“Politics as pop culture”: Behind the scenes with CSIS’s About the News podcast
“Good Tuesday afternoon,” wrote POLITICO Playbook authors Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer in the June 17 Playbook Power Briefing. “Jake and Anna talked to the great Bob Schieffer for his podcast with CSIS’s Andrew Schwartz. Listen here.”
Andrew Schwartz, the chief communications officer of CSIS and co-host of About the News, smiled as he read this aloud from the computer in his office.
“I had been wanting to invite Jake and Anna onto About the News for a while and their PR people beat me to it,” he said. “Jake and Anna are able to give us a kind of insight into what’s going on in Washington that very few people can.”

There is a special tension to About the News podcast recordings: the interviewees are usually long-time admirers of the interviewer, rather than the other way around. Bob Schieffer, who was declared a living legend by the Library of Congress in 2008 for his decades of national news coverage for CBS News, has won virtually every award in broadcast journalism. He is one of the only journalists to cover the White House, the Pentagon, the United States Department of State and the United States Congress. Schwartz and Schieffer’s mission to create a podcast built around interviewing journalists was made easier by the fact that Schieffer is a storied journalist.
Palmer and Sherman are illustrious journalists as well. They are two of the three-person team behind POLITICO Playbook, the most widely-read political insider newsletter in D.C. (Vanity Fair has described it as “the always insightful, relentlessly insidery bible for Washington’s swamp-creatures.”) Palmer and Sherman celebrated the one-year anniversary since they took the Playbook reins from Mike Allen by recording the podcast episode with Schwartz and Schieffer.
During the episode, Schieffer and Schwartz asked Palmer and Sherman how early they wake up — “between 3:30 and 4 a.m.” — how they ensure sources do not lie to them — it’s hard to lie to reporters that are always around and intimidatingly well-sourced — and how their Playbook is different from Mike Allen’s — “Mike was primarily a White House reporter, but our frame of reference is Capitol Hill.”
Palmer and Sherman described how they have expanded the POLITICO franchise: they have added an afternoon edition, launched Playbook in six U.S. states and are launching a London Playbook. They say their readership is more expansive than it has ever been. In other words, Playbook is not only for DC insiders anymore.
“It’s politics as pop culture,” Sherman explained. “I think, Bob, you’ll find this fascinating…CNN and MSNBC have basically set up sets on the East Lawn of the Capitol and are doing full shows at four or five hours of broadcast from right outside the Capitol, as if it’s, like, a crime scene. So that just shows how much interest there is in what we do.”
According to Schwartz, About the News shares the “politics-as-pop culture” mindset with Playbook.
“About the News looks at politics as pop culture because politics has become a big part of our pop culture,” Schwartz said. “People in Los Angeles are watching CNN and Fox and MSNBC like it’s reality TV. Of course, it is very real, what’s going on here in Washington. But it’s become an addictive story.”
In fact, About the News recently shifted its mission to adhere more closely to this philosophy. Schieffer and Schwartz now focus specifically on what it is like to cover the White House under President Donald Trump.
About the News is true to its name: it is “about creating the news,” Schwartz told Inside CSIS. “We talk about the issues of the day, but the podcast is really about covering the news and how the news is broken, how it’s covered and how it’s created.” Schieffer and Schwartz invite on members of the press to discuss what they do and think.
When Schieffer and Schwartz started the series in 2015, they sought to answer one question: “Americans have access to more information and news than ever before, but are they better-informed?” They conducted 45 interviews with this theme in mind, which they compiled into a book called “Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News.” (The book comes out October 1 — you can pre-order it here.) Those podcasts featured the top journalists of the moment, from comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert to Buzzfeed’s Editor in Chief Ben Smith to Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.
Schieffer and Schwartz decided to orient the show towards covering the White House on April 25 when they interviewed Glenn Thrush of the New York Times. Thrush had just interviewed President Trump in the Oval Office with his partner-in-crime Maggie Haberman.
“For us to talk to Glenn about his interview with President Trump and about what it is like to cover the White House in this day and age, with this administration, with this President, was instantly fascinating to me and Bob,” Schwartz said. “We decided, pretty much right then and there, we were going to focus on the people who are covering the president the closest.”
Since then, About the News has interviewed, among others, the White House correspondents for the New York Times (Maggie Haberman), Washington Post (Ashley Parker), Bloomberg (Margaret Talev), and POLITICO (Annie Karni). They spoke to the “Dean” of the White House Press Corps George Condon and the President of the White House Correspondent’s Association Jeff Mason. They even spoke to Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox.com, a website whose mission — to explain the news — has been complicated by an often-inexplicable political era.
“There’s nothing like covering the White House in journalism. We’re trying to shed light on that, lift the veil off of what it’s like to cover a White House — and certainly to cover this one,” Schwartz said.
Over the next year, About the News plans to invite people who are covering the White House in nontraditional ways: editors of White House coverage, people who are involved in politics as an observer, and more.
“We want to be flexible,” Schwartz said. “We want to be able to go where the interesting stories are.”
Anna and Jake’s interview is on Soundcloud and iTunes. You can read the transcript here.
Listen to About the News here.
Pre-order Schieffer and Schwartz’s book here.

