Michael M. Grynbaum

In the muffled recording — left Oct. 16 with NBC reporter Rich Schapiro — Giuliani, the chairman of a security consulting firm, can be heard discussing business in Turkey and Bahrain. At one point, speaking with a pair of unidentified men, Giuliani declares: “The problem is we need some money.”

Nearly 10 seconds of silence tick by before Giuliani clarifies: “We need a few hundred thousand.”

It was not the first time that Giuliani had left remnants of a conversation on Schapiro’s phone. In a voicemail in September, he can be heard railing against the family of Joe Biden, suggesting with no evidence that he knows of corrupt activities by the former vice president.

Calls and texts to Giuliani seeking clarity about the messages went unreturned Friday. And Schapiro, in an appearance on MSNBC, said he had tried without success to ask Giuliani about the unusual recordings.

“I have yet to receive an intentional or unintentional call back,” Schapiro said.

Given Giuliani’s sensitive role in the impeachment inquiry, and his taste for the spotlight, there was some speculation that the messages could have been staged. But based on reactions from the Washington press corps who cover him, Giuliani, 75, is an accomplished inadvertent caller. On social media, the Giuliani stories began to flow.

“Everyone has a good Rudy butt dial story,” Josh Dawsey, a Washington Post White House reporter, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve heard him on what sounded like a plane, at the airport, at what sounded like a bar.”

Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for Axios, had another story. “He once texted me a voice memo recording of himself talking to a guy,” Swan recalled. “I couldn’t make any sense of it or figure out how he managed to text me a recording inadvertently.”

David Martosko, a journalist at the Daily Mail, remembered once bumping into Giuliani and a Fox News producer at a Washington television studio. “He was just finishing telling her a story,” Martosko wrote on Twitter, referring to the producer. “It ended with: ‘And I butt-dialed him! Can you believe it?’”

Accidents aside, Giuliani relies heavily on his telephone to communicate. He is a frequent texter and often eager to engage with reporters. In a recent parlor game of sorts in Washington, journalists posted pictures of their smartphone conversations with the former New York mayor.

Oliver Darcy, a CNN media reporter, joked on Twitter last week that it was “starting to feel like I might be the only reporter not texting with” Giuliani.

Inadvertent phone calls have yet to join the pantheon of legendary reporting methods. But the smartphone era is young.

“I can tell you,” Schapiro said Friday on MSNBC, “I did not go to sleep that night expecting to wake up in the morning with a three-minute voicemail message from Rudy Giuliani.”

This article originally appeared in

It's Giuliani on the Phone, But He Might Not Realize It

WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a key figure in the impeachment inquiry, managed to inadvertently telephone an NBC News reporter at 11 p.m. one night this month and leave a lengthy voice message filled with snippets of an overheard conversation.

And, of course, coordinate the commodes.

“It’s a very long debate,” said Alex Conant, a political strategist who prepared Sen. Marco Rubio for his primary debates in 2016. “You have to think about things like: ‘When do you go to the bathroom, and how many men can fit into the men’s room at once?’”

Four years ago, an 11-candidate matchup in California featuring Rubio and his Republican rivals seemed to mark the high point of jampacked debate stages. But on Tuesday, no fewer than a dozen Democrats will gather in Ohio for the CNN/New York Times debate — a three-hour brawl that poses unique challenges for the production team and moderators.

“That’s a logistical nightmare,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, who produced 10 debates and candidate forums between 2004 and 2016 for NBC News. “All kinds of things can trip you up.”

Now retired from the network game — and dean of the communication school at Hofstra University — Lukasiewicz did not sound particularly nostalgic as he ticked off the potential pitfalls that haunt TV producers.

“Twelve candidate walk-throughs, 12 separate arrivals, 12 green rooms, 12 individual routes to the bathroom, 12 sets of family VIPs that have to be taken care of,” he said. Even herding the candidates onstage can become a struggle.

“It’s like in horse racing, when they lead all the thoroughbreds to the starting gates, and they have to appear in just the right order and stay still before the bell rings and off they go,” Lukasiewicz said.

He recalled a painful moment at a 2016 debate when Ben Carson, then a Republican candidate (and now the secretary of housing and urban development), missed his entrance cue and dawdled for more than a minute.

