hey, i'm brian stelzer. it's time for "reliable sources." our weekly look at the story behind the story. how the media works and the news gets made and how to make it better. "catch and kill" by ronan farrow has news about matt lauer, nbc executives, and what he calls a corporate cover-up. it is an incredible read. our guests will have reaction. plus, peter wenner, bush aid, says the condition is delining. the legendary journalist sam donaldson and so much more. we start with a real shock to the television system. shep smith resigning from fox

news, throwing up his hands after months of tepgzs with fox's opinion shows. shep had the power to speak truth, to provide a reality check to fox's viewers who hear pro-trump talking points all day long. but he won't be there anymore. his last day was friday. and i think this is bigger than fox. it's a sign of what's happening in america and to america. people sorting themselves into tribes. tuning out inconvenient information. and right now this phenomenon is most intense on the right which is why shep smith's exit is a cultural moment and why it's shaking up the journalists who are left at fox. one fox reporter saying she feels like she's been hit by a bus. another saying the news is he t heartbreaking and saying, quote, i fear things are going to get much, much worse. look, fox has some excellent journalists including one on the ground in syria right now. the journalists are feeling squeezed by the opinion and propaganda players. let's talk with three former faces on fox. starting with connor powell, he

was a fox correspondent for nine years. full disclosure, he's working for cnn news source. democratic strategist a paid contributor on shows like "the five" for six years. and carl cameron, who was fox's chief political correspondent until 2017. thank you all for being here. julie, what are your friends at fox telling you about this news about shep? >> they're depressed. they're obviously shocked. a lot of them feel like the management isn't managing. it used to be when roger ailes was here, the inner warfare would never be seen on the air. now that shep and tucker carlson have gone at each other, sean hannity had gone at shep, as well, a lot of them feel they're not going to have their backs, they're not going to be protected by the people in charge of the network in a way that would have happened before. they are anxious. they are depressed about the fact that the person they believed was their leader and trying to really have a journalistic ethos at fox is now gone.

they're worried about who else may be going as a result of shep's departure. they're not necessarily journalists. some are opinion people who feel this is a massive, massive loss for the network. all around, the few people i've spoken to, more than a few, the number of people i've spoken to have all been very depressed about this news. nobody that i spoke to was high-fiving. >> that's more on the journalist sides of fox. there are detracktators that he had at fox. they said he was only on the hour an hour a day. he wasn't that much of a leader. i wonder, connor, if you agree. how important is this moment? >> for those of us are paid to be journalists, he was the direction for those of us journalists. his voice didn't always make it past his own show. some shows ignored what he reported. at least day in and day out, his voice was on the channel, and he provided a lot of direction for those of us on the ground around the world in the united states trying to be reporters. you take away his voice, you

take away his voice and his team around him which is crucial to the news organization, and i'm not sure what you're left with. i think you're probably just left with sean hannity and tucker carlson's voice. i'm not sure that's particularly a good thing for the united states. >> right now there's no indication that the producers are leaving, though. i hope they don't leave. there's a lot of great correspondents at fox. it's just that my impression is they feel they're not getting on the air very much because opinion shows are taking up mother nature and more time. is that fair to say, carl? you were there until trump's inauguration. >> yeah, no, i think it's very true that the news department, the news division has shrunk. and there are an awful lot of really good journalists at fox newschannel. it's just that they're vastly outnumbered by the opinion makers. and the opinion makers are more interested in playing with people's bias than anything else. and it makes it very difficult for journalists to actually give people honest facts when the airtime is shrinking constantly. and that 3:00 hour is critical.

