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Water Park Safety Under Scrutiny After Child Dies; Clinton Challenges Trump By Accepting All Three Debates; Report: Ex-Fox News Chief Spent Millions To Spy On Enemies; Will Ailes Deputies Be Fired Over Alleged Misuse Of Fox Funds?; All Eyes On Today's Women's Gymnastics Team Final; Simone Biles Expected To Dominate At Olympics. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired August 09, 2016 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[08:30:10] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: We have new details this morning about how 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was killed on a water slide at a Kansas theme park on Sunday. Kansas City police say the boy died from a fatal neck injury while riding the Verruckt water slide, which is the tallest in the world. This morning, "The Kansas City Star" is reporting the state had not inspected this water slide since it opened in 2014.

I want to bring in Deborah Hersman. She is the President of the National Safety Council and former NTSB chairman. You know about this, obviously. You may not be surprised to learn that this security or this observation of the safety of this slide happened really infrequently and the last time was a couple of years ago. But I think a lot of people are. Tell us, what is going on here and what is the state of regulation of slides like this, rides like this?

DEBORAH HERSMAN, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL: I think there's still a lot of information. It's early in the investigation. We're going to find out more details as the work goes on, and so we want to let the investigative authorities do some of that. But what we do know about water parks is, there is very little federal oversight or regulations. They're not required to report their injuries. And that much of this is handled at the state and local level. And so there can be a patchwork system across the United States with respect to oversight.

KEILAR: Do you think that this could have been an oversight problem?

HERSMAN: Well, I think it's still very early to understand what happened in this specific event. But I think there is absolutely the opportunity, with an event like this, for everyone to take a step back and say, what's going on? What do we need to do better? How do we make sure that everyone coming to water parks are safe? When they arrive at that water park, they're hoping for a fun day but they're certainly expecting a safe ride. How do we make sure that that happens every time with every customer?

KEILAR: Well, little Caleb Schwab and so many of the people who have gone on this water slide were looking for a thrill. Obviously, this is a bit of a daredevil water slide. I just want to let our viewers know just how tall it is. It's 168 feet. That, if you compare it to Niagara Falls, is even taller by a foot. The Statue of Liberty; it's 111.5 feet. So this is a very tall drop, and that second bend that you see sort of in the middle of the slide is where we understand this accident happened. We know that he had a neck injury. Does this tell you anything about what may have happened?

HERSMAN: No, it really doesn't give us any information at this point. We need to understand where the people were seated in the vehicle. I think there's just a lot of work that the investigators need to do. They need to inspect restraints, they need to identify whether or not the slide was working properly at the time. The whole thing, the mechanics, the design, whether it performed as designed.

There's a lot to understand here and I think it's really important for anyone, when they go to a water park, to make sure that they look out for their own safety. If they see something, they should say something. If something doesn't look right, if something gives you concern, really speak up. Don't take a ride if you're not comfortable and don't force anyone to take a ride if they don't want to take one.

KEILAR: But when you look at the height of this, do you think that some of these rides are getting too extreme?

HERSMAN: I think there's always going to be an interest in whatever we do to try to do something taller or faster or higher. And so some of these rides are extreme. People are doing things out in nature that's extreme. But what we need to do when we have paying customers coming into a park, they're expecting to have a safe ride. We need to make sure that all of the work on the design, maintenance, and oversight and inspection, is done so that there is a safe ride for everyone, and make sure that if there are minimum requirements, whether they're height, weight, or age, that those are also observed every time as well.

KEILAR: And that's really the point here, because we understand that two to three riders need to be strapped into this raft, and altogether it needs to weigh 400 to 500 pounds. So there's this weight requirement, there's a height requirement of 54 inches tall. We don't know if Caleb met that requirement. But under Kansas law, obviously, this is something that is supposed to be adhered to. How good do you think these parks are and just the individuals who are operating these rides are at making sure these requirements are met?