Little else from that event, broadcast by ABC News in February 2016, has persisted in the public imagination like Carson’s gaffe — a phenomenon that veteran debate producers know well.

“If it all goes well, no one notices,” said Cherie Grzech, the vice president of Fox News’ Washington bureau who has overseen five debates for the network. “And if you have issues, everybody notices.”

NBC News received warm reviews for its handling of the first Democratic debates in Miami in June. But a microphone mishap that temporarily suspended the event made headlines and prompted a mocking tweet from President Donald Trump.

Given the president’s fixation on CNN, there is some probability he will be tuning in on Tuesday. Hours before the broadcast, Trump tweeted falsely that the network’s president, Jeff Zucker, “will be resigning momentarily.” (In fact, Zucker was on the job in Ohio overseeing debate preparations.)

In an interview, Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, said he was not sweating the unprecedented number of candidates in the debate.

“We’ve had 11 before, and now we have 12,” Feist said between rehearsals at Otterbein University, in the cavernous gymnasium that has been converted into a one-night-only soundstage with seating for 1,500 people. “It doesn’t really change our approach.”

To accommodate the jumbo-sized event, a small army of CNN crew members installed 550 lights, 50 speakers and at least 16 cameras inside the Clements Recreation Center, a building typically used as a campus fitness center. The candidates will stand at a dozen slender, identical lecterns installed in front of a glowing, 70-foot-long wall of LED lights.

Not all of the preparation can be seen onstage.

Candidates can be prickly about their personal space, particularly at a high-stakes event with the potential to either elevate or diminish their campaigns. In 2015, rival campaigns squabbled over the amenities of their backstage facilities at a CNBC-sponsored debate in Boulder, Colorado. One adviser to Sen. Rand Paul claimed that Rubio’s quarters featured cushier seats.

To avoid similar problems, Feist said that CNN had arranged for RV trailers — of equal, and ample, size — for candidates and their entourages on Tuesday before the broadcast.

Nature being what it is, the dozen Democrats in Ohio may need to take advantage of the evening’s three scheduled commercial breaks to use the restrooms. In 2015, Hillary Clinton had 1 minute 45 seconds for her bathroom break at a debate in New Hampshire. Because the men’s room was significantly closer to the stage, Clinton was delayed, but ABC News resumed the broadcast anyway, questioning her male opponents as her podium stood empty.

CNN says there will be no such problems Tuesday. “We made sure that the restrooms are in close proximity to the stage,” Feist said.

Lights, Camera, Bathrooms: Big Stage and Big Night, Even Behind the Scenes

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — There are many challenges involved in televising a presidential debate featuring a historic number of candidates. Keep track of speaking time. Calibrate the camera shots.

The next Democratic presidential primary debate, on Oct. 15 in Westerville, Ohio, will feature a Brobdingnagian lineup of a dozen candidates onstage at once, party officials said Wednesday.

Never before have so many presidential candidates shared a single stage in a primary debate, according to political historians who keep track of such things.

Eleven Republicans appeared together in September 2015 at a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. And lineups of 10 candidates have been relatively common in recent campaign years.

But the 12-candidate milestone had yet to be reached, setting up a challenge for the event’s moderators, CNN anchors Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper and national editor of The New York Times, Marc Lacey.

The Ohio debate, on the campus of Otterbein University, will feature the 10 candidates who appeared at last month’s matchup in Houston. In addition, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Tom Steyer, a billionaire and former hedge fund investor, qualified to appear, the party said.

Candidates had until 11:59 p.m. Tuesday to meet the Democratic National Committee’s requirements: amassing 130,000 individual donors and receiving 2% support in at least four qualifying polls.

The number of hopefuls sharing the stage is on the rise, but the overall field has grown smaller. Earlier this year, 20 candidates qualified for Democratic debates in Miami and Detroit. The party split those events into two nights, so that a maximum of 10 candidates appeared together.

This time around, Democratic officials opted for the jumbo format to ensure that viewers could see the party’s top presidential contenders face off.

The 12-candidate format is likely to generate more than a few moments of cross talk and interruptions, particularly as lower-polling candidates seek a possible last opportunity to break out in front of a national audience.

But for party officials, the alternative formats carried drawbacks, too. One option — dividing the candidates across two nights — might have separated the leading candidates through a random drawing. Splitting the candidates by polling performance, as the Republican Party did for its initial round of 2015 debates, would likely have prompted criticism about unfair treatment.