shep now gone, what fox has said is they are going to be a rot e rotating series of hosts. "f tho "if those are people like bill hemm hemmer, hosts that do news, if they're journalists, it will be a good sign for the 3:00 hour. if it's not, if it's opinion mavens, that will be another big chunk of real journalism that won't exist there. >> yeah, and there's other hours, the right-wing conspiracy theories. look at jeanine pirro's show, she had president trump call in for a softball interview last night. there was also a left-wing conspiracy theory out there about shep smith, and i want to debunk it. there was a reporter in "the new york times" that rupert murdoch had a meeting with attorney general bill barr. they did meet, but it had nothing to do with smith resigning. smith had been thinking about this for several weeks. i want to put that to rest. i do think it speaks volumes, though, people wonder is someone pulling the strings. julie, people do legitimately wonder about the murdochs and their role in shaping fox news

and bringing it further to the right. >> there's no question. i don't know how much further it could go to the right. i think there are business interests the murdochs have that the president of the united states, they can benefit from that. as a result obviously being on the side of the president, helping the president helps their business interests. i think that's a business decision that they've made. having said that, i think there's an object sense of leadership at fox news. when i was there, carl, when you were there, i think whatever you thought of the leadership, there was a very strong person at the helm who was able to rein a lot of this in. i think today in the absence of what, what you have are people like tucker carlson and sean hannity running their own thiefdoms and not allowing others airtime. i've spoken to people who are not democrats or liberals by any stretch of the imagination unless you think that truth has a liberal bias. these are people who are facts checking the president in realtime. they're seeing the airtrem cut off. they're not seeing as much access to the air as they used

to have. they a business decision the murdochs are making. it's unfortunate because the fox news audience is not served well by having uncritical views of what the president is saying. there's no dispute about the fact that the president doesn't and unless somebody says that on fox's air, theres no way the audience would know that. that's unfortunate. shep was very good at that. >> julie, you did sue fox for harassment and retaliation. you mention the secondives in in charge. do you have a personal axe to grinds against them? >> i have no personal axe to grind. the person i mentioned is no longer there as a executive, neither of the two are there as executives anymore, so i don't. this is purely from talking to people still at fox who feel strongly that roger ailes, whom i did sue, would never have allowed this to happen. this is a compliment to roger ailes -- >> i hear that quite a bit. yeah. i hear that quite a bit. >> can i -- >> you were going to jump in? sorry, carl, go ahead. >> i think one of the things that's important to remember

here is that over the years, there was not a history of fox opinion hosts criticizing the journalists. and over the course of the trump administration, more and more the opinion hosts have been criticizing the journalists. and so that really pits bias against straight journalism. i think julie's pretty much nailed it. that's a huge part of what frustrates the journalists at fox news because they shouldn't be arguing with people who are there to comment on the news and completely neglect what was just reported by the journalists. >> and a lot of fox critics say the journalists are complicit by staying at fox. the journalists tell me they're just trying to make the network better, trying to too the right thing. connor, last word to you. as someone who worked with shep, how did he make you a better journalist, improve your work? >> i loved being on his show. his show, his entire sort of

organization pushed you to give the fuller context. i think one of the things that's tough about reporting at fox is there are a lot of anchors who wanted to stay in a narrow lane and answer questions and look at a story from a very specific point of view. shepherd always made sure you brought in the full context of a story. and so the key details didn't get lost in your reporting. that's something that shepherd specifically did that a lot of other hosts didn't do, at least for myself and in terms of reporting overseas. he wanted a fuller context, even on the days where shep wasn't there because he was maybe off on a friday during the summer, his producers and team there always pushed you to give the full context. again, that's something that i think will be lost long term with his leaving fox is i'm not sure there are that many reporters who are willing to give the fuller context unless they're pushed by an anchor to do so. it's easy to get time on fox if you kow the conservative line -- tow the conservative line in terms of reporting.

>> a cultural moment. you're describing why this is significant. thank you so much for being here. new to come, what's next fshep. and on deck, a look at how much trouble president trump is in. douglas brinkley, sam donaldson standing by. we'll be right back.

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"it's my hope that the facts will win the day." few other anchors and reporters at fox feel like they can aggressively counter trump's nonstop noise. this is what they tell me anonymously. they say, yes, we fact check trump sometimes. as one staffer said to me, almost none of us have the power that shep had. so as for shep, he had a noncompete clause which means he cannot join another network right away. his spokesman says, devoquote, s not retiring. joining me, writers, politics writer for "salon." and david zerwick standing by. amanda, what's your reaction to the news about shep? there's a paradox involved here. fox viewers didn't like shep. he had the lowest rated show on the daytime lineup. >> yeah. i think that shows that one of the biggest problems facing fox news' news division and any effort to get news out to right-wing america for lack of a

