Kalb explores Trump and the Sunday shows with Todd, Dickerson

So, as the moderator of one of the most-popular and longest-running Sunday morning talk programs, how do you prepare to interview Donald Trump? That was a question posed to Chuck Todd of NBC’s "Meet the Press" and John Dickerson of CBS’s "Face the Nation" during the “Kalb Report” at the National Press Club on Nov. 9.

Both Todd and Dickerson have interviewed Trump, who made his foray into the top tier of the Republican presidential candidates by contesting every interviewer and making repeated exaggerated assertions.

Todd began his response with a quip, “Well, we do it like Trump. We always wing it.” But then he got serious. “I never looked forward to an interview less than the first face-to-face I did with Trump because I had no idea that he had personalized – and I am just going to be honest – he had personalized everything I had ever said.”

Marvin Kalb gave Todd a quizzical look. “What does that mean?”

Trump “just personally attacked me in his book because I was the guy bringing the information that said he was the most unpopular person here,” Todd replied. “He internalized it as me doing this. So I had no idea what to expect.”

But then during the interview, Todd realized that Trump was no different than every other politician. “They’re desperate for you to like them all the time. No matter what. I prepped for him the same way I prepped for any other interview.”

Dickerson said that for him, the challenge was not in the preparation but how to manage the interview once it had started. When Trump says something, it is often so outrageous that deciding how to follow up is difficult.

“You can interject and correct,” Dickerson said, “but when there’s five different things, which one do you pick? And it’s not necessarily a correction, but where do you press?

Todd agreed that following a Trump answer is challenging. “I could go there, there, there, which is the beauty of him,” he said. “I call it the spread offensive of political talk. You don’t know where it’s going.”

“That adds to the excitement,” Dickerson added.

Kalb, who was the moderator of "Meet the Press" in the 1980s, wanted to know how these two venerable shows, which go back 60 years, were faring and changing in this new generation of news media.

Both "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" still provide an oasis of thought and understanding in an increasingly frantic news environment, Todd said.

“We are sitting back television on Sunday mornings,” Todd said. “They’re choosing and they want to have a conversation, and they want a little bit more. You don’t have to scream at them to keep their attention. We have the luxury of still being one of the few programs where, ahhh, take a breath, sit back, enjoy your cup of coffee.”

The public’s shredded attention span gives the show a chance to be something different, Dickerson said.

“There should be a place that’s a bit of a sanctuary from the madness, where you can put things into context, let an answer develop and have a conversation … that this is something worth pausing for,” Dickerson said.

As the presidential election picks up, so are the numbers of people turning to the Sunday shows, Todd said.

“The audiences are gathering around again on Sunday,” Todd said. “It’s a nice feeling. I think we’re seeing all of our boats rise.”

The Kalb Report is a joint project of the Press Club, the University of Maryland University College, the George Washington University and Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is underwritten by a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.