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Journalism in Modern America

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HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. Bonjour. Hi, Canada. Greetings to the rest of the globe listening via hughhewitt.com. Good morning to all of you watching on Univision.  

That music is normally played in the last radio hour of the week. But we have a special "Hillsdale Dialogue" this week in the second hour of the first day of radio on Monday at 7, oh, 6:00 in the East, 4:04 in the West. And that's because Dr. Matt Spalding, the director of the Kirby Center, which is the lantern of sweet reason in the shadow of the Capitol, joins me this morning for a special conversation. Matt, good morning to you. I hope you had a great weekend despite the grim news from Poway and other places around the country.  

MATT SPALDING: I did. I did. And it's good to be with you again.  

HEWITT: I wanted to dobecause I was off on Friday, and I wanted to talk about it. And it's good that we waited a day, because Mollie Hemingway wrote a piece over the weekend. But before she wrote a piece over the weekendand people can follow her @Mollie on Twitter you named her, you and Hillsdale College, welcomed author and journalist Mollie Hemingway as a senior journalism fellow to its growing campus in Washington, DC. Tell us about the growing campus, which we often do, the Kirby Center, and about the journalism program, and about Mollie, Matt.  

SPALDING: Well there's a lot there, a lot going on. At Hillsdale, we are expanding our campus in Washington, DC. As you well knowyou've been there many timeswe're adding teachers for our undergraduates. We're adding new programs. We're getting ready, if all things go well, to start a graduate school in Washington, DC. More on that in the future.  

And now we've added Mollie Hemingway. And the particular reason there, we have a very longstanding and a very good journalism program. One of things we do is we teach our students about liberal arts and all the great things about the true, the good, and the beautiful.  

But we also want to give them skills to try to change opinions in our country and to restore its key principles and go into the politicalgo into politics in the public square. One area where we think a lot of work can be doneand our students have shown a lot of success, writing for many papers and getting involved in radio and televisionis in journalism. And we have had a very active program on the main campus.  

We've always wanted to have somebody here in Washington, DC, to essentially be the face of the program, to teach our students when they come back to DC to help them get into journalism positions and advance their careers. And Dr. Arnn and I have both known Mollie Hemingway for some time, admired her. Her and her husband, Mark, were Pulliam Fellows on campus a few years ago.  

She is an excellent journalist. She is one of the few who actually follows facts in her investigations, in her work. And we've been talking to her for some time. And now we've made her our senior journalism fellow to do just that.  

And I think it's going to be a great addition to our program. It'll be great for our students. Our students have already been working with her. And she's going to be just fabulous. And it is an important expansion of our activities here in Washington, DC.  

HEWITT: Now, I can't imagine anyone who listens to this program, or very few people who listen to this program, not knowing who Mollie is or what she does. But for the benefit of those Steeler fans out there, Mollie helped launch and is a senior editor of the online magazine The Federalist, which has become one of the most influential voices in politics. It's got millions of readers.  

She's a Fox News contributor. She's a regular on the All-Star Panel with Bret Baier. She's a regular guest on Media Buzz with Howard Kurtz. She's appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, LA Times, Guardian, Post, Atlantic, Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Christianity Today. She's got a new book coming out called Justice on Trial. And she and her husband, Mark, have been at every Alliance Defending Freedom seminar that I have led for the media over the past many years, where con law and religious freedom meet.  

I've just got to tell you. There is actually no one better in the country. She's the right age, the right skill set, the right combination of media platforms to reach down and inspire young journalists. Now, you don't have a journalism major at Hillsdale. Everyone takes liberal arts. But there's a minor.  

SPALDING: That's right. Well, like everything else. We don't have an education major, either. We think you actually should learn something. So, you take English or history or politics. But then you can minor. You can do a journalism minor.  

And our students, we have an excellent student paper. They come back here. They work at magazines and newspapers. We have people at The Wall Street Journal.  

So it's an excellent program. And she will be a wonderful addition to that, because right now, with so much discussion about fake news and not good journalism, I read the papers every day, several papers. And I'm always struck by how journalists don't ask that question that's obvious.  

There's bits of information missing. And they don't follow the path that the facts take them. Mollie does. She's one of a handful of journalists we can point to, I think, who remained level-headed in recent controversies and just followed that investigative work.  

HEWITT: Her most trenchant  

SPALDING: That's an important model for our students.  