better term, is that they don't want to hear it. i think that we're facing audiences that are rejecting the truth for ideological reasons. they prefer donald trump and his lies, they prefer donald trump and his, you know, lying twitter feed, and they like fox news best when it is echoing donald trump and his dishonesty. >> and viewers are going to say you're just being a smug liberal saying that. what's your proof? >> like you said, shep's show was the lowest rated show on fox news. meanwhile, tucker carlson's is pulling millions of viewers a night. and you know, tucker plays fast and loose with the facts. i think it's a fair thing to see. >> you know i was watching one of trump's rallies live on fox. it was striking to look at trump's storytelling skills. i understand that most of the story he's telling is nonsense, to put it one way. but he's selling a really appealing story about fighting the deep state, about fighting

the democrats. and i wonder if political pundits sometimes underestimate the storytelling power that both trump and fox have. >> yeah. i mean, i think that it's hard for a lot of people that are not in that right-wing bubble to understand trump's power over people because his story doesn't make sense to us. but i think what you're seeing is a lot of white conservative people who used to be the masters of the universe in this country, who used to control this country legally, politically, businesswise, culturally, and now are starting to see that hedge money talented. and donald trump tells them a story about how they're under assault by a bunch of villainous elites instead of the truth which is that their power is waning in the face of growing diversity. >> yeah. let's bring in david zerwick in washington. he's been talking about the shep news and how it relates to president trump, as well.

president trump criticized shep. he would tweet against shep. the president seems always to promote the opinion shows on fox and attack the news division. for example, he attacked that fox poll this week that showed impeachment getting a majority support among americans. david, your reaction? >> well, one of the things is, you know, with trump doing that, it really can wear you down. i mean, some of your reporting, you talked about him, about shep just wanting to move on. maybe being tired of this. you know, i heard some of that from megyn kelly when trump went after her on social media. she was a star at fox at that time, and then of course left. it creates -- it takes any sense of joy out of the business. when you have that -- it's not just the president. the president is driving many in the fox base to be after you constantly on social media. >> yes, yes. >> that's psychologically a problem. and you know i don't blame shep

one bit for walking away from this if he can, you know, and obviously he can afford to do it with the contracts he's had the last few years -- >> $15 million. yeah. yeah. >> really that's one of the ways fox management getting into bed with trump hurts the network long term. this is a severe blow to its credibility when you lose shep. i'll tell you something else, we haven't -- that hasn't been much discussed is it was -- fox likes to say, oh, during the day it's all news, at night it's opinion, blah, blah, blah. it isn't all news during the day. a lot of those shows, those news shows, look like news shows, but they're stacked with people who replicate the talking points of the white house or right-wing point of view. he didn't do that. maybe it was because he was a managing editor, but his show didn't have right-wing ringers on it giving talking points. and if they did, he went after them. that's another huge loss i think to fox on this. >> we need more of that on the air, not less. all right.

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hey, i'm brian stelter. welcome back. news outlets are trying to explain all the threads of the impeachment inquiry by coming one diagrams, flow charts, maps, you name it. we've been creating faqs and explainers and q&as. we've been launching new newsletters and podcasts. there is certainly an appetite for news right now, but not everybody is equally hungry. here's the "washington post" noting a remarkable finding from a new kquinnipiac poll, it says people are paying a lot of attention to the impeachment probe were more likely to say they want trump impeached and removed. but, quote, those paying less attention were less likely to say they support impeachment. that's interesting. here to help us break it down is cnn presidential historian douglas brinkley and legendary journalist sam donaldson who was abc's main watergate

correspondent and was a white house correspondent during clinton's impeachment. sam, nixon, clinton, trump, what's different this time around? >> well, it's not the same thing in the sense that the press' job is to point out what people say accurately, but if they say things that are not true and the press knows they're not true, not because of our opinions but because we have facts, you present the facts on the other side. and trump has been called out repeatedly because he repeatedly misstates the facts. i think that's what we need to do now. and don't be afraid of fox. don't be afraid of the people who support president trump no matter what the facts are. they're either willfully ignorant about them or know about them but don't care. we can't do anything for them except continue to do the job of the press. when nixon resigned, 24% of the american public said they still liked him, he was still a great president. there's always been this strain of american life. but they don't represent the country. if in trump head 30%, 31% of a

