Dan Bongino and Megyn Kelly on the Sorry State of Journalism and What Actually Killed It

I do get annoyed when they refuse to call me a journalist. I'm a journalist and a commentator. Those are the two things I do, but I am absolutely a journalist. And the fact that I do commentary on the news doesn't diminish that. I mean, did they ever refer to Don Lemon as just talk show host or liberal commentator? No, they called that guy a journalist, but they refuse to use this term when they're writing about me, Dan. And it's always the left-wing publications and it's intentional, right? They're trying to undermine you in the same vein as what you just said. Like, now I'm over in this irrelevant sphere in which no real journalist would ever appear. It's like they've never seen like iTunes charts, Spotify downloads. It's really bizarre how you'd expose yourself as so foolish. Megan, I'm gonna tell you something. Honestly, the word journalist doesn't mean jack shit anymore. Really, I get what you're saying. It's not a proxy for credibility. We have a running joke on my radio show. If you call me a journalist, I'm gonna have to immediately cut you off because I don't want to be associated with such a pathetic group of people. President company, obviously excluded. And I forget who it was, but maybe it was Trump interviewing Trump or somebody called me a journalist and the audience like jumped on Facebook. Stop them, Dan, stop them right now. It doesn't mean anything. I'll give you a quick example. A friend of mine sends me a thing during my radio show today and says, Dan, there's this group of liberal lunatics, Ad Fontes Media or whatever, and they grade the credibility of commentators. And they said they gave you an F and Rachel Maddow an A. And I said, that's hilarious. Because Moscow Rachel Maddow, who pretends to be a journalist, has almost, I hate the word literally, but almost literally gotten every single major story of our time about Trump wrong. The impeachment thing, the collusion stuff, the spying operation, the Mike Flynn story, the tax returns. We got them right. I wrote books on them, actual books on them. I footnoted them with liberal sources, extensively researched, and yet we get an F. Why? Because I don't meet what the left calls a journalistic standard. But if the standard's meaningless and it's like a ruler that changes every five minutes, well, here's a 12-inch ruler, and tomorrow it's six inches, and the next minute it's eight inches, then it's not really measuring anything, is it? I mean, it's not even, there's validity and reliability, right? If you're a scientist, there's two measures of how you would measure the robustness of statistics. So if your information is valid, right? Say like a scale. A scale can be 20 pounds off every time. I weigh about 200 pounds right now, so the scale shows 220. It's not, it's reliable, but it's not valid. It's not measuring my weight. The thing about the media and the thing with journalism is you're actually given an A for being reliably wrong, like the scale. It's a valid measure. You're a left-wing lunatic. You're validating your left-wing lunacy, but you're just not reliable. You're not validly measuring anything statistical, and as long as you toe the liberal line, you'll get the journalist title, but someone like you won't because you've said things that don't go right up to the line and you don't genuflect before the golden calf of liberalism. 100% true. You know, I was thinking about it because I recently, like my kids are all in middle school or late elementary school, and soon they're gonna be moving on to high school, and I'm very much conscious of not projecting to them that they have to get perfect grades. Their mother did not, and so I decided to go back to my high school to get my transcript just because I knew that there would be some things in there to make my kids feel better, just in case when they go to high school, they have those down moments, they get some bad grades and start to beat themselves up. I'm saving this. I'm putting it in my back pocket, and when they come home sad, I'm just gonna show them my transcript and I'm gonna try to make them feel better. I say it in other ways all the time, but it's different to actually see the grades. Let's just say that they were a lot worse than I expected. I knew they weren't gonna be stellar, Dan, but I didn't know they were gonna be like this checkered. Okay, so Abby, my assistant, now is on a mission to get them all for me, and she actually got my guidance counselor's college recommendation for me, and I'm not gonna read you the whole thing, but I'm gonna read you one line and I'm gonna explain why this is relevant to our discussion about journalism. Okay, here's the first three lines. First of all, he calls me Meg Kelly, which is funny because nobody calls me Meg Kelly, but okay, my husband calls me Meg. Meg Kelly is a solid student who has taken a strong program in high school. Her areas of strength seem to be in language arts and social studies. Meg loves to write and has a real interest in politics and government. Okay, that's interesting. Currently, her goal is to become a political journalist. Look at that, Dan, and I'll read you one more line because you're laughing. You know that or what? Megan has had to work much harder