The Ever Elusive War

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So I come in the next day all dressed up at pearls and heels, and she says, why are you dressed that way? I said, well, you said I'm going north and going to Miami, right, She goes, no, You're going to the Jungles today with a camera crew by yourself.

Welcome back to the Journalista Podcast. Cookie is embarking on her first gig for CBS News, the beginning of an era that will put her in the middle of the biggest scandal of the nineteen eighties. But before she starts this new adventure, I want to introduce you to another character in the story, someone you've already met. Actually it's not a person, it's a place at the epicenter of history.

Literally.

Stephen Kenser, former bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote about the significance of the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua back in nineteen eighty seven.

It was in a pyramid shape and stood on top of a hill.

The Somosa family, which ran the country like a private enterprise, also ran the Intercontinental. Of course, the family controlled every business that was really lucrative.

I remember hearing that. In nineteen seventy two, at.

The end of the year, the staff was told, you can't come out today. They're locking everyone in the basement. There's a special guest coming. They sealed off two entire floors, the seventh and eighth floors. Nobody was allowed up there. It finally emerged that the guest was Howard Hughes, that famous, reclusive, eccentric billionaire.

Howard Hughes was worth, by some estimates, as much as four billion dollars, making him the richest man in the world at the time. He made his fortune in engineering, aviation, and massive defense contracts. He even owned a movie studio.

For years, he was fascinated with Hollywood. A rich playboy, dating a bevy of starlets Lana Turner, Catherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner, Hughes signed a personal check for almost twenty four million dollars to buy himself the Rkos Studios. He became a starmaker. Jane Russell was a hit in the Hughes picture of the Outlaw. It was frowned on because of Russell's famous cleavage. Hughes dubbed Gene Harlow the Platinum Blunde and catapulted her to fame in a film called Hell's Angels.

He was also eccentric as hell, a notorious germaphobe, suffering from extreme OCD. It's said that he only cut his nails and hair once a year.

He was interested in making some investments in Nicaragua, and of course the Samosas were thrilled with this. They felt they had hooked a really big fish. He might have even wanted to buy the hotel. He said he wanted to buy the National Airline. But he was in the hotel on that terrible night in December of nineteen seventy two when the earthquake happened.

The Intercontinental is one of the few buildings left standing after the earthquakes.

So the whole city, of course exploded in fire and rubble and dust.

It turned out that Howard Hughes had.

This tremendous phobia about germs, and that's why they had to steal off these floors.

For him and had special ways to purify the air. Suddenly he's surrounded by germs and smoke. He immediately fled the country and never came back.

After the earthquake, the hotel was suddenly everything everywhere all at once.

Yeah, I said it.

Many countries have find themselves in civil conflicts and draw a lot of journalists, develop a kind of a place where the journalists hang out, and that tends to be the place where other people hang out, like intelligence agents and arms dealers and politicians. In a smaller country, it's more likely that they'll be just one such place in Managua as the war they are exploded. That place was

There were diplomatic receptions there at night.

There were all sorts of adventurers in that place, some Nicaraguan, but many from the outside, and everybody who arrived in Nicaragua for the first time would always go there. It really didn't take long before you were immersed in the whole story.

The guests there were such a variety.

You had world leaders like Jimmy Carter, who I spent an hour with you had assassins.

There were movie stars, there were athletes.

Every star who came there came to the Intercontinental. It's where I met Susan Sarandon and Bianca Jagger. It was really at the center of national life. Then, of course, it played a role in the national politics of that era, the very turbulent period in the late seventies and early eighties when there was a revolution, government changed, and since the Intercontinental was the center of everything, it was right at the middle of all these changes. One guy tried to assassinate Somosa.

In his New York Times article, Kinzer writes, a flamboyant rebel named Fernando Chimorro Rapaccioli quietly checked into rooms seven sixteen, closed the door behind him, and began assembling a mortar. He had selected a room that overlooked the military headquarters of President Anastasio Simosa, hoping to assassinate him by firing a rocket into his office. Soldiers immediately converged on the hotel. As employees dived for cover, the soldiers sprayed the building

As the government of Somosa collapsed, many of the cabinet, ministers and generals sent their families out of the country and rather than live at home, since there was no one there or anymore, they moved into the Intercontinental Hotel. So essentially the entire power elite of Samosa, Nicaragua was living in the Intercontinental Hotel in the first months of nineteen seventy nine.

Really, there were no staff there. It was open. We had the run of the place.

