As the longest-running program in television history, Meet the Press has been a staple in American culture and television news since the Truman presidency. In the most recent episode, Chuck Todd and his fellow panelists hosted Michael Wolff, the author of the tremendously controversial book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, as well as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. In a particularly intriguing Meet the Press episode to launch 2018, both interviewees contributed much to the debate involving the immediate and long-term state of politics and policy pertaining to freedom of the press. Michael Wolff’s book has captivated Americans nationwide and attracted the attention of Donald Trump, who has gone to Twitter to dispute Wolff’s claims, as well as put down his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. In the interview, Wolff claimed that not only were all of his interviews conducted on-the-record but that he was rather “unobtrusive” within the White House, instead choosing to record what he saw and heard with “fly-on-the-wall” access to the West Wing. His goal was to capture the human nature of Donald Trump and those around…show more content… Specifically, Michael Wolff had every right to collect information on-the-record if no one stopped him, but it has been severely questioned how he could have possibly recorded such intricate conversations that were supposedly private, even to someone with access in the West Wing, without either breaching privacy, conducting interviews off-the-record and then publishing them, or simply fabricating stories. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s anger towards his book primarily stems from the increasingly-fractured state of his image and reputation; however, unless he can explicitly prove an instance of defamation in Wolff’s book, there is nothing he can do to erase the book from the public