and achieved less success in math and science. He goes on from there, right on, Mr. Villa, I cannot deny. Okay, but back to- It's good you're not a nuclear physicist, right? We've all got our little niches, right? So political journalists, how does that happen? Wait, wait, hold on. One thing I learned about you this week, I follow you on social media, is apparently you're quite the basketball player too. Got a nice little shot there. I guess your kids were filming you. I'm sorry to embarrass you. It's on your Instagram, so I figure it's public knowledge in this way. If you have not followed Megan Kelly on Instagram and you want to see her shoot hoops, she's got a little bit of LeBron Allen Iverson going there, man, not too bad. The kids got you a little like, they were cryptic about it too, right? From the living room or something? Yeah, they were inside taping me without my knowledge. Yeah, it was great. I mean, that was very good. Very candid moment. You and Rachel Campos are my favorite followers on Instagram. She's got a daughter with downs and the daughter is just the cutest kid on planet Earth. I mean, there's nothing finer than what, these videos always put a smile on your face, but you guys are really great. And your guidance counselor there, I mean, absolutely nailed it. We all have little like niches, right? And I wrote a whole book about failing at a thousand different things. And Megan, sometimes you ask God for answers as I write in a book and talk about honestly and openly, and the answer's no. People think, oh, I asked God for an answer and he's like obligated to tell you yes. God, I want to be a millionaire. I want to be a politician. I want to be a congressman. You know what, the answer was no. And if you're going to ask him for answers, you better damn well be listening. The ask is the easy part. The listen's the hard part. I love the book and I want to get to it in one second. The only reason I'm getting into my high school guidance counselor's opinion of me is the reason I wanted to be a political journalist, Dan, is because in 10th grade, I watched in my journalism class, all the president's men. And like so many, I just thought that was such a great story. You know, Woodward and Bernstein and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards, you know, it was like, you felt inspired. It wasn't political. It wasn't like, I wasn't anti-Nixon or anything like that. It was just like, oh my God, this is crazy story, crazy story and how they got it. I don't even know what we are anymore. You're right. The term journalist is meaningless now. If anything, it has a negative connotation and you've given me a new way of looking at this irritant. I'm actually gonna let this irritant go because you're right, that term itself is, it is not what it once was. It is, and journalism itself is not what it once was. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of theories about what killed journalism. I think, and it's never one thing. I mean, there's never really in life a road to Damascus moment. I mean, you know, that happens in great stories in the Bible and great cataclysmic events, but in life things happen on an incline and a decline. They happen slowly, you know, the simple machines, you know, an incline ramp there. And the thing about what I, one of the lead factors, if you had to attribute it, say, I don't know, 51.62% of it is definitely the subscription model for journalism online. Right now you have this model online where it's really easy to disconnect. When we were growing up in New York, there was basically two papers. The conservatives bought the New York Post, the liberals bought the Daily News. Maybe you picked up a news day once in a while, but you know, they had their audience. The other one had theirs, but they would generally agree on a certain set of facts. It was just how they kind of put lipstick on the facts that mattered because it was always crossover too. Some people bought both. Now with the litany of information with social media, which is democratized information exchange, I mean, you and I can go and report on a story on Twitter or True Social right now and break news ahead of the Washington Post. I mean, Megan, one thing I was astounded to learn as on a self praise moment at all, it's just a hard reality, you can look up yourself. My Facebook page, which is one of the most popular in the world, has a larger distribution than the Washington Post and the New York Times combined. I found that out by the way, through the New York Times. Kevin Roos, who wrote an article about me, it's sitting right there on the wall because I love to mock him. It's called right wing pundit draws a lot of who's on Facebook. And he'll tell you, I have a bigger audience than them combined. So I can crack a story quicker than them. So the problem they have now is you got a bunch of left wing nuts who are subscribed to this business model that's old. And if you lose 10, 20% of them because you write an honest article about Trump, your business is finished, it's done. Millions of Americans earn and use credit card rewards. A few big box retailers want to take those rewards away. What the? That's according to the Electronics Payment Coalition, a sponsor of today's episode. 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