It was mostly journalists and Samosa government officials, so there was nobody manning the front desk. There were no food, there were no employees, nobody cleaned the rooms, but somehow they kept the place open. At that time, the hotel really reflected what was happening in the country as a whole.

It was no authority, nobody was in charge.

July nineteenth of seventy nine, Samosa flees Nicaragua and the government falls A.

Few days later.

The Santanistas had won the revolution and they were in Monagua. Now, if they're in Managua, what does that mean. It means they're in the Intercontinental Hotel.

They're all in the lobby and they said, now what And one of them says, well, let's form a government. Why dodn't it be nine? And Dante's each one the head of something. Okay, So you're going to be the head of interior ministry, you're going to be the head of education, you're going to be And that's how they did it, just like that, one afternoon. You're gonna be this, You're gonna be Oh, you're gonna be the head of defense, You're going to be the head of economics.

It was a total clusterfuck. Steven Kinzer has one more quick story to tell about the hotel, and this one will last forever.

I hadn't been in Nicaragua very long.

I was in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel and a lot of reporters are around.

Somebody came along with a sign up sheet.

If you wanted to get on a bus that was going somewhere the next morning to go out and visit someplace where something had happened, you had to sign up and that sheet would be posted a little bit later. So I was going to sign up and then this the young, attractive, tall, very thin woman comes up to me, says, put my name on it too. Can you just add my name on the list when it comes out? And I said sure. And then I turned to me. I said, wait a minute, what is your name? And she said Cookie?

Years later, Kinser wrote this about Cookie's impact on the news during the nineteen eighties and nineties. Cookie hood was the driving force behind the most successful television coverage of Central America that appeared anywhere in the United States. Things are changing in Nicaragua, but they are also changing in the US.

Mister Chairman, mister Vice President, to be this convention, my fellow citizens of this great nation, with a deep awareness of the responsibility conferred by your trust, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Ronald Reagan beats Jimmy Carter in the nineteen eighty election and becomes the fortieth President of the United States. There's a new sheriff in town, and he doesn't like the Sandinistas. I asked Tulane Professor Justin Wolfe about the consequences of this election to the future of Nicaragua.

Ronald Reagan comes into power hardline anti communist American cowboy vision right of a robust conservatism and a robust cold war hawk. Very quickly, the Reagan administration is trying to figure out how to oust the Santinista government, how to frame this as a US Soviet proxy struggle and one

On December one, nineteen eighty one, President Ronald Reagan signs a presidential finding which authorizes covert operations in Nicaragua. The plan is to train and fund what is essentially a terrorist group in Nicaragua known as the Contrasts. So it begins a decade long obsession with a tiny Central American country with an economy one fourth the size of Vermont. When we last saw Cookie, she was standing in front of CBS News producer Carla Ferrell.

She says, you got the job.

I need you to come in tomorrow and you're going up north. I thought she was sending me to Miami. So I come in the next day all dressed up in pearls and heels, and she says, why are you dressed that way? I said, well, you set up going north and going to Miami, right. She goes, no, You're going to the Jungles today with the camera crew by yourself. And I could see the camera crew off to the side and they're laughing. They're just enjoyed the shit about this. I said, Okay, give me five minutes.

I asked Carlo why she hired Cookie and what made her special.

Cookie was so sociable, so tenacious, she was just so full of life. She had an amazing personality, gregarious, spicty when she needed to be, diplomatic when she needed to be She always had the personality, the kind that could break through the camera. She was wonderful, whether it was in social situations or in work situations, to help bring people together. From the beginning. Impressed me as someone who would always work hard to get things done.

Thank goodness.

I had a change of clothes put on the tennis shoes to jeans, and everything was introduced to the Mexican Cammebra crew, him and Roberto. Of course they're looking at me also like does she know what she's doing? But at the same time, she really is pretty. You know, this could be fun. Carla said goodbye, and we went downstairs and blowed it up into the jeep. They're assuming that I know what I'm doing. They are assuming that

I had not a clue.

Did you get any instruction from Carla what you were looking for or anything?

None?

Carla thought I was a journalist too. Job was you're a fixer. We need you to translate, We need you, you know, to help the crews whenever they need to be helped.

That was it. Bye.

So Cookie is hired as a fixer and interpreter for CBS News. War is Hell. Cookie is about to find out what it really looks like. We'll be right back, Welcome back. Cookie sets off on her next great adventure working for CBS freaking News. She has no idea what she's doing, but how hard can it be? At least she's not running from the dea with a couple of tons of cocaine. Reality is about to punch her in the face.

As we're driving to the Jungles to look for the war. We're getting to know each other and they're liking me and I'm liking them. We could see that it was going to work between us, the three of us. So I'm asking questions. They're telling me, this is what we're gonna do.

