It was a greatest blessing just being vulnerable and honest with people about how much I was struggling. It made me realize I hate being vulnerable. I want to be independent and do everything myself. I came out of the womb that way. But you got to lean on other people sometimes. And if you don't give them the gift of being honest about how you're struggling, then they don't get the gift, I think, of helping you.

Hey, hey and welcome. This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special. I'm excited to welcome Shannon Bream. She's the author of the brand new book, Finding the Bright Tide. We'll get into

that book and everything else you need to know about Shannon Bream in just one second.

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Everybody here at the office is on notice that if they do a terrible job, we're heading straight to ZipRecruiter.com slash Ben-Gest to replace them. You too can upgrade your employees or get new employees who are great. Go check them out at ziprecruiter.com slash Ben Guest. Well, Shannon, thanks so much for stopping by.

I really appreciate it.

It's great to be with you.

So why don't we start with this?

I'm not a person who is particularly known for finding the bright side. You obviously are somebody who's done that. How do you stay positive? I mean, you have a difficult job. And you're covering the news every day. You're doing it late at night. It's a very fraught political cycle. So how do you stay positive all the time the way you seem to?

You know, I try to keep perspective. Sometimes you have to compartmentalize things, and we do report on things that are really tough, especially if it's a situation with the loss of life. It can be natural disasters, you know, terrorist attack, whatever it is. You have to do what you have to do in the moment, report these things. But for me, I try to separate that and have my real life where I have a little bit of perspective on the bigger picture. For me, my faith is at the center of everything. And that's really my compass and kind of where I have my foundation. And so for a lot of people, I think, I'm not sure where they put their roots and where they kind of find that stability, but that's it for me. So one of the big controversies that's broken out in sort of the journalistic sphere is the objective journalist versus opinion journalist divide. Now, I'm very obviously an opinion journalist. I say what I think. It must be difficult for you because you are a fair and balanced objective journalist. That means you're trying to remove your views. How do you, number one, do number one, do that as a human being? And number two,

how much do you think it's possible to do that as a journalist? I think you have to make the effort 100% of the time. If you're in, as I am in the news division, and we go through our show every night when we're preparing it, we want to make sure that all sides are presented. Do we have guests that are opposing in views on any particular issue we're going to cover. We go through the copy very carefully and say, let's take out any adjectives that are over the top. It's always good to winnow those out. And just let the story speak for itself. Let the facts speak for themselves. We make sure that we give voices to all sides. It doesn't matter what I agree or disagree with. And I feel like I'm doing my job if at the end of the day my Twitter is split.

I have some people on there who say, like, you're the worst. You are attacking our president. Why don't you respect him? And on the other side, the very same show, I have people who will say, obviously you're taking all of your talking points straight from the White House. The president told you exactly what to say. And I think, well, if people don't know where I'm coming from personally, then I've done my job. Because, of course, all of us have our own opinions as human beings. But my goal every night in doing the show is that people don't know what my personal opinions are. We just give them the news. Our viewers are smart. They can figure things out for themselves. So we give them the information and leave it to them. So is it frustrating for you? You see a lot of politicians, particularly and the Democratic side of the aisle, now having this open debate about whether it's even appropriate to do things like appear on Fox News, whether to do these town hall events with the objective side of Fox News, people like Brett Baer. And then you have Senator Elizabeth Warren who goes on the view and says, well, Fox News is a hate machine and a propaganda machine, I'll never appear on there. and even their objective hosts are just providing cover for their non-objective hosts. What do you make of that critique of Fox? I expect it. I mean, it's something that if you've worked there for five minutes, you know you're going to have to deal with. I always encourage people. And sometimes I think I get a convert or two out there who will say, oh, how can you work there at such a terrible place, especially as a woman? And, you know, they go through the whole litany of problems. And I say, make me a deal. Will you watch our 11 o'clock show or 6 o'clock with Brett or 7 o'clock with Martha? Any of our shows that are strictly news programs, watch it for a week or two and then see what you think. You don't have to watch the opinion-based shows, which we celebrate. They have their own fan base, and they spark really interesting conversations. But for the news division, I say, watch one of our shows that is straight down the middle, and then you tell me what you think. And I find that most of our critics have not spent any time doing that. So I think it's fair to ask them to recognize the difference, choose one of those news programs, and then you can judge for yourself. And I think if people do that, they might be pleasantly surprised. How much does the news division interact with the opinion division? Do you guys talk amongst yourselves or are you guys friends? How does that work? We are all friends. I mean, my hallway, I've got Tucker, Laura, Brett, and myself, we're all on there. And Britt Hume is on our hallway, too. And we will pop in.

We're all friends. We'll exchange ideas and talk about things, the news of the day, of course. What are you going to do on your show? Who have you got on tonight? That kind of thing. But when it comes to putting our shows together, making editorial decisions, there's really no crossover at all. I mean, we're friendly with each other, but we have completely different production staffs. And the way that we tackle our shows, I think, is very different.

So given sort of the politically fraught nature of the moment and the very strong opinions that people hold about President Trump, what do you think is the best way as an objective journalist to cover President Trump? It's been kind of fascinating. From the left, there's been a contention that if you treat anything that is pro-Trump with any level of seriousness, that you are somehow

contributing to his fake news narrative or that you are somehow covering for him. On the right,

there's this feeling that if you criticize President Trump at all, then you are being disloyal or that you are treating

him as something terrible. What is the best way to cover President Trump? And how exactly do you separate the narrative from the news when you do this? I think that we stick to the facts. I think that's the most important thing. And if he has a good day, he makes a good decision, something's good with the economy. I mean, we just report it down the middle. And some people will see even that as taking aside. As you said, there's some people who say, you shouldn't even treat him as a legitimate president. If you cover him in that way, in some way, you are legitimizing something that they feel is illegitimate. But I think, you know, he tweets, we don't cover every single tweet, but if they're newsworthy, we do. And sometimes he makes policy statements by tweet. We try to winnow through those. But again, if it's factual information, it's data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on unemployment, those kinds of things. That's what we traffic in in the news side. That's what we do in our particular hour. And I find that so much of people's reaction is projection. Either they're pro-president Trump, they're anti-President Trump, and I think that their feelings factor into the way that they hear what we're saying.

So we try to be very careful in the way that we present things, knowing that people are going to come at it from, you know, often very tribal places.

And sometimes we have to remind ourselves more about their emotions and things are so emotional and passionate on both sides right now.

It's more about that than it is about what we're presenting. So what do you make of the critique that the Trump administration is somehow uniquely stonewalling? You're a journalist. The critique is that they are a threat to press freedom. You have Jim Acosta and ladies find you someone who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta. But you have Jim Acosta at CNN who actually puts out books about how victimized he is from an air-conditioned office in Washington, D.C. So as a journalist, what's your impression of how transparent the Trump administration is or is not? I think, if anything, I would say that this administration, sometimes there are members of it who feel like they're too transparent because he does see and think what he, you know, he puts it all out there, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's stopping to talk at these gaggles as he does so often when he comes to or from the White House. I mean, that's something we didn't always get with previous administrations. He will stop and take question after question. And I think in the beginning, there were probably some people on the stuff are like, no, no, let's keep it moving, just get on Marie 1 and let's go on this trip.

He loves that. stop and take question after question. And I think in the beginning there were probably some people on the stuff are like, no, no, let's keep it moving, just get on Marie 1 and let's go on this trip.

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