HEWITT: Her most trenchant observation which I do not have in front of me; I just remember it is how she observed at dinner one night with her husband, Mark, who's a fine journalist as well, not just that often Beltway conventional wisdom is wrong, but that when you disagree with Beltway conventional wisdom, they get mad at the person disagreeing. They don't merely note or examine the disagreement. They get angry and collectively attempt to erase the dissent. It's the herd mentality.  

Now, I have lots of friends who were at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. I've got nothing against them. I went last year, and I thought it was pretty despicable. And I don't think I'll ever go again, much less be invited again, because I just thought it was despicable.  

But the herd mentality represented inside Beltway journalismnot by everyone. Probably let's say 70%. 30% are not there. They get angry with the Mollie Hemingways of the world when Mollie refuses to knuckle under. We're going to talk about that after the break with our Clarence Thomas piece. But she does not knuckle under.  

SPALDING: No, that's right. I mean, so much of our politics todayand here we're talking about journalism, but you've already alluded to other areasreally is dominated by this sense of a consensus. And you have to join the bandwagon in journalism and politics, in the academic world. And if you don't, you're ostracized.  

And increasingly, you're intensely ostracized, to the point ofsuch as with the correspondence dinnerit's not very funny anymore. They've lost their sense of humor. And journalists have lost that sense of going after stories and being independent and following ideas.  

And herd mentality really is right. If you don't go along with that, you're outside of the mainstream to the point where you have to be destroyed. And it's terrible for our journalism, left, right, or center.  

This is not the way it should be occurring. We need good journalists. We need more well-trained journalists who know how to write and think and do and pursue their art. And I think Mollie is really the best out there.  

HEWITT: She is. And I now want to turn to, as a teaser for the next segment, what she wrote over the weekend. And Hillsdale, as a nonpartisan institution, doesn't involve itself in partisan politics. Dr. Arnn and you and I have often talked about what's going on in the world of partisan politics, but not from a perspective of Hillsdale taking a side.  

There's a big Democratic primary underway. One of the participants is Joseph Biden. Mollieand I want to put her whole piece on the recordbegan with this paragraph.  

Former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly said on The View on Fridaythat's the television showthat he believed Anita Hill from the moment he heard her tale of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas. But Joe Biden had previously told Arlen Specter that it was clear her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee included lies. That's the first paragraph.  

Well, we'll just stop there. That is, by the way, great journalism, because it sets up the premise, Joe Biden said x. And then it adds a fact. But Joe Biden said not x earlier. That's what good journalism does.  

SPALDING: And she's doing it in the face of right now, at this moment, she's going back and looking something up and showing something that happened in the past that has a factual basis that she believes is good to bring out. So it's a great example of how a good instinct of a journalist is to go back and check things. And it turns out that oftentimes our memories are false, or what happened in our perceptions of what happened in the past are just not correct. And that's a very good sign for how to help us and how to help political thinkers think through this mess of things we're in right now. We need more people like that.  

HEWITT: And in fact, when she notes that at the conclusion of the Thomas hearings in 1991, 58% of Americans believed Clarence Thomas and only 24% believed Anita Hill, that will shock young people, who are growing up in a conventional wisdom that Anita Hill is widely believed. One minute to the break, Matt Spalding.  

SPALDING: No, I think that's right. I mean, they don't remember that. They don't remember these characters. It goes back to your point about herd mentality, that the modern media assumes certain narratives.  

And over time, they maintain certain narratives, such that anybody who breaks out of the mold in this case, going back to see what actually happened is radically outside of what they should be doing and can't be allowed. But that's exactly what journalism means and what a good journalist should do in their investigations. And I think that's a great example of that.  

HEWITT: I'll be right back with Matthew Spalding is the vice president of the Hillsdale center's Kirby Center in Washington, DC, a lantern of sweet reason in the shadow of the Capitol, talking about the Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist, which is so important to the debate and the campaign ahead. Don't go anywhere, America. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

22 minutes after the hour, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. That's music from Breakthrough the movie, in theaters everywhere. Great movie. It is the "Hillsdale Dialogue." All things Hillsdale are found at Hillsdale.edu, including online courses on the Constitution, the Founding, the progressive movement, just World War II the Second World War, as we call it.  

And they also have at Hillsdale the Kirby Center, which is located close to Capitol Hill. It's a wonderful center of learning for both the elected and the representative and the bureaucratic and students. They've got lots of student interns there. Hillsdale turns out great journalism minors. They will now be mentored by Mollie Hemingway.  