Television audiences remain deeply invested in the 2020 race, judging from recent ratings. One of the Miami debates, hosted by NBC and Telemundo in June, drew 18.1 million viewers, a record viewership for a Democratic primary matchup. Last month’s debate in Houston, broadcast by ABC News and Univision, surpassed 14 million viewers, the second-highest audience on record.

The candidates appearing at this month’s Democratic primary debate are:

— Former Vice President Joe Biden

— Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey

— Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana

— Julián Castro, the former housing secretary

— Sen. Kamala Harris of California

— Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota

— Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas

— Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

— Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund investor

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

— Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur

Next Democratic Debate Will Have 12 Candidates Onstage, the Most Ever

It’s official: Biggest. Debate. Ever.

<h1>MIAMI — Technical difficulties are every news producer’s nightmare.</h1>

Especially during a political debate. On live national television. With President Donald Trump watching — and mocking — in real-time.

For NBC News, those fears came true shortly after 10 p.m. Wednesday, as audio problems forced the network to briefly suspend the second hour of its much-hyped Democratic primary debate.

Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, the moderators for the debate’s second half, had taken their seats and were exchanging some easy banter when Todd abruptly flinched and touched his ear as an errant audio feed began playing in the debate hall.

As the candidates looked on with confusion, Todd told the audience that the microphones of the previous moderators — José Díaz-Balart and Savannah Guthrie — were still live. The producers cut to a hasty, and unplanned, commercial break.

It was a brief interruption, but enough to merit the attention of one viewer savvy about the nuances of TV production: Trump, who was monitoring from Air Force One on a trip to Japan. He wrote on Twitter that NBC “should be ashamed of themselves.”

“Truly unprofessional and only worthy of a FAKE NEWS Organization, which they are!” Trump wrote, reviving his usual line of attack on the news media.

Inside the debate hall, Todd joked to the audience that “nobody gets fired.” Producers skipped one of the subsequent planned commercial breaks to make up for the unexpected interruption.

Still, it could have been worse. In a debate between President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976, the microphones cut out for 27 minutes, while the cameras kept rolling.

“For almost the next half‐hour,” The New York Times wrote at the time, “President Ford and Mr. Carter leaned on their lecterns, sipped water, shifted their weight from foot to foot and stared into the darkness of the Walnut Street Theater.”

On Wednesday, NBC had it easier: The proceedings resumed after just a few minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/nbc-technical-difficulties.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

NBC's technical difficulties lead to an awkward pause in the Democratic debate

For NBC News, those fears came true shortly after 10 p.m. Wednesday, as audio problems forced the network to briefly suspend the second hour of its much-hyped Democratic primary debate.

<h1>MIAMI — For all of the cable news chatter, Twitter skirmishes and presidentially bestowed nicknames, this week’s prime-time Democratic debates mark the entry point for millions of Americans who are just now tuning into a contest that will dominate news coverage for the next 16 months.</h1>

It’s also the starting gun for a media frenzy that is poised to outstrip even the coverage of the raucous 2016 campaign. NBC is pre-empting four hours of lucrative weeknight programming for a two-night showcase that could draw 20 million viewers, by far the biggest platform of the primary season so far. Roughly 700 journalists will descend on Miami on Wednesday, a reminder that in the era of Donald Trump, television still has the power to determine candidates’ destinies.

“Network news still assembles the largest marketplace, the largest public square of any form of news,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center for media and society at the University of Southern California.

Crew members Tuesday were completing the high-tech debate stage at the Adrienne Arsht Center, which is dominated by 600 square feet of screens displaying a wraparound image of the White House. Slim Plexiglas lecterns, emblazoned with the presidential seal, stood in a tight semicircle, a concession to the crammed slate of candidates.

“It’s a much thinner design than we’ve done in the past,” Marc Greenstein, the NBC executive in charge of design, said as he gestured toward the lecterns. “We wanted to keep the intimacy, even though we have 10 people.”

More than 200 news outlets — including ones from Australia, China and Japan — are on hand to cover the two debates, though reporters and the candidates will be physically separated: The media headquarters and so-called spin room, where campaign operatives roam, are across the street from the debate hall.