We're gonna go here.

At that point, you know, we need you to help us with the equipment, and I'm like, no sweat, I can carry my own weight.

I Am not going to be a burden to you guys.

But obviously I'm going on this great adventure, which I think is if I'm great adventure, I have literally no idea what I'm getting into. So we proceed to drive and drive and drive.

And we're getting deeper into the jungle.

I'm being told, you know, Cookie, sometimes it's not so easy for us to find what we're looking for.

We've actually called this war the ever elusive war.

We can hear it, we just have a hard time finding it. And I said, hey, no sweat, we'll find it. As we we got in deeper and deeper, the camera crew got less funny, less upbeat. They got very serious, and you know, they said, these are certain things that you're gonna have to know.

We tell you to be quiet. Be quiet when we tell you to.

Hit the ground, hit the ground, win in doubt, just do what we do.

So hit the ground, meaning in case you're getting shot at, in case there's danger, in case we.

Run into the enemy. Whatever we do, you do it. Whatever we whisper it to you to do, you do it.

Did they give you any positive Does your mind start racing about what you're getting into?

Well, I'm still thinking, great adventure, How hard can this be? I can follow instructions. I still really didn't have a clue. Even if I would have been told you're going into a war. You're going to see dead people. Even if I had been told that, it's one thing to be told it, it's another thing to actually see it and live through it.

And that happened, And that's what happened.

We could hear some fighting, we could hear weapons, we could hear shots, but we.

Knew that it was far away.

At one point we got out of the g to cover some ground see what we could find. I know what gunfire sounds like, but what struck me is I kept hearing yelling like one side yelling to the other side. Come get me, you son of a bitch. No, you come get me, you son of a bitch. Oi in abuta Benita Paraka to mother day Benita off Paraka.

You come here, No fuck your mother, you come here. You know, trash talk, and.

It all sounded the same, same accent, same lingo, same street talk. And that's when I first started to realize, Wait, this is a civil war.

This is brother fighting brother.

Fire stops, there's an eerie quiet. Cookie and her crew make their way toward the battle scene.

All of a sudden, we could see ahead of us what looked like a big pile of something.

I didn't know what it was. Obviously.

I think the crew knew what it was. They were very seasoned war journalists. It was a pile of dead bodies. I've seen dead people before, but not like that. I was not prepared for that. It was at that moment I started to lose a little of my faith.

Describe what you saw.

Men, women, children, all in a pile. Looked like civilians to me, I didn't see soldiers. The emotions just like, fuck, what have I gotten myself into here? The Mexicans at that point said to me when they saw that, I was kind of shocked at what I was seeing. This is your first but it's not going to be your last time seeing what you're seeing right now.

And honestly, this is nothing.

Compared to what you're going to see in the future if you last with us, if you stay with us, So get ready because this is what it's all about. This really is war, This really is dead people, this really is massacres.

Am I going to be able to pull this off? Fuck? Yeah, I could pull this.

Off for Cookie. It was first blood, but it wouldn't be the last. Back in the CBS office, there was another kind of war.

So I was hired to sort of be a grunt because the guy that was running the office, his name was Martin Barretto, was a nice guy. I grew up with him. He was part of the Oligark families. But he didn't like to get his hands dirty, and so he would have all these little minions to do all his dirty work, you know, the drivers, the fixers, which was what I became.

And then he wanted me to go with the camera.

Crews, with or without a correspondent and just go and get material for stories. Martine was a very disagreeable person. You could be on good terms with the correspondents and the producers, but if the crews and the drivers dislike you, you've got a problem because those are the people that are going to get you the story.

And if they don't like you, then you're up shit's creek.

You've got nothing to offer the correspondent or the producer.

Or the editor.

Well when did it change?

Larry Doyle comes to town.

He was the gentleman that we spoke about at the party who offered.

Me the job.

We went out into the boon docs and you know, we just got along famously. I remember that we stopped in some you know, shack to get something to eat. Larry said, well, what's on the menu, and there was no menu. The lady said, it's a roscomboyo chicken and rice. Next thing, you know, we hear the chicken being killed, you know, and plucked and to make the lunch. And then the jukebox wasn't working, and so I went to it and I kicked it. Larry Doyle screams out, you

Larry Doyle was a force of nature and he always got what he wanted.

Martine was becoming less interested in getting the job done, more interested in entertaining and you know, partying in a different way than I partied.

So everybody's pitching about Martine.