I am talking with Matthew Spalding, the vice president of Hillsdale and the leader, the head, the dean of education programs for Hillsdale in Washington, DC. Matt, if I can go back in this short segment to what Mollie wrote on the weekend.  

Not only that I didn't vote for Clarence Thomas, I believed her from the beginning. I was against Clarence Thomas. I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas. And he won by the smallest margin ever won going on the Supreme Court, Joe Biden told The View's Joy Behar.  

But in 1998, Mollie Hemingway wrote over the weekend, Biden admitted to Specter that, quote, "It was clear to me from the way that she was answering the questions, Hill was lying about a key part of her testimony." The exchange was published in Specter's 2000 memoir, Passion for Truth From Finding JFK's Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.  

Mollie adds the issue is important as the media and other partisans rewrite the historical record about Hill and her accusations. The widely watched hearings revealed inaccuracy in Hill's version of events and ended up with 58% of Americans believing Thomas, and only 24% believing Hill, as I said in the last segment. There was no gap between the sexes in the results.  

In the intervening years, activists have relentlessly attempted to change the narrative, writing fan fiction about Hill, bestowing honors on her, and asserting that her disputed allegations were credible. That is the key thing, Matt Spalding. History doesn't change the facts. But facts are changed as history precedes and narratives arrive.  

SPALDING: No, that's right. And the question is who plays a role in changing that narrative. And I think Mollie is pointing it out there. I mean, what I found interesting about that article and being reminded of all this was the extent to which Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was in a dilemma, trying to be fair in those hearings.  

He was against Thomas and wanted to get rid of Thomas. As you recall, though, the most vivid thing I remember from those hearings was before the Anita Hill story came out, you might recall, Biden opens those hearings with an attack on Clarence Thomas about his judicial philosophy in connections to natural law. There was actually an amazing debate over that question before he even got to this.  

He's trying to oppose Thomas. He's trying to be fair. But he doubts her testimony. He has questions about it. There are all sorts of ways in which it doesn't add up.  

And now today, all these years later, here's where you see the gap between his points as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and today, given where we've gotten to with identity politics and the vast changes in how we describe these things. On The View, his ability, his difficulty in trying to address that, given the facts of the past and today's politics they want him to apologize. They want him to renege on what he did or did not do at the time.  

We go back and review those facts. We just see that gap, very obvious to anybody who's willing to read it. And the question is what has changed in the meantime in terms of the narrative and the politics of it?  

And so now we're going back and rewriting history. I think he's getting caught in that very problem within liberalism of trying to rewrite history. And now he's in the middle of it.  

HEWITT: And you don't get to do it. 30 seconds, Matt. I don't know that any other journalists besides Mollie has yet brought this up. But it is the obligation of every journalist to be acquainted with these facts and to confront the vice president with them.  

SPALDING: No, and constantly go back and check your facts and remember things. The journalists are, we think of them as fighting right now over what's going on today. But journalists, in many ways, are our national memory, to go back to those facts and bring them forward again. That's what journalists have done well in the past.  

And we need more of that. And she, I think, is doing that here. Great example. And it'll play out more as we go forward. The left doesn't remember facts anymore.  

HEWITT: Vice President Biden in western Pennsylvania today, making his official announcement in person at a Teamsters Hall. But we are reading Mollie Hemingway, new senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College, with Matt Spalding at Kirby Center. Her piece on the weekend about Joe Biden and Anita Hill from 1998. Don't go anywhere, America. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. The Hillsdale Dialogue special Monday edition is underway on The Hugh Hewitt Show. Thank you for watching on the Univision. If you're watching at hughhewitt.com or listening on any of our 200-plus affiliates or over the air at hughhewitt.com.  

"Hillsdale Dialogue" is usually Friday. And it will be back on Friday. But I skipped it on this Friday because I wanted to talk to Matt Spalding, the vice president of Hillsdale College, on this Monday about their weekend announcement that Mollie Hemingway, whom we well know from the All-Star Panel on Bret Baier's show on Fox, as well as The Federalist, who's been named senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College.  

She has a magnificent piece. Now, I want to remind everyone, Hillsdale College is not partisan. So Mollie's piece on Joe Biden and Anita Hill is not a partisan piece. It is a piece that recounts history. And Matt, if you'll indulge me, a couple of minutes of reading. I want people to hear what Mollie writes about.  

