On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, veteran NBC newsman Tom Brokaw said Breitbart News is one of the outlets that he reads to keep up with the news and viewpoints across the political spectrum.
In a discussion about new and old media with host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, Brokaw revealed, “I read Breitbart, for example, because I want to hear what you all have to say, take your philosophy very seriously… and it’s authentic.”
In speaking about the glorified “old days” of media, Brokaw said many news veterans think those days “were sensational because there were very few network outlets” and, in a way, “America sat down at 5:30 at night or 6:30 at night… in a unified fashion” to get their news. Brokaw said many old media veterans yearn for the “good old days” and ask, “why can’t we go back to the old days?”
The NBC legend said, though, that “what they were seeing was the news through the prism of white, middle-aged men who lived on the Eastern seaboard.”
“Now, we’ve expanded that universe so that there are so many more choices,” he said, adding that he doesn’t know what “mainstream media means” anymore with the proliferation of news outlets.
Brokaw said the three conventional networks and the major newspapers now “sit in a universe with Breitbart, Fox News” and all the digital sites like BuzzFeed and Huffpo.
“It’s very hard to say that one part of that spectrum has the kind of control that it might of had at one time,” Brokaw said.
He said ultimately “this is for every individual to sort out.”
“I honestly think that we’re well-served by all of this access,” Brokaw said. But he noted that the new media environment “now puts much more of the burden on” the viewer/reader “to determine what holds up over time, what matches their values, who they can count on to be authentic.” Brokaw praised NBC News foreign affairs reporter Richard Engel as a go-to person for international news who has held Democrats and Republicans to account.
He said “across the spectrum there are any number of places to go” and said he also recommends that people seek out some outlets like the Financial Times of London (Middle East reporting) and the Council on Foreign Relations that do not have a “particular political view.” He acknowledged that a lot of people have problems with the Council on Foreign Relations but they “have extraordinarily gifted scholars and analysts” and “you can access their overnight update on what is going on in the world.”
“Pick out two or three others and test them,” Brokaw said. “And if they hold up, continue to go back to ‘em.”
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