Yeah, well, bitching or complaining or just making an observation, because not everybody had a problem with him. They wanted more of Cookie and less of Martine. Sure we could have Cookie out in the jungle, but we also want to deal with Cookie directly in the offices at the Inner Collin and Larry was also behind my back and obviously behind Martine's back, was making sure that Martine was on his way out. And when he started to get

I learned from them too.

Well, let's talk a little bit about Larry. Now.

From what I understand, Larry had quite a colorful career already.

He had been in Vietnam.

Yes, and he had made quite a name for himself as a war correspondent.

Yes, and he was the epitome of a war correspondent. He didn't know the word danger. He just plowed through anything with anybody.

You didn't give a shit about the rules.

Nothing, And CBS knew that he was breaking rules, but they didn't care because he always brought home the story.

In researching Larry, he gets fired all the time, all the time, but they'd always bring him back and always ask.

For him to come back because he was the epitome of a war correspondent.

So would you say that he taught you what?

You know?

He took me under his wing.

He would not do a story unless I was right there with him, and Larry was one of many that would not go to cover any story unless I was with them.

He taught me everything, he knew everything.

Being a woman at that time, especially being a war correspondent, you had to be one of the guys. You couldn't be frail, you couldn't be a chick. You just had to be one of the guys. And that didn't just mean carrying your own weight, being able to carry the equipment it meant hiking up through jungles, hiking up mountains just meant being one.

Of the guys.

Was there sexual harassment.

I'm gonna say yes to that, but at the time I didn't know that that's what that was.

I grew up with five brothers.

I was always you were harassed your whole life.

I was harassed my whole life. And I was always more of a guy than a girl.

You know.

I was a tomboy and that comes, you know, from my father dynamic. I always had to prove that I could do anything as well as or better than any man.

Were you intimidating to some of these guys.

Oh oh yes, oh yes, and on any level, not just as a correspondent, but as a female. Yes, I was quite overwhelming. But I've always been that way, so it wasn't anything new for me. It was something brand new for humble soldiers that have never experienced strong women.

I remember going.

Through roadblocks getting out of the jeep wearing a little wife beater T shirt, no bra walkmen, being stopped by the soldiers and they'd say, you can't go past this roadblock, and I would bullshit my way, saying, oh, I've got orders from the Minister of Interior, and you don't want to call him because if you call him, you're gonna get in trouble.

You might as well just let me through.

And you know what, here you hold on to my walkman, here's some American cigarettes.

Will be back.

I could get in and out of any roadblock. Larry loved that. Larry loved it. He would just sit back and laugh. He would let me do all the work. He didn't have to do all the work anymore.

Yeah, yeah, wow, man, amazing.

It was fun.

Okay, so this is happening, and you see your star rising in terms of getting in on the stories, people wanting to work with you. You right, demanding de Manning to work with you. When does it change from that to hey, I'm running this show now?

Fairly quickly, within a year, I had camera crews that the only way they would come is if I was there. There would always be a camera crew in residence, different ones, but they would come and stay for six weeks, two months.

Then they'd rotate them. But none of these crews wanted to come in unless.

I was there because if you weren't there, who would they go with? Exactly Cookie was in charge. Now if they only knew who was running the news in Nicaragua. But her future would be shaped by two very important stories, one a tragedy and one a triumph.

We'll be right.

Back, Welcome back. Cookie may be in charge, but this job is about to get a lot harder. Just another day looking for the ever elusive war. This time she's going to find it, and something terrible has happened.

Where are you?

Deep in the jungles of Nicaragua, in the middle.

Of nowhere, a little farming town.

Or no, not even a town. You wouldn't even call it a village. It was that remote.

No paved streets, all dirt roads, shacks, shanties.

You just rolled into the aftermath of a horrible crime.

What did you see?

Well, I saw dead civilians, some dead soldiers, but a lot of civilians, children massacred, women massacred like that famous bat Vietnam.

Melai Asafia Themese official. The military chief of Kueng Nai Province today denied charges that American soldiers on the ground executed several hundred villagers in March of nineteen sixty eight. The province chief said the civilians died in air and artillery strikes. That leveled the village after a number of Americans had been killed there by Vietcong snipers. The villager's

It was one of the darkest days of the Vietnam War. More than five hundred unarmed civilians were killed, some were raped and mutilated. Twenty six soldiers were charged, but only thee tenant, William Cally Junior, was convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison, but spent only three and a half years under house arrest. His sentence was commuted by President Nixon. The story prompted worldwide outrage, especially in America, and caused the tide of popular opinion to turn against

People that didn't deserve to die or had nothing to do with it.

