Politico's Tim Alberta is writing letters to DC "from the rest of America"

Reliable Sources

CNN

News

3.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

"I just don't think the media as an institution has done a great job keeping up with the pace of change, political and cultural and socioeconomic and otherwise," says Tim Alberta, the chief political correspondent for Politico. That's why he is writing columns "to Washington from the rest of America," aiming to break the campaign coverage mold. His first dispatch was from the Mid-Michigan Gun & Knife Show. Alberta talks with Brian Stelter about "diner" cliches, voters' motivations, and news media blind spots. Alberta also points to a different "defining group of swing voters in 2020," offers tips for breaking out of broad-brush reporting tendencies, and more...To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dear Washington, do you know what's going on beyond the beltway?
0:07.0	That is one of the questions on this week's Reliable Sources Podcast.
0:11.0	Welcome to it. I'm Brian Stelter. I'm your host here for our weekly podcast going in
0:15.7	depth with media leaders and newsmakers. And today my guest is one of the country's
0:21.8	top political writers.
0:24.0	Tim Alberta is the chief political correspondent for Politico,
0:28.0	and is the author of the acclaimed book American Carnage
0:31.0	about the Civil War inside the Republican Party.
0:34.0	Tim has started a brand new column for political,
0:37.0	that you've got to keep an eye out for.
0:39.0	It is called Letter to Washington.
0:42.0	And the idea is exactly what it sounds like.
0:44.0	It's a letter written to Washington from the rest of America.
0:48.0	Tim wrote his first column from Michigan, where he recently moved. He wrote about a gun show in
0:55.1	mid-Michigan. The title of his column is how the gun show became the Trump show.
1:00.2	But he's going to be doing dispatches from all across the country talking with
1:04.4	Trump voters and anti-Trump voters and people who might not vote at all. The idea is to
1:09.5	make sure we are all hearing the voices of voters and there's nothing more important than that when it comes to campaign coverage.
1:16.0	So let's talk with Tim about this.
1:18.0	He's joining me now from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1:20.0	Tim, great to see you. I love this idea. Where did you come up with this idea of the letter to Washington?
1:25.0	Well, thanks Brian. You know, I suppose the genesis of it was when I started talking with the brass of
	...

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