strong base, we don't know exactly, but that's not the country. the other 70% are out there. when i go to parties or elsewhere and people say, oh, he's going to be re-elected, i mean, look at those rallies, look at the people, the fervor and all of the things he says, they love it, treasonous nancy pelosi and all this -- i say, why his base loves it. the base is not the country, and it's not going to run the country. >> what you're saying reminds me of what we've been seeing all week long. journalists have been trying to get republicans on the record about where they stand, about whether trump's conduct is acceptable or not. and douglas, we need to know those answers. >> absolutely. i think the press has been amazing this week just following doggedly gop lawmakers and asking them what do you think about this, is it okay for an american president to encourage a foreign power to interfere in our domestic electoral system? and many of them won't answer. they hem and haw, and that's not going to look good in history. i think the answer is i'm not

for impeachment, i'm backing donald trump, but i was wrong -- it was wrong for him to have spoken as he did to the ukrainian president. alas, it's good that journalists have to keep pushing the republicans to go on the record right now, just like they did during the watergate era. >> and are you seeing lots of patriotic republicans coming forward? speaking out? what are you seeing? >> it's mitt romney and a lot of people that are afraid to tell the truth right now on what they really feel. the republicans are in hiding mode. they're trying to figure out how to play this right now. they're so worried about donald trump's anger and it being tweeted about -- he's been effective at showing i will punish you if you break ranks with me in any way, shape, or form. what's interesting is the role mitch mcconnell's plying here and donald trump kind of unra l unraveli unraveling, constantly needing to call mitch mcconnell for

reassurance. trump obviously knows that congress is going to move forward eventually here and impeach him. but he has the backstop of the senate and can live for another day. after all, brian, bill clinton probably could have won the election in 2000 even though he was impeached in 1998. and andrew johnson left in the 1860s to go back to tennessee as an impeached president but ran for the u.s. senate and won. that's to sam's point that nixon had a fan base. trump still will have his fan base even if he's wearing the eye. >> sam, you've said you think this is a more dangerous time than the nixon years. do you think the press is making mistakes? are we accurately conveying how dangerous it is? >> well, yes, the press makes mistakes. i've made mistakes. you try correct them. but you call out things that are not true because you have the facts. and you present them to the american public. now, mitch mcconnell is in a tight race, tighter than he thought, in kentucky.

and he's watching the polls, and he's watching the people that he thinks are going to support him. i'm going to tell you something, if the 71 -- rather, 51% polled that fox put on that said the impeachment anger is rising against trump, if it continues, mitch mcconnell will throw him over. republicans will think we've been conned, how could we be fooled? i'm telling you something, if public opinion is strongly for the impeachment and the conviction of president trump, he will be convicted in the senate with the republican help. >> so you listen to the trump rallies, you think there is not representative of all of america. you think it's important for us to see that. >> no, the trump rallies are trump's -- his strong supporters. i mean, lock her up, i mean, all the things he says, all the vicious, mean things he says, they love it. there are these people in this country, they're good americans otherwise. they'll probably give you the shirt off their back, they'll help you if you need, but they

have this fixation. they want to return this country to the white christian country that they believe it should be again. they don't want the diversity, and they follow him for this, but they're not the country. we are a we are good and strong because of that, and we're going to come back to that, i assure you. >> i like the optimism, sam. thank you. sam donaldson, douglas brinkley, thank you for being here. we have a lot more coming up including a really important fact check. trump spreading false hoodses about u.s. troops in syria.

