"Oh, lookee here to see who's behind the America Prepared Campaign. One Steven Brill. This is gonna be good."
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Just a little side-note. This event continues to intrigue me:
Originally published on January 15, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/155031p-136286c.html
Summit is a real Brill ride
How does Steven Brill manage to maneuver himself into the white-hot center of nearly everything?
The answer is doubtless too grand and full of nuance for a mere gossip column.
Suffice it to say that that on Tuesday night the 53-year-old Brill - journalist, media mogul and national I.D. card entrepreneur - hosted a summit between Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and the major television network news divisions.
Sitting around the dinner table with Ridge at Brill's Fifth Ave. apartment - to hash over terrorism scenarios, government-to-media communications and other pressing issues - were NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings (along with news President David Westin), CBS News President Andrew Heyward, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and CNN's Aaron Brown.
Dan Rather, recovering from facial surgery, couldn't make it, but Brill's wife, Cynthia, and two of their children listened and learned.
"The dinner was a wide-ranging discussion about international terrorism and domestic security," Jennings told me. "The topics included the challenge for the networks if, God forbid, there was ever another catastrophe similar to 9/11."
Fox News' Ailes said: "I think we got a little better understanding of their process and how they make their decisions of what they're going to announce to the public. Anytime you have conversations about homeland security, it's always interesting."
I'm told that Brill, who befriended Ridge while working on his post-9/11 book "After," engineered the off-the-record government-media exchange out of a belief that "thousands of lives can be saved depending on the kind of information that is on television in the first hour after an event."
Last year, Brill founded a nonprofit group to address the challenges of homeland security.
The dinner, said Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, was "one of a number of ongoing efforts to have a continuing dialogue with the media to determine how we can best work together to get timely and accurate information to the American people."