On a warm Sunday afternoon last July, a couple of days after he returned home to DC from covering the GOP convention in Milwaukee, Ed O’Keefe, SPA/BA ’02, senior White House and politics correspondent for CBS News, donned a pair of shorts, sneakers, and a t-shirt and took his two young daughters to a movie theater for the 1:40 p.m. showing of Despicable Me 4. 

Suddenly, at 1:44 p.m., O’Keefe’s cell phone vibrated—his producer was calling. O’Keefe didn’t answer, and moments later his producer texted him, saying she wanted to be sure he’d seen the news. O’Keefe checked his phone and saw that President Joe Biden had just tweeted he was dropping out of the presidential race.

“I panicked,” O’Keefe said. “This movie’s just beginning, and the girls are spellbound watching [it]. I said, ‘Girls, we gotta go.’” His 9-year-old responded, “What? Why? I’m not leaving.” O’Keefe said his brief effort to explain was ineffective, so he called his wife, who quickly took an Uber to the theater. “I throw the keys at her, tell her, ‘They’re in the third row on the right.’”

O’Keefe shared his anecdote during the November 19 edition of Coffee with Ken, a thought leadership conversation series hosted by Ken Biberaj, SPA/BA ’05. Biberaj’s previous guests have includes Maryland governor Wes Moore and historian and author Jon Meacham.

The discussion, which was hosted by the School of Communication, was titled The Fourth Estate. In addition to the dozens of people who attended the talk in person, many others watched online.

After he raced home to change, O’Keefe filed a special report from his house and got to the studio by 3 p.m. Later that day, he apologized to his daughters and told them, half-jokingly, “‘I’ll see you in November.’ They got it. It was a great example of [how] you never know in this business where things are gonna take you.”

O’Keefe spent the ensuing four months covering the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.

The outcome of the election wasn’t surprising, O’Keefe said. While Harris’s entrance into the race initially generated a jolt of Democratic enthusiasm, “we knew that a few fundamentals were still true. Being a vice president never guarantees that you’ll get elected president. You can talk to Al Gore about that, you can talk to Walter Mondale about that. You could talk to Richard Nixon the first time. 

“Any time the economy is perceived to be in bad shape—notice what I said there—perceived to be in bad shape—the incumbent party doesn’t do well,” O’Keefe continued. “So those are two big fundamentals working against Kamala Harris. And third, the fact that it was so tight, and he was performing better than he had in 2016 and in 2020 suggested that he had more support.” 

O’Keefe noted that Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory surprised many people across the country—in part “because you’re all bifurcated and probably aren’t opening your eyes wide enough to other sources of information. It probably wouldn’t hurt to get up from your screens now and then and talk to your neighbors and the guy sitting next to you on the plane. To think about and really listen to why it is that certain people feel a certain way.”

O’Keefe noted that Trump is wrongly suggesting he has a mandate. “He has about 49.9 percent of the popular vote as of last night, so he did not win a majority of the population, “O’Keefe said, “[Harris] has about 48.2 [percent], Jill Stein and others take up the rest. As the count continues to come in from California—where they wait for mail-in ballots—sure enough the margin has closed and he’s no longer over 50 percent.” 

O’Keefe also spoke about the dramatic changes in the way people consume information. 

In response to a question from a student who asked about the changing nature of legacy media, O’Keefe said CBS has more subscribers to its Tik Tok channel than it has to viewers of some of the network’s programs. 

“That is consistent with most legacy outfits now,” O’Keefe said. “They may have more followers or more subscribers on YouTube than watch The Today Show. It doesn’t mean that 4.6 million people are watching everything that NBC puts on YouTube.”

Keeping track of viewers has become complicated, O’Keefe said. 

“This is the other problem we have now in this space,” he said. “Subscribers versus viewers—viewers that are measured on broadcast television versus those who watch on digital platforms. They’re doing math, they’re doing algebra, they’re speaking in Sanskrit and they’re speaking in French. There’s no one common language to account for it all.”

Nonetheless, O’Keefe said there is a place for legacy news outfits. 

“I still think there is a world where organizations like CBS or the Washington Post exist and provide information. What we have to figure out is on which platforms, and in which ways are we gonna reach people. And are they, in one way or another, willing to pay for it.”  

O’Keefe said it’s in everyone’s interests to support news agencies. 

“It’s not free,” he said. “It just isn’t.”