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earlier this week president trump maded following comments to reporters about the deteriorating situation in syria. >> look, we have no soldiers in syria. we've won. we beat isis, and we beat them badly and decisively. we have no soldiers. >> we have no soldiers in syria. now, cnn's team fact checked this and said the united states still has about 1,000 soldiers in syria. the president of the united states getting those facts wrong. well, now the situation in northern syria is deteriorating rapidly. in the words of jim sciutto, turkey has been given free reign by president trump to slaughter kurdish fighters who are loyal u.s. allies. the president is being widely criticized right now, and the situation as it gets worse is causing the u.s. to take action. just today, the u.s. defense secretary is saying that we are preparing to evacuate a thousand troops, those 1,000 troops that president trump said weren't

there. watch. >> i spoke with the president last night. after discussions with the rest of the national security team, he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern syria. >> what forces? again, trump said this on thursday -- >> we have no soldiers in syria. >> look, he was wrong, i get it. maybe he just misspoke, maybe he was innocent. if so, that is also part of the problem. joining me to discuss this is peter wenner, v.p. of the ethics and public policy center and author of "the death of politics: how to heal our tried respect after trump." and peter, i'm pulling out a specific onetime misstatement by the president. to make a larger point which is that, you know, as you've written, trump's words are poison. he doesn't seem to be well. this is a situation where life and death stakes are very clear in syria, and yet we don't know what to believe from the president. >> well, that's right. that's a problem when a president's going out and lying all the time and getting his facts wrong all the time. sometimes you can't tell which is -- which is which.

but the bottom line is the same. and this is a man who has no interest in governing, no interest in reality, no interest in the -- the state of the world. and what's going on now in syria is extraordinary. and the radiating effects, the collateral damage of this is going to be tremendous. there's a humanitarian cost. we're seeing a massacre, we may see a genocide of the kurds who are such terrific allies. really intrepid allies of ours. isis prisoners are going to be released. the region's going to be destabilized. america's trust worthiness is -- is being blown apart. so this is really, really bad. but it goes to a core problem with donald trump which is he's not well, and he's not -- he's not equipped to be president of the united states. but he is. >> james mattis today on "meet the press" warned about isis returning. the reports about isis-linked

fighters breaking out of prisons in northern syria. he said if we don't keep the pressure on, then isis will resurge, it's absolute a given that they will come back. this is someone who worked for president trump. >> yeah. i mean, this is almost a mathematical equation. the kurds were the ones who were watching over the prisons of the isis prisoners. now they're under assault by the turks. so of course the isis prisoners are being released. they're being released even as we speak. it's going to happen more. probably in the range of 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 isis prisoners. there are going to be tremendous human consequences to that. there's going to be blood because of this, lives are going to be lost because of it. and again, for no reason. donald trump didn't get anything. it was just that he had a phone call with an authoritarian dictator who says jump and trump says "how high." >> he says he's ending the endless wars, while at the same time sending 2,000 more troops to saudi arabia. let me talk about your columns where you say trump is not well.

this is a conversation that's gingerly head on television most of the time. there's still people, still a lot of tiptoeing going on about the president's behavior, his misbehavior. how does the press need to cover this while still being fair? >> i do think they have to cover it, and fairness requires making an objective assessment of the facts and the reality of things and covering it. this idea that you do not cover donald trump's psychological and emotional state strikes me as bizarre. there's more to a president than what he says he's going to check the policy boxes. we make judgments about wisdom and prunes and character -- prudence and character. of course we should make a judgment on a psychological state. he's not well, he has a disordered personality. that's almost beyond the point of dispute to any objective individual. are we supposed to not -- >> how do you think trump supporters see through it? how do they excuse it t? >> it's a complicated thing because we're so tribalistic today, things are so polarized

that anybody that -- that criticizes trump, they just reflexively defend him because they feel like the enemy's of trump are their enemies, and that the critics of trump have contempt for them. in many cases they're right. they go into their tribalistic enclaves and decide to protect him. look, i've had countless conversations with trump supporters -- you know, i've been a lifelong republican, i've served in three republican administrations. so i have a lot of contact. a lot of my conversations are to hear, listen to people, see where they're coming from. >> yeah. >> it's pretty extraordinary. it is almost like a hermetically sealed world. and facts are like b.b.s, they just bounce off of a brick wall. they just don't -- they don't penetrate -- i think one of the reasons they don't penetrate is there's something called the psychology of accommodation which is people decided early on for a variety of reasons to accommodate themselves to donald trump. i think some of them thinking that things would get better.