For NBC, keeping things coherent is paramount. Ten politicians mean that cross talk and spotlight-hogging are inevitable. Five network personalities are sharing moderating duties.

“Our focus is trying to maintain decorum as much as we can,” said Rashida Jones, the NBC executive overseeing the event. “A lot of this we’ll have to determine in real time. We don’t want the experience for the viewer to be so chaotic that they can’t hear and absorb what people are saying.”

Then there’s the Trump wild card: The president has already mused about live-tweeting the proceedings. Jones said that NBC did not have a specific contingency plan for that. “Anything that happens before and during the debate, we put through the same news lines of, ‘Is this worth incorporating into the conversation?’ ” she said.

A presidential race carries great public import — but commercial priorities are at play, too. Politics is big business for TV news, an aging medium that has enjoyed bigger viewership and profits since Trump came on the scene. A Pew Research Center study Wednesday found that the average combined prime-time audience of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC increased 8% in 2018 from the previous year. Revenue across the three networks was up 4% in 2018 to about $5.3 billion, the study said.

The heightened interest has changed the calculation for the major broadcast networks that, four years ago, declined to air presidential primary debates on weeknights, because they were reluctant to preempt lucrative entertainment programming. Weeknight debates were mostly relegated to cable news, which draws a smaller audience than national broadcast affiliates.

And unlike in past years, when primary debates were mainly the dominion of political junkies, these first debates have spawned a TV cottage industry that can reach a broader variety of viewers, with late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers offering live analysis after the event.

“Most of presidential campaigning is retail and incremental movement in the polls,” said Mark McKinnon, a veteran political consultant who himself became something of a TV star in the 2016 campaign, when he co-starred in “The Circus,” a Showtime reality series. “Debates are wholesale and an opportunity to really move the dial.”

Television’s importance to modern presidential politics was clear from the first Republican primary debate in August 2015. Trump’s slashing attacks on his rivals and subsequent feud with one of the moderators, Megyn Kelly of Fox News, made for riveting TV. The audience, 24 million people, remains a record for any cable news broadcast.

This week’s Democratic debates are simultaneously airing on MSNBC and the broadcast affiliates of NBC and Telemundo. Executives at NBC have sought to play down expectations for ratings, noting that four hours of debating across two nights is a big commitment for viewers. “It’s not about the numbers for this one,” Jones said. The first Democratic debate in October 2015 on CNN drew 15.3 million viewers.

Indeed, some campaign operatives say live viewership of televised political events can be less important than whether their candidate secures a viral moment. Feisty exchanges — or cringeworthy gaffes — can live for days on cable news talk shows and Twitter GIFs.

Barnstorming in Iowa and South Carolina still matters. But candidates who have embraced media exposure, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have seen firsthand television’s ability to boost name recognition and voter interest.

“What I think is ironically benefiting television is all the ancillary support and interest kindled by social media,” said Charles L. Ponce de Leon, a historian and author of “That’s the Way It Is,” a history of television news. “Rather than competing, social media and legacy television are working synergistically. That in turn compels candidates to appear on legacy television to enhance or correct the previous news cycle.”

The election coverage will also be a major test for individual network journalists, whose role as campaign referees has become more complicated amid Trump’s attacks on the news media and the increased polarization of the news.

A move by Democratic leaders to exclude Fox News from hosting debates turned into a major issue in the party primary. NBC raised some eyebrows by including Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC opinion host, among its moderators this week, though the network noted that she previously moderated an MSNBC debate in February 2016. (The other moderators are Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, Chuck Todd and José Díaz-Balart, of Telemundo.)

Kaplan, of the Norman Lear Center, offered a broader concern: that the collaboration between political parties and financially motivated television executives may not necessarily leave the public better off.

“Why is it that a network gets to monetize our election?” he said. “It’s a financial transaction between democracy and the media industry. Politics has effectively merged with entertainment, because both these entities are in the attention-capture business.”

But will Kaplan be tuning in Wednesday?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/politics/democratic-debate-nbc.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Debates Mark the Starting Line for the Media's Race Through 2020

It’s also the starting gun for a media frenzy that is poised to outstrip even the coverage of the raucous 2016 campaign. NBC is pre-empting four hours of lucrative weeknight programming for a two-night showcase that could draw 20 million viewers, by far the biggest platform of the primary season so far.

Debates mark the starting line for the media's race through 2020

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