She continues, on The View last week, Joe Biden claimed, quote, "If you go back and look at what I said and I didn't say, I don't think I treated her badly. I took on her opposition. What I couldn't figure out how to do and we still haven't figured out is how do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions?"  

Prominent media partisans attacked then ranking minority member Arlen Specter for asking tough questions of Anita Hill, or really just for asking simple questions she struggled to answer back in 1991. Specter began by noting that many people had reported Hill had praised Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court. These included a former colleague at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas had worked years prior.  

Another person corroborated the colleague's claim. Anita Hill disputed their claim. She also disputed the former dean of her law school, who said she had praised Clarence Thomas as, quote, "a fine man and an excellent legal scholar."  

Then Hill claimed she didn't know a woman named Phyllis Barry, who had told The New York Times that Anita Hill's allegations, quote, "were the result of Ms. Hill's disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her." Under questioning from Specter, Mollie Hemingway continues, in which he mentioned that two colleagues had provided statements attesting that she knew Barry, Hill was forced to concede that she knew her and had worked with her at the EEOC.  

In other words, a lie. Molly didn't write that, but I will say that. Arlen Specter then asked Anita Hill about the major contradictions between her testimony to the Senate and her interviews with the FBI. Her testimony with the Senate was much more colorful and descriptive, even though it took place just days after her FBI interviews.  

Finally, Specter asked Hill about a USA Today article that claimed, quote, "Anita Hill was told by Senate staffers that her signed affidavit alleging sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas would be the instrument that, quote, 'quietly and behind the scenes' would force Thomas to withdraw his name." Specter read from the article, quote, "Keith Henderson, a 10-year friend of Anita Hill and former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, says Hill was advised by Senate staffers that her charge would be kept secret and her name kept from public scrutiny."  

Later, it said, quote, "they would approach Judge Thomas with the information, and he would withdraw and not turn this into a big story, Henderson says." Specter asked her if this was true, attempting to find out what Senate Democrats had arranged with Hill. Nine times Anita Hill denied the claim, demurred, or otherwise attempted to get away from the question.  

She said she could vividly remember events related to Thomas from many years prior but couldn't quite remember the conversation from weeks prior. I'll read what Specter said about that. But do you notice what Mollie is doing here, Matt? She is methodically building up a record from 1991 to remind people 28 years later that history matters.  

SPALDING: No, that's right. She's going back and figuring these things out. That passage you read there, of course, is a great walking through the testimony, the cross-examination by Senator Specter, which then is going to lead upwhich you're going to go intowhich got Biden, convinced Biden that she had said some lies.  

But she points out the discrepancies here by adding up the times she denied something, what was said, what wasn't said, to establish the factual record to come to a conclusion. You read this, and you juxtapose it to a piece you see day-to-day in one of the leading newspapers that the article has an objective and a narrative it wants to play out. And it does whatever it needs to get there.  

What I like about this essay and other things that Mollie writes is the extent to which she has a premise and a thesis. But then she just basically works through and follows the facts and sees where they go. And she puts the facts together to make her case.  

That strikes me as what a good journalist should do. In this case, this is precisely the kind of journalism that is going to go back and establish that historical record, that is going to put someone like Vice President Biden in a spot, given today's politics and the discrepancy between what happened then, the facts, which were overwhelmingly accepted by the American people and understood in a certain way, and today, in which especially the base of his own party won't abide by those opinions in the context of today's looking at the immediate circumstances of the politics necessary to get the Democratic nomination. And the factsfacts are hard things to work with, as John Adams might say.  

HEWITT: Yeah. And I've got to say, we're about to quote Arlen Specter's memoir from 1998. The Anita Hill charges and Clarence Thomas' confirmation came in 1991. So, Arlen Specter's book is seven years later, and it's hearsay. And so, a good journalist isn't afraid to point out that it's hearsay.  

But people should remember Arlen Specter as a credible witness because he switched parties. He was also a prosecutor, and he played a prominent role with Biden. This is what Mollie Hemingway quotes from Arlen Specter's book.  

Quote, "After this exchange, Biden recessed the committee." Biden told me, Arlen Specter, in November of 1998, it was clear to me the way she was answering the questions, she was lying. At that point, I truncated the hearing and recessed it early for lunch, Biden said. I turned to my chief of staff and said, go down and tell her lawyers that if her recollection is not refreshed by the time she gets back, I will be compelled to pursue the same line of questioning that Senator Specter did, because it seems to me she did what he said.  