that he would grow in office, that he would be surrounded by good people. he's gotten worse. but having made that accommodation early on, they didn't feel like they could get off. now it's not just a defense of trump, it's a defense of their defense of trump. to indict him is to indict themselves and to indict their own judgment. that's hard for any human being. and trump supporters are not doing it. they -- they will defend him, you know, regardless of what happens come hell or high water. >> peter, thanks for being here. check out peter's column in "the new york times" and "the atlant atlantic." we've been talking about trump's enemies. i think we're going to hear more from them on tuesday. the president portrays democrats as his enemies. the democrats are going to be on stage for this debate. tuesday night, a cnn/"new york times" debate in ohio, tuesday at 8:00 p.m. eastern time on cnn. up next, ronan farrow's book "catch and kill" is out on tuesday. already there's new controversy at nbc as a result. we'll talk about what it means for the network right after a

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this book "catch and kill" is the number-one seller on amazon, and it's not even out until tuesday. there's a lot of interest in preorders because ronan farrow has a lot of bombshells in this book. it's called "catch and kill: lies, spy, and a conspiracy to protect predators." he describes reporting on harvey weinstein and how nbc try today to shut him down over misconduct over the years. he suggests in the book that weinstein used his knowledge of matt lauer's behavior as leverage with the network. here's what both sides are saying -- farrow says that nbc committed a, quote, corporate cover-up. his reporting on weinstein was shut down for inappropriate

reasons. farrow says the network's secrets weighed on the judgments. farrow says that weinstein claimed to have a deal with nbc executives, and farrow says some of those executives have skeletons in their own closets, inappropriate behavior in their own pasts. now here's what nbc says -- they say there was no deal with weinstein. they say that would be ridiculous and unethical. they say farrow's reporting did not meet the standards for broadcast, and that's why they let him walk over to "the new yorker" with it. they say farrow did not have a single on-camera, on-the-record interview with a weinstein accuser. they say the book uses a variety of tactics to paint a fundamentally untrue picture, and they also say they've cleaned up the house. they say in the past two years we have taken significant steps to improve our culture. farrow has a lot in this book including the first on-the-record interview with the woman who said she was raped by matt lauer in 2014 which lauer firmly denies. she says the incident derailed her life. here to size up what's going on is "new york" magazine's senior correspondent and cnn contributor erin carmone, and

you've been talking about cbs and the other outlets. what do you make of nbc's handling of this? >> well, you know, i have likened the experience of both reporting on sexual harassment and assault and learning from other reporters the kind of things that are happening behind closed doors. to the movie "get out," to the pre-cease moment where allison williams, who the character has seen dangle the keys, we've dean sueplicitiy or the attitudes that underpin sexual harassment and assault. my question -- and i worked at nbc, and there's a lot of people i really respect there. i think that they deserve to know exactly what knew what when. they deserve accountability. there was never an independent investigation at nbc, in contrast to cbs which i reported on which hired a law firm to do an independent investigation. wasn't a perfect process, but you can see at cbs there are many new faces skiering the ship. at nbc, we have yet to have a full accounting. and ronan farrow is now pulling back the curtain to give us a

sense of how much these executives were themselves participating in this system that commodityfied young female journalists, looked another way while matt lauer took advantage of them. these were young women who were showing up because they wanted to be journalists, because they wanted to do the job. and they deserve better, too. >> there's always been questions about who knew what when at nbc about lauer. the network always says there was never a formal complaint. here's andy lack's statement from this week saying that when they learned what matt lauer had allegedly done in 2014, he was fired within 24 hours. the statement says, he says here, "any suggestion that we tried to cover up any aspect of lauer's conduct is absolutely false and offensive." david, your reaction? >> i love it when they say it's offensive. brian, i never bought -- for not a second did i buy that they didn't know what was going on with matt lauer. he was making a lot of money in the most important day part. the notion just voiced that they looked the other way is the

kindest thing that you can say about him. and now after farrow's book about these incidents, i laugh in their face when they tell me how committed they are to -- to a diverse workplace and protecting women who come into the workplace. there is outrageous. you know -- this is outrageous. you know, the account of the way -- look, in fairness to nbc, let me say this -- when you are doing a story, when you know powerful people are going to come at you with everything you have, sometimes a young reporter, sometimes any reporter thinks they're slow walk it when they're just being careful. but this went way beyond it. he took what they told him was unacceptable after they told him and his producer to stop reporting. he took it over to the "new yorker" and it won a pulitzer prize. how do they keep doing the crisis management talk in the wake of that? as journalists we know exactly what that it. >> their claim is he came up with new sources once he arrived at the "new yorker."