[08:34:55] HERSMAN: So there are different issues here. There are probably very few laws that actually apply to water parks. Most of it's going to be internal oversight and regulation at the park. They're going to set those standards based on the design features of the ride. But it's also up to the park to have compliance with those, certainly. I've been to amusement parks where they have a yardstick and they measure my kids. But it's also, as consumers, we want to make sure that we understand that those limitations are there for a reason. And you really don't want to try to skate under the rules. You really want to comply with those rules. And so, whether you're taking a helicopter ride and they need to do weight and balance, you need to be honest about your weight. When you're taking rides because there's a safety factor that's built in. And so height, weight, age restriction, and medical restrictions, too, are important to disclose those. Don't disregard those signs.

KEILAR: And you are right, Deborah. Those are guidelines, certainly for the weight and the height -- Kansas law has to do about the inspections of these so-called permanent rides like this one should be inspected once a year. We'll be seeing, of course, if that changes, certainly in Kansas and other places. Deborah Hersman, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. Chris --

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Brianna, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Another big name accuser coming forward saying Roger Ailes sexually harassed her at Fox News. New allegations about how the former Fox News chief used company money to target his enemies. Is there anything to these allegations? We'll discuss it next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:40:24] CUOMO: Hillary Clinton challenging Donald Trump by accepting all three presidential debates, calling him up, saying, come on, Don. Let's get it on. Let's discuss this and other big breaking situations in the media business. We've got CNN Senior Media Correspondent, host of reliable sources, Brian Stelter and CNN media analyst, Bill Carter. Of course, I'm talking about the developments at Fox News, the mud getting thicker and thicker there, but let's start with this.

Conventional wisdom would have said, Brian, Trump is going to want these debates. He's going to want to get it on every chance he can, and boy, will this be a test of how he deals with someone as seasoned as Clinton, a woman in Clinton, and then she turns the tables. What's the plus minus?

BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Yes, the biggest stage for the biggest reality TV star. But right now, Trump is the one who's objecting to some of the debate dates. Last night, the Clinton campaign came out and said, we accept. We're going to be there. It's up to you, Donald Trump. Are you going to show up? This statement was interesting because they haven't even been invited yet. They're not going to be invited officially to the debates for a while. The Clinton campaign wants to make this a winning issue. Wants to challenge Donald Trump. Maybe he'll take the bait, we'll see.

KEILLAR: How much is at stake here? A lot.

BILL CARTER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST: A lot. I mean, he's losing. Usually, the loser really wants the debate and the winner, the person ahead is saying, well, I don't need the debate. This is sort of the reverse. I think Trump's position was, I'm going to make her conform to what I do. If I can get her to switch the dates, I look more powerful. Now she's saying, these are the dates, I'm going. She shifted the power.

CUOMO: But how about the, be careful what you wish for? What do you see as the plus minus of these two on the stage together?

STELTER: At a debate, anything can happen. And Donald Trump knows television better than anybody alive, even better than Hillary Clinton. So if anybody can turn a campaign around with a debate moment, it would be him.

CARTER: You would think. But also, he did not do very well -- he didn't want to debate one on one with the Republicans. I think he basically sort of like uses a lot of verbiage and aggression in his debates, not a lot of facts, and she's strong on that.

CUOMO: Dangerous. Dangerous. Do you remember the Rick Lazio moment with Hillary Clinton? Lazio was doing well, he was gaining, he had her on the ropes on a particular issue, and he walks across the stage and hands her these papers that she had said -- and she looked -- it was abrupt, it was off putting. And boy, did his numbers tank after that, because it was seen that he had intimidated a woman on stage.

CARTER: Yes. And that's all Donald can do is attack her. The optics of that could be really risky.

KEILLAR: Or even President Obama when he had said, you're likable enough, Hillary. That was something that was really seen as kind of poking her in the eye.

STELTER: Right. So we'll see if we even get to that point. I think there's a lot of people in the industry that have doubts about whether Trump is going to show up. I'd be shocked if he didn't, but --

CARTER: He's this far behind, he has to.

CUOMO: You want to temper that a little bit, Bill. The battleground states are tight -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida. Could be a little deceptive when we see this big gap opening up nationally, but maybe it's over-weighted the states where she has a clear advantage. I think this race is going to be a little closer than they think right now.

KEILLAR: I want to talk about what we've been seeing going on at Fox News. Obviously Roger Ailes stepping aside, many allegations of harassment. And then some new information that we're getting about how just sort of he wielded his power and also the money of the organization. What do you make of this?

