You're encouraging a response in citizens and the public, that has nothing to do with an informed decision, that has nothing to do with policy, that has nothing to do with any of that but that just kind of turns it into a competition they're watching as if they're watching the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes and I think if we want people to make more cool-headed, sober-minded decisions covering elections as horse races is the antithesis of doing that.

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

We are constantly bemoaning that we have two nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who are when you put them together as unpopular a duo as we have ever had in our kind of Final Two for the presidency. There are reasons for that, regardless of who ends up winning and going into the White House, I think we need to take dig, those of us in the media, because we're the ones who can foster these discussion and ask the question what is it about the system that got us to a point where most of the people heading to the polls are holding their nose as they cast their vote?

We are spending so much time in studios, and in chairs listening to somebody at a lectern, and if we really understood what Americans were concerned about and what resentments were building, we would not have been as shocked by Donald Trump's success.

I can't speak for the news side 'cause I'm on the opinion side. But what I have noticed that the news side has done and, and to be really honest I think the news side pays too much attention to polls, but I think they're trying to restrain themselves by for instance there's a rubric called Poll Watch, um, that appears in a stream of a whole bunch of other political news where they can gather all that polling information for those people who really want it.

In terms of the rise of social media and the kind of discourse that it encourages, the kind of pointed attitude it encourages, in terms of the number of venues like our conversation here where reporters who are not technically opinion columnists are giving analysis that's invariably gonna edge into opinion. I think our journalism is getting much more almost European in terms of that, that ideal of objectivity exiting it.

I wanted us to be careful about, going to the corner diner, interviewing three people and saying, "here's the mood of the public."