Biden, as the committee's chairman and top Democrat, would have carried great sway if he had suggested publicly that Hill was lying when she repeatedly answered questions about Thomas' potential withdrawal by saying she didn't remember. Then Mollie switches back to the current. She quoted Specter, and then she says, now that Biden is running for president again, Biden may be trying to avoid the reality of Hill's weak testimony or his role in encouraging her to answer the questions forthrightly.  

But in 1991, when Hill came back from lunch, her story had changed. Quote, "There was some indication that the candidateexcuse me, the nomineemight not wish to continue the process," Hill finally admitted. Asked to clarify whether a particular staffer had told her that Thomas might not wish to continue to go forward with the nomination if you came forward, Hill again admitted yes.  

This exchange was just one example, writes Mollie, of why so many Americans outside of the liberal media thought Hill lacked credibility. Specter credited Biden's warning to Hill about her lies as helping her with her eroding credibility. Hill's afternoon modification of her morning testimony, therefore, was not only deliberate but calculated to avoid greater erosion to her credibility.  

I'll read more about this. But what Mollie Hemingway has just done there is remind everyone that Joe Biden helped defeat Anita Hill. Maybe not knowingly, but he did.  

SPALDING: He was trying to help her maintain some credibility by having his staff intervene with her to point out that she probably was lying about something and she better get that record straight. He was the chairman of the committee, trying to be fair as a proceeding, but also being fair in a way that would be againsthe opposed Justice Thomas, and he was trying to help his key witness.  

HEWITT: And now, it was interesting. I had forgotten this part. I remembered a bunch of different stuff because I was on the radio at that time. I was outraged.  

I don't know Justice Thomas well. I've met him a few times. I know Virginia a little bit, but I don't know Justice Thomas well. But we were colleagues together on the Combined Federal Campaign back in the day.  

And so, I was watching this very closely and was outraged by this. But what I had forgotten is that she had been told, if you just make these allegations, he'll drop out. Now, that's what happened with Doug Ginsburg when he was nominated to replace the Bork nomination. And he withdrew after allegations he had smoked marijuana came up in 1987.  

And so, the Democrats thought they had a playbook. They ran the same playbook against Brett Kavanaugh. And it didn't work last year either, Matt Spalding.  

SPALDING: Well, it is a great review. And the fact that Mollie has also written a book about the Kavanaugh hearings is going to be interesting because this is an interesting series of things to remember, telling us about the history of Supreme Court nominations and their testimony before the United States Senate. It's changed over the years.  

This occurrence, the Thomas hearings, occurred at a time when the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a Democrat who opposed the nomineethe Democratic Party had a majority of the United States Senate. He didn't like the nominee. He still thought a process had to be gone through. And they were trying to figure out ways to get him to withdraw.  

I don't think the intention was for that story to come out. I think she got caught up in that. And he pointed that out, trying to have the proceedings fair. He was trying to help her with her credibility.  

And now here we are, 30 years later, where all the gloves are off. And not only are these things brought up behind the scenes, hoping that the nominee might withdraw, we have these public fights. It's all done upfront.  

All the laundry is out, and we're fighting to the death, which you see in the Kavanaugh hearings. And it's all done publicly in front of the committee. The politics have changed in the meantime.  

The way we look at politics, the way the parties look at politics, the way the activists look at politics, everything is political in a way that it wasn't just a few, just years ago, decades ago especially, such that Biden's got a foot in each one of those worlds. And how he maneuvers in that and how he thinks it through and how he presents himself is going to be very difficult, especially when he's asked questions about his actions 30 years ago versus today. And I think we're seeing in his consternation, in his difficulty to do that, we're seeing the change and the radical transformation of how politics is discussed, from being a matter about a nomination in a broada process that was attempted to be fair but trying to oppose a candidate, to today, where it's all politics  

HEWITT: A search and destroy.  

SPALDING: —without a fair process as well.  

HEWITT: Well, search and destroy. I'll be right back with Matt Spalding of the Kirby Center. "Hillsdale Dialogue" continues after the break. Don't go anywhere, as we continue with Mollie Hemingway's piece.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. That is the soundtrack of Breakthrough. Great movie, in theaters now. I want you to go see it.  