STELTER: What we're seeing is drip, drip, drip. The Murdochs who run Fox -- they had this phone hacking scandal in Britain ten years ago. It revealed a lot about the corporate culture that would allow illegal activities. Well, now we're seeing that in the United States with Fox News. Ailes has denied these allegations but they are piling up. Even yesterday, a new accuser coming forward, Andrea Tantaros, who was a host of a show on Fox until a few months ago. She says she was sexually harassed. We've heard more than a dozen women at this point.

CARTER: That's the other thing, that he's tapping his own employees. They were afraid they were all being wiretapped, and they were afraid if they ever said anything against the company, they would be attacked in the PR armada that he had to go after people.

CUOMO: At this point, we've seen no proof of any of these. Harassment is a difficult thing to cover because legally, as a lawyer, my mind goes at this one way. I better see some proof, because these allegations are crushing this guy's reputation. But then in the media, it's seen, are you blaming the victims of some type of sexual assault, although nobody's actually claimed that, it's just harassment. The money stuff, this espionage or whatever you want to call it, that's easier for us to cover. That's either there or it isn't. Any proof?

STELTER: In terms of the money, (inaudible) Gabriel Sherman (ph) reporting from "New York Magazine" (ph), he's been a leader on this story. He wrote a book about Roger Ailes a number of years ago. A lot of what he's reporting I think reporters have suspected for a while. I'll give you an example.

[08:45:06] About ten years ago, I had a crush on a woman at Fox News. She was a low level staffer. I was in college at the time. So I was going out on what I thought were dates. I thought these were dates; these were not dates. She was actually reporting back to Fox News about me. She was reporting back about what I thought of her and about CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Because I was a reporter on the beat, they were actually spying on me that way. Now, I didn't think that was a big deal at the time. I thought it was the way Fox operates. Fox is a political organization. But now we know they were actually sending out private investigators. They were tailing other reporters.

CARTER: We new, covering Fox, you had to deal with that. You'd get a call from them saying, you better be right on this story, or the implication was, we'll dig into your past, we'll dig into your private life.

STELTER: So we sort of knew, but now we know much, much more because of these reports like in Gabriel Sherman (ph) saying that money, that Ailes was using Fox News money for his own private spending.

CARTER: Yes. Operatives that weren't really on the staff but were being paid -- there's a lot of questions of what --

KEILLER: What's really the fallout? What happened?

CARTER: I think the question then becomes, who else knew it and what did the Murdochs do about it? Are they going to remove wholesale people there, the top lawyer, the second in command? Are they all going to be on the carpet because of this? And by the way, when you mentioned proof, talking about some of these women have tapes supposedly of conversations with Ailes. If that ever came out --

CUOMO: But I'm just saying, it's tricky.

STELTER: It is.

CUOMO: Obviously we always want to get everything right, but this is tricky because unlike an assault situation, this is going to be something where, well, this dynamic has to be suggestive of certain principles at play. There has to be this environment. There has to be this dialogue between them that is openly harassing and not just conveniently so at a certain point. Because then you wind up over- weighting all of these allegations and threatening a man's reputation, who's taken a long time to build one. STELTER: I would just note that the Murdochs did make a decision

rather quickly to force him out, and they know more than we know.

CUOMO: But you had said some of your reporting early on was that they wanted him out, and maybe this gave them a reason to push him.

STELTER: That's the other piece of it. And this is always a complicated dynamic --

CUOMO: OK, you always want to defer to victims, but we've got to get this right because there's a lot in play.

STELTER: I keep asking Ailes' spokespeople and lawyers for comment, and at this point, they've actually stopped replying. They say they deny the allegations, but they're not going after this as forcefully as they could, and that may reveal something as well.

CARTER: And there are settlement talks in the works. So that tends to make me think they're going to solve it that way.

KEILLAR: There's much more to this story. Bill, Brian, thank you to both of you.

