Harold Holzer on 'The Presidents vs. the Press'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jack Goldsmith spoke with Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, about his new book, "The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News." They discussed the long and interesting history of the contentious relationship between presidents and the press, and how President Trump's relationship with journalists has many precedents and is not the low point in president-press relations. They also discussed the likely arc of the battle between the White House and the media after Trump leaves office.
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Transcript
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| 0:29.0 | President-like Wilson. |
| 0:33.0 | They found him chilly and professorial. |
| 0:37.0 | And they didn't like the way he answered questions. |
| 0:41.0 | With T.R. and Wilson, all the press conferences were off the record. |
| 0:45.0 | So FDR continues the off the record press conference tradition. |
| 0:49.0 | But he has a slew of them. He has two short of |
| 0:53.0 | 1,000 press conferences in his 12 years and one month as President. |
| 0:57.0 | They were events twice a week events. |
| 1:01.0 | The journalists would crowd into the Oval Office. |
| 1:03.0 | They would find Roosevelt smoking a cigarette or fiddling with a cigarette holder. |
| 1:09.0 | It was off the record. It was friendly. It was teasing. |
| 1:13.0 | It was bantering. But he also got mad. |
| 1:15.0 | He also attacked publishers. He attacked the journalist. |
| 1:19.0 | He didn't like. He once gave a German cross, |
| 1:23.0 | pretend German crossed to a reporter from the New York Daily News. |
| 1:29.0 | Because he thought it's editorials. |
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