October 18, 2020: Trump, Biden and the attention economy; anatomy of the NY Post's Hunter Biden story; interview with Andrew Sullivan
Reliable Sources
CNN
3.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Plus... Charlotte Alter on swing state voters gripped by 'unlogic;' Yochai Benkler on a looming test for American democracy; are Murdoch outlets positioning themselves for a Trump loss? Anne Applebaum, Yochai Benkler, Noah Shachtman, Charlotte Alter and Andrew Sullivan join Brian Stelter.
To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Brian Seltter, live in New York, and this is reliable sources. |
| 0:06.0 | Our weekly look at the story behind the story. |
| 0:09.0 | This hour, a tale of two moderators. |
| 0:11.0 | Would-be debate moderator, Steve Scully, suspended by C-SPAN, while |
| 0:15.1 | Town Hall Host Savannah Guthrie of NBC is praised for her performance. |
| 0:19.8 | Plus we have new reporting about the debate coming up this Thursday, |
| 0:23.0 | plus the origins of right-wing media's latest obsession |
| 0:26.5 | with Hunter Biden. |
| 0:27.8 | Yeah, we are going there. |
| 0:29.5 | And later, a rare interview with commentator Andrew Sullivan on the role of the media in 2020. |
| 0:35.0 | But let me start with this. |
| 0:38.0 | This is the media critique that I hear most often from all of you watching at home. It's that President Trump gets too much |
| 0:46.0 | attention, too much airtime, and he crowds out everyone and everything else. Every week I hear from viewers that say we are talking too much about Trump and |
| 0:56.0 | not enough about Joe Biden and this has been going on for five years. |
| 1:00.8 | This screen grab is from August 2015 on this very show. |
| 1:04.0 | I was pointing out that Trump was sucking up all the oxygen in the proverbial room during the GOP primary, |
| 1:10.0 | winning far more nightly news coverage than other GOP candidates. |
| 1:13.6 | Now flash forward to 2020 and Trump still dominates TV. |
| 1:17.6 | We checked CNN, MS NBC, and Fox News this month and Trump mentions outranked Biden mentions on all three channels. |
| 1:25.7 | Here is another data point. Google searches for both candidates in the last 30 days. |
| 1:31.0 | Trump is consistently ahead of Biden. |
| 1:34.0 | So what's this about? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CNN, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of CNN and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.