I am doing the "Hillsdale Dialogue" both Monday and Friday of this week. Hillsdale.edu is where you find everything Hillsdale. But if you want to listen to the "Dialogues," all of them, back to 2013, they are collected at hughforhillsdale.com.  

Last week with Dr. Arnn on Brexit chaos. We did a couple of weeks on the Mueller report. The electoral college on March 22. The college admissions scandal on March 15. The case for Trump with Victor Davis Hanson on March 8. They're all collected over at hughforhillsdale.com, and everything online at Hillsdale.edu.  

My guest this week, Dr. Matt Spalding, who is the vice president of Hillsdale College, the dean for education at the Kirby Center in Washington, DC. Matt, I want people to understand. I can't read the entire Mollie Hemingway piece. But what matters here is what mattered to me.  

I was so exercised on the radio back then because any trained lawyer knew that Anita Hill was lying. And that comes through, and the record is re-created. But we are now living in a post-truth age, with Joe Biden being able to tell Joy Behar that he did the best he could, when in fact he knows she was lying.  

But the narrative of today allows him to get away. And no one presses him on it. And that to me—they press Trump on everything, and I get that. But the fact-checking industry ought to be fact-checking Biden every time he's asked about Anita Hill, because the vice president has changed his tune.  

SPALDING: Well, look here. I mean, I think the key thing which we need to understand here is how the terms of our politics have so changed. Today, it's no longer about facts, as we refer to here in the case of journalism. But also just more generally, it's not about finding the ground or the truth behind an argument. It's not about arguments, for that matter.  

The development and the gap going forward between that view of the world and a more kind of deconstructed view of the world is becoming more and more apparent. I think this has been becoming clear for some number of years now. It's not just the current president that's brought all this out. It was becoming obvious.  

And I think that the current president has kind of pulled the curtain back to reveal a lot of this going on, especially in our culture, in our cultural elites, of which I would include the modern journalists. And now we're seeing it in our politics, which is, it's really about kind of your self-actualization. It's about identity politics. It's about empowerment.  

We're seeing it going on in the Democratic primary. And we're seeing it now being caught up in with Vice President Biden. And what's interesting about him, I think, is the extent to which he is, on the one hand, a vestige of the past, of a Democratic Party that in many ways was the old left, a certain degree of moderation and some sense of fairness, although they were fighting their battles. He opposed Clarence Thomas.  

And yet, he is trying to be a political figure today. And the difficulty he's seeing points to that division. And now he's trying to go back and rewrite the past to show that he is more acceptable to the modern identity politics.  

I think it just points to the change that has occurred over time that has come over our society and our culture. And now we're seeing playing out. And we're at this moment where I think our politics are all laid open to bear. It's open field politics, in my opinion.  

And we're coming to a point where the American people are going to have to get involved and decide what kind of country are we? Where do we want to go? And how do we rebuild some sort of semblance of a politics to allow us to have a structure to go forward? It's hard to imagine, as frustrating as it is to look back to those original Clarence Thomas hearings, it's hard to imagine a hearing like that occurring in this day and age after we've gone through the Kavanaugh hearings.  

HEWITT: It is. And one last bit of the record. On The View, the interlocutor, Joy, told Biden that people were upset he hadn't allowed other women to testify against Thomas. Biden explained he tried to get them to testify, writes Mollie Hemingway, but there were problems and that forcing them to testify may have been worse for Hill.  

Last minute to you, Matt Spalding. That's exactly what happened with Kavanaugh. And nobody remembered the Hill example, because the media has disappeared it. 30 seconds, my friend.  

SPALDING: Well, part of it, you have towhat is the objective? The objective of much of the modern media and much of modern culture is not to pursue facts and find out or make arguments and pursue the truth. It's to pursue an agenda. It has an objective. It's trying to upend and achieve a politics through the narrative.  

And we've just got to see through that and get back to some serious ideas of truth. And that's one reason why we want to train good journalists in America so they can serve our country and help it correct its path, and why having Mollie Hemingway teach our students is so important.  

HEWITT: Well said, Matthew Spalding. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu. If you're a youngster out there who wants to go into the business, no better place to train than Hillsdale College, and no better person to train under than Mollie Hemingway and Matt Spalding and Larry Arnn and the whole team at Hillsdale.edu. Come back. Hour number three of The Hugh Hewitt Show straight ahead.  

 

C.S