Ben Smith

Like intended ironically perhaps, but not – I would not say that is collegial.

And when I – at some point somebody complained to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, that my being in the Slack made people unsafe.

because I might write about it.

And he, I thought, quite reasonably.

And this is a sense of like, I don't think, it was not a totally homogenous culture.

He told them, that's ridiculous.

This is a slack with 2,000 people in it.

Of course it's going to leak.

But yeah, I mean, I guess I think that, maybe I don't think it was quite that straightforward, but certainly there was the kind of left-wing political waves and social waves swept through there, swept through all of society.

And I do think it was...

I think the management has spent the last couple of years pushing that back.

I think if you've spent a lot of your career being attacked by strangers on the internet, as I have, you develop a kind of pathologically thick skin to it.

But I don't think you can actually expect other people to act that way.

That's not normal.

If your colleagues are being mean to you, probably you hate it and you're going to quit.

I don't think that's an unreasonable reaction.

So I'm sorry about that.

But I do think, like, the question you asked before, like, what is – I think what this means, like, what is Barry's role at CBS News, like, very – I don't think it's decided.

I think it's very open to interpretation.

I think a lot depends, you know, in particular on how they decide to cover Donald Trump.