He's joining me now from the Post Newsroom.

Glenn, what a week it's been.

Thanks for being here. Glad to be with you.

Glenn, one of your latest articles is titled,

Trump's fog of scandals and outrageous about the Mueller investigation.

I was really helping to talk with you about this week full of so-called spy coverage,

you know, we're taping this on Friday, May 25th.

It's been almost a week now since the president started pushing this idea that his campaign was spied on by an infiltrate

from the FBI.

Did you find this was a particularly hard story for the media to unpack and explain what was true and

untrue? Well yes because what you have is the president with his talent for branding using a rather, you know, inflammatory word spy.

And if you're going to write, if you're going to broadcast or write about Spygate, you're going to be

and end up using the language that the president has used when as far as anyone

can actually tell this was not a spy it's not like they inserted anyone inside the

campaign or anything like that it was so it was a an informant who spoke to on the

sidelines to a few I guess three members of the Trump campaign.

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