Journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter following the facts on the collusion narrative
Solomon and Carter discuss their coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, bias in the mainstream media.
This is a rush transcript from “Life, Liberty & Levin,” March 31, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, HOST: Welcome America, I’m Mark Levin. This is “Life, Liberty & Levin.” We have two great guests — John Solomon, good to see you, sir.
JOHN SOLOMON, INVESTIGATIVE COLUMNIST, THE HILL: Good to be with you, Mark.
LEVIN: Sara Carter, good to see.
SARA CARTER, CONTRIBUTOR, FOX NEWS: So nice to see you, Mark.
LEVIN: Everyone knows who you are. You’re ubiquitous and there’s a reason for that. You’re the — I don’t want to offend you like the Woodward and Bernstein’s of our time, of course, Woodward and Bernstein aren’t anymore, but you’ve dug into this story about Russia, about the Obama administration, about spying, about what I consider the greatest political scandal, if not in modern history, in all history — and I’m very much a historian.
For two years, this collusion narrative — really two and a half years has been pushed. Pushed by the Hillary campaign, by the DNC by their propagandist, by the surrogates, by the media. You’re professional journalists.
John Solomon, let me go to you first. How do you explain your doggedness, it’s almost instinctive. You see this, you’re a journalist. This is how you were trained and you go after it, and yet the vast majority of others in your profession, they see it and they divert. How do you explain that?
SOLOMON: You know, I think there’s a romanticism in the profession with Watergate. Everyone wants the next Watergate and they’re trying to aspire to it. I grew up in an era where you were told never to fall in love with your story, to always be dispassionate and to just follow the facts wherever they lie and when we started to follow the facts, they did not add up to this story that the mainstream media and the Obama administration was telling us.
We were talking to the very intelligence people that were briefing Congress behind closed doors and selling them we don’t have evidence of collusion and then we see these members come out and say there’s evidence of collusion. People like Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, and we just kept with it. We talked to people and we kept hearing, “It’s not there. This is a faux scandal. It’s a dirty political trick. Stick to the facts and you’ll get to the truth,” and that’s what we did. We just talked to the facts. We didn’t become passionate. We just followed the facts where they went.
LEVIN: But why are there so few journalists who follow the facts where they go?
CARTER: I don’t know and I don’t understand it. I don’t know what their personal decisions are. I know my own. I know that when I started as a journalist, many decades ago, a couple of decades ago or more, the first thing I was taught is you are a voice for the voiceless. Your objectivity is everything, as much as you can be objective in a story because we all have our own personal feelings when we enter it.
We try to put those aside. Be dispassionate as John said. But we’re really there to tell the story. It’s not our story and we rely on multiple sources regardless of who that source is, whether that source is John Brennan or James Clapper and we put a lot of emphasis in senior officials.
I was told, “Don’t put emphasis in senior officials. Find three –” I mean, even John and I discussed this. We would cover stories all the time when we started at the “Washington Times.” It didn’t matter if it was —
LEVIN: You worked together at the “Washington Times.”
CARTER: Yes, we did.
SOLOMON: We did.
CARTER: We did. That’s where we met. I came from California. I heard John Solomon was going to be coming from “The Post” to actually — to go to the “Washington Times,” and I was very excited. He came on board and John sent me — I was at the foreign desk and John sent me on my merry way to Afghanistan and said, “Bring us back some stories.”
SOLOMON: And that she did.
CARTER: And that I did, and I spent time on the ground with our – with soldiers, with U.S. soldiers.
LEVIN: You’ve both been journalists for some time now. You heard what Koppel had to say. He’s very concerned about what’s happening to major media outlets here.
CARTER: So am I.
LEVIN: You’re concerned, too.
SOLOMON: Yes.
LEVIN: What do you do? You just keep soldiering on, show people what a real journalist is, show people how to do news or is there need for something more or something bigger, do you think?
SOLOMON: That’s a great question. I think, the industry has to have a moment of introspection after what’s happened here and not some faux introspection where we beat our chest for a couple days and move on. I think we have to look at how do we practice journalism in the 21st Century, where we have Twitter and Facebook and all these outlets to say things.
I think one of the great signs that I saw coming of an industry that was straying so far from neutrality was when Twitter started and you would see these reporters make these extraordinary expressions of opinion. I would have been fired at the “Associated Press” if I ever said any of those things 20 years ago and it just opened up a bottle of champagne, the cork popped out and all of a sudden, journalists felt they could just say whatever they wanted.
And I learned when I came and no one cared about my opinion, they want to hear about the facts you have in your notebook, I think we strayed so far from that. We’ve got to go back and look, how did that happen? And how do we try to resolve what we’ve done to the industry? We’ve lost a lot of our credibility.
CARTER: Well, and the public is very well aware of that. I mean, we see that in how the public views journalism now as I mean, there’s no trust. There’s a lack of trust. One of the things that I thought of and I wanted to say, I remember, you know every great editor has always told me this. You don’t write a story from behind a desk. You go there. You interview the people. You look at them in the face. You ask for documents. You find what their motive is. Do they have a motive for telling you this?
What is that mode? Sometimes the motive may be selfish. It may still be the truth, but we need to know what the motive is. That’s what we always did. I saw it changing. I saw it shifting. So many journalists in a lot of different newsrooms that I worked in would never leave their desk. They always wanted to have friends, especially in Washington, D. C.
There was a big bubble here where people felt that, you know, it was better to be friends with the administration especially under Obama — President Obama — people really wanted to be friends with the administration — go to their parties, go to their dinners. It became very difficult for them to tell the truth, to tell the stories, to hold these officials accountable and I think that’s what we’ve seen —
LEVIN: Is this highly missed in the Trump election?
SOLOMON: Clearly.
LEVIN: Sitting behind their desks.
SOLOMON: Sitting behind their desks and tweeting instead of getting out and talking to real America. If people were out in Wisconsin, if they were out in Iowa, they would have seen this groundswell of a connection between real Americans and the President that we, sitting on the global elitist desks of these news organizations completely missed and I think that journalism — when I first took my job, my very first editor in Washington, Walter Myers, great famous journalist said to me, “What makes a great journalist? Their sole. And I said, “What do you mean their sole?” And he said, “The sole of their shoes. If it’s worn out, then you know they are doing their job. If it’s clean and new, they’re not out really reporting.”
LEVIN: You both operate in an area of journalism where you deal with shady characters from time to time, where you’re dealing in the shadows from time to time. Have you ever had any unusual experiences doing that?
SOLOMON: Not really unusual experiences. I mean people come with motives and you have to deduct what those motives are, report them out, try to control that the motive doesn’t sway the story, but you know, many people approached — most of the people that have approached me and I probably, I’m sure with Sara, have good intentions. They want to get a story out. They think they have —
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