Brian's 5 takeaways from May 11 show

If you weren't able to tune in on Sunday, here were some of the moments that really stood out to me:

1. Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas joined me to talk, initially, about insensitive references to Cinco de Mayo on MSNBC and ABC. Then we widened out the conversation, and she made this comment about Univision:

"I know that we have been accused in the past of being biased. We have been accused of doing advocacy journalism, because we do give the point of view of immigrants. And the way that I see it, it's actually adding to a dialogue in this country.

Otherwise, it becomes a monologue where you have some media outlets accusing immigrants of all the ills in this country, and in a very negative light." Here's the rest of the segment.

2. What's been mystifying about CBS's response to the now-discredited "60 Minutes" story about Benghazi is the "lack of an independent, outside review," said Jeff Greenfield, a longtime political analyst and a former correspondent for CBS.

The "60 Minutes" story was back in the news this week because of this New York magazine feature about it.

After the Benghazi story by correspondent Lara Logan unraveled, "CBS charged a veteran producer, a really good guy there, to review this story," Greenfield said. "What that meant was he was judging the work supervised by Jeff Fager, executive producer of '60 Minutes,' and then reporting to the chairman of CBS News, that same Jeff Fager. In other words, his boss. That, to me, was as serious a mistake as the report in the first place. Because there's no transparency there, there is no guarantee of independence."

3. This comment from Greenfield also stood out to me: "I've seen this over and over again, where it's almost impossible to separate media criticism from political criticism."


Joe Hagan, the author of the aforementioned New York magazine feature, also joined me for the conversation - here's the video.



4. Will Rep. Mike Rogers find an audience on radio? He's leaving Congress at the end of the year to host a radio show for Cumulus. Here's what he told me...

…The only messages I hear out there, especially on talk radio, is isolationism bent, and if you don't get 100 percent of what you want, you're not really a conservative and go home. I just think all that is wrong.

I think, as a conservative, we have lost - there's certain programs we wanted to reform, but because we had a strong group that said 'If we don't get 100 percent, then we want nothing,' and guess what we ended up getting? Nothing.



So, I argue that we left lots of savings on the table because of that attitude. Meaning that we could have done so much to reform government, get spending under control, reform some of these programs, but you can't do it if you're not working as a team.



STELTER: But does the talk radio audience want to hear that? 



ROGERS: We're going to find out. I think they are, because the only message that they get - remember, a lot of people have the other message.


5. Later on in the show, I asked Naomi Wolf how she would advise Hillary Clinton to handle the emergence of Monica Lewinsky (via Vanity Fair magazine). Wolf answered:

"I think she should issue a very lovely, gracious statement… and always pivot. It's called hit, bridge, sparkle. You hit. You acknowledge the issue. You bridge to what you really want to talk about, then you sparkle with what her agenda is for the future ahead."

Both Wolf and my other guest, Jeffrey Toobin, agreed that Clinton won't actually do that - watch the discussion here.

Let me know what you thought of the discussions. See you next Sunday at 11 a.m.!

–Brian