here's what farrow said about the weinstein reporting at nbc and why maybe it was tabled by the network. he says there was flow doubt that the allegations against lauer and nbc's wider use of nondisclosures with women who experienced harassment were under threat of exposure during our reporting. he says, that precarious culture of secrecy made nbc more vulnerable to weinstein's intimidation and enticement. we know weinstein was badgering the network, trying to get the story shut down. that's been very clear. nbc says that didn't matter, though. the pressure campaign didn't matter. here what's interesting here, farrow's suggesting maybe it was nbc's own secrets that made the network a little bit nervous here. >> right. i mean, it would appear that they were throwing stones from a matt lauer glass house. you know what i think is really interesting here, brian, here we are two years later. the "today" show has female co-hosts leading the way, right. it's doing just fine. this was actually an executive suite delusion that matt lauer was so valuable that they had to look the other way as he abused

his power in the work force. look at how great the show is doing without him. and i think we really need to step back. you know, my colleague, rebecca traceter, has written brillia brilliantly they're covering allegations of sexual assault at the supreme court, they're covering female presidential candidates. what does it mean that these are their attitudes toward women, that they're disposabldisposable commodities, they are to be demeaned. i think the second reckoning has to be who knew what when, and there has ton understa be under that this is not the individual behavior but all these news narratives are being shaped by men. i don't think that process is over by any means. >> he doesn't have a smoking gun that proves that, like, for example, nbc was blackmailed by weinstein? there isn't that smoking gun, there is just an accumulation of a lot of different pieces of evidence. that's what he'll be arguing as

he does sbrirz interviews in thg week. last word? >> we know they shut down that reporting. the biggest thing about this book historically is it's a granular look at what it takes when you take on patriarchy. the women are coming out and the men are trying not to be held to this reckoning, and mia farrow is in the middle of it. someone just got up one day, and said, oh, let's stop patriarchy. these women are in this battle and ronan farrow told his story. do you know what it takes to bring these guys down? weinstein, nbc. what was just said about the men shaping the narratives, that's

absolutely true. the powerful shape the narratives and he took them on and told his narrative and these women's narratives so well that they're shaking in their boots right now. >> david, erin, thank you. everybody read our full coverage of this book at reliablesources.com. we'll take a quick break here. we have breaking news from syria in just a moment. until i almost lost my life. my doctors again ordered me to take aspirin, and i do. be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. listen to the doctor. take it seriously. ever since you brought me home, that day. i've been plotting to destroy you. sizing you up... calculating your every move. you think this is love? this is a billion years of tiger dna just ready to pounce. and if you have the wrong home insurance coverage, you could be coughing up the cash for this. so get allstate and be better protected from mayhem, like me-ow.

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breaking news coming out of syria now. deteriorating situation as turkish forces are pushing further south into syria. there was an incursion into the country after president trump ordered a small bunch of troops,

50 of them, to be withdrawn from the area. now the president says they're withdrawing a greater number of those troops, and there is breaking news from hana. they're releasing news saying at least one journalist has been killed during this turkish operation. the turkish reporter is named assad al ahmad. another journalist was injured in this incident. cnn will continue, but that's all for this week's "reliable sources." we'll see you back here next week. t always where i needed to be. is she alright? i hope so. so i talked to my doctor about humira. i learned humira is for people who still have symptoms of crohn's disease after trying other medications. and the majority of people on humira saw significant symptom relief and many achieved remission in as little as 4 weeks. humira can lower your ability to fight infections,

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hisamitsu. heating up. house democrats subpoena more top trump officials ahead of a busy week of testimony in their impeach. inquiry. >> the president is violating the constitutional separation of powers. >> but as democrats rev up their presidential probe, are republican senators standing by the president? we'll talk to red state senator kevin cramer ahead. and going low. president trump steps up his campaign schedule using rowdy events to exercise his rage.