Ahead, the U.S. women's gymnastics team, they're going for gold in Rio. It's such a big day there. We'll have a preview. We're going to talk as well with legendary gymnast Shannon Miller, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:51:25] KEILLAR: Today, a highly anticipated event in Rio, the women's gymnastics team final. And much of the focus is going to be on a 19-year-old, the phenom Simone Biles. And joining us now from Rio is the most decorated gymnast in American history, seven time Olympic medalist, Shannon Miller, to talk about this. You have an amazing front row seat to this today, Shannon. And I want to talk you just about -- I think especially when it comes to gymnastics, we look at so much pressure on the shoulders of young women who are 16, 17, 18, 19. But first, just tell us what it's like being there in Rio and what your expectation is for today.

SHANNON MILLER, MOST DECORATED U.S. GYMNAST IN HISTORY: Well, it is. It couldn't be more beautiful here in Rio. Everyone's having a great time. I think the theme of this Olympics is one big party and it's absolutely contagious. So it's a lot of fun to be here, and gymnastics has been rocking and rolling. The women, of course, coming out the first night of qualification, blowing the competition away by ten points, which is unheard of in the sport of gymnastics. And I think tonight is just going to be a special night not only for everyone to see what amazing gymnastics looks like for the U.S. team, but really across the world, because we have some great international athletes that will be competing as well. I don't think we have much anxiety about whether or not the U.S. is going to take home gold. It's kind of a race for silver at this point, but there's still great gymnastics to be seen.

KEILLAR: We heard from the top Russian gymnast who said, look, the U.S. team is unbeatable. So they're really competing for second place at this point, right?

MILLER: Yes. And I think every -- I think every athlete -- as a gymnast, you appreciate over great gymnastics. So I don't think it's any hard feelings. It's just, OK, hey, they're going to win, but let's keep trying, let's get on the podium. And we've got Russia, China, Great Britain, and even Brazil vying for a position on that second or third spot on the podium. And if Brazil makes it onto the podium, this place is going to go crazy.

KEILLAR: I want to talk to you about some of that pressure and I want to show some of the pictures of you in 1996, because these are images that everyone will remember. You won gold on the balance beam, an amazing routine that you did. I mean, it looked just perfect. I went back and watched it again today. But you go into a games like this, even in this case where this team is favored, and you have the weight of the world on you. You're on magazine covers. Everyone says you are the one who's going to win. What is that like? I can't even imagine.

MILLER: You know, I think when you kind of grow up with it, you grow up competing, it is something you're used to. You're used to the pressure. Because mostly there's no one that can put more pressure on you than you put on yourself. And so I think for these athletes, it's not just about winning a medal. It's about going out and representing their country on the world stage. It's what they've trained for for so long. So I think that's what they want to do. Regardless, they're likely going to win a gold medal. But regardless, they want to go out and just show the world what they can do.

KEILLAR: Tell us about Simone Biles. You've been watching her. Obviously you come at this with a unique perspective, not just when it comes to prowess in gymnastics but just the mental game that goes along with it. There's so much hype around her, but what we hear from so many people is, it's not hype, it's the real deal.

MILLER: It's the real deal, absolutely. This is not hype. It is amazing what she is able to do. And I think a lot of us in the know that have done this for so many years and been in the thick of things, we look at her and we just kind of say, how? How does she do that? It's incredible the difficulty she has but also the consistency that she has.

[08:55:06] But I think what draws you to Simone Biles is that infectious smile, her personality. She's friends with everyone. And I just love that she's able to go out and do gymnastics and keep it fun. And I think that's what shines through in her performance

KEILLAR: And real quick, just before I let you go, Shannon, what is it, though, about her? Some people say it's her adventurousness, that she's attempting things other people aren't doing?

MILLER: Absolutely. So, a lot of those skills that you see, there's one on floor (ph) that's names after her, but she's attempting skills that we've only seen the men compete, oftentimes, and she's doing them with ease. And I was talking with some friends of mine who are also in the Olympics previously last night. And she just goes and does this floor routine like it's a walk in the park, while we're like dying at the end, gasping for breath, our legs are about to give out, and she's walking the park like, OK, what's next? Let's go.

KEILLAR: It really is amazing. Shannon, we would love to have you back. This is obviously a big time today for your sport and also for the country. Thanks for joining us. Shannon Miller.

"NEWSROOM" with Carol Costello is picking up after this quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now on the "NEWSROOM", Donald Trump tries to reboot.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I want to jump start America. It won't even be that hard.

COSTELLO: While more Republicans revolt. But if they're not with him --