They were just all killed.

The concures were ruthless though, even though some were Nicaragua and some were from Honduras, they were trained by the CIA.

CIA. Don't play.

The women are wailing, their children have been killed, their husbands have been killed. I'm told, go record them wailing and crying. Wait, how can I just start filming and recording these women wailing without first comforting them?

So I put down the microphone.

I'd comfort them a little bit, you know, hog them it's going to be okay, and then ask them permission, can I record you?

So you basically just cried with them.

I didn't cry, but I comforted them. Obviously, I was crying and dying on the inside.

The story played on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

David Dick in Nicaragua reports tonight on a tragedy of war, a massacre yesterday that has changed one village forever.

Some of the bodies from the massacre began arriving here early this morning. In Hinotega, about one hundred miles south of the Honduran border, a mother grieved for her seventeen year old son. She said he was the only one of her children who had not left her, but now he was gone. A young woman nineteen years old lost her husband. He was also nineteen. She is pregnant. Her child will be born in December. She said, this is all I have left of him.

As a journalist, you're supposed to remain neutral. You're supposed to be objective. You're not supposed to integrate yourself into the story. And I remember being pulled aside several times, not just on that trip, but throughout my first years of my career.

You cannot do that. You have to be objective. And I said, look, the moment I can't.

Feel the story, feel emotional about the story, or help these people.

I'm out.

So CBS didn't want to lose me, so they'd give me a little rope, and then that little bit of rope became more rope and more rope, and finally they knew my methods. My stories were always exclusives. They always got on the air, whereas the other networks they wouldn't get exclusives. Their stories may not lead on the evening news, but mine always did.

When you saw this and you had this experience, did that change you, Did that make you look at the world differently.

I just rolled with the punches I've always throughout that whole career of mine. I just was rolling with it because I knew that the moment I no longer felt anything, and that I could.

Just cover a story, just get the story, go in and.

Go out, then I knew it would be over for me as a human being. So the fact that I was feeling for these people and that the emotions were coming, I was dying on the inside and knowing that my own country.

Was doing this and this is one place, one place, God knows what's going on.

And my Nicaraguan side felt for these people, and then my US side is so angry.

I'm a part of that.

And the one thing about the Nicaraguans, the poor, the humble, the ones that were the victims of war, never held it against us that we were American. Obviously because I'm speaking Spanish like they do, they think I'm one of them. But I'm with camera crews that are Americans, I'm speaking English. They never once held it against us. Oh, your country's the one that's do it.

Never.

That says a lot about the people.

Never. Never.

They would feed us if we were hungry, they would give us something to drink from their meager shacks. If we were thirsty, they would give us their.

Bed that was on a floor.

The spirit was just overpowering, overwhelming to me. What I did come to realize, no matter where war is in the world, no matter where war is in history, the people that get fucked, or the poor people, whether it be because they're victims or they're massacred, or because they're sent to the front line, they're always the ones that get fucked.

As the Contra war gathers momentum, the US gets deeper and deeper into the quagmire of Central America. But so are the Russians sending advisors, arms, and economic support. The Sandinistas deny it. But Cooking and the journalists covering the war or looking for the smoking gun, tell me about that first big scoop.

Well, we did a lot of little stories, things that we weren't expecting to find. But then there came some rumors that the Sandinistas were getting help from the Russians, from the Cubans, from a rand from anybody that the US didn't like.

From what I read, the Nicaragua was really locked down. So if they didn't want you to see something it was very hard to see.

It is that true?

That is correct.

For instance, we'd heard that they were possibly some Russian ships at the port of Corinto. I remember myself, the crew and maybe some other journalists driving to Corinto to see what was going on, because we had also heard about possibly these ports having been mined by the US, which is pretty much against the Geneva Convention you can't put mines in foreign ports.

According to The Washington Post, the CIA played a direct role in the laying of underwater mines in Nicaraguan ports, damaging at least eight ships. The CIA did this without the approval of Congressional intelligence committees, as the law required, eventually leading to Congress cutting off funding for the contrast.

That sort of sets up the story. And I remember we tried to get to the port and we weren't allowed even within a mile of it.

People are being turned back.

One of the few times I couldn't talk myself into getting through.

Nicaragua had journalists from.

All over the world, not just regular journalists like myself and networks and you know, ap UPI and photographers, but also there were journalists from countries that were mortal enemies of the us. The camaraderie between all journalists, no matter where they were from, was the same. We're all in this together. So I had become friends with some Cuban nationals from the island, which is different from Cuban Americans from Miami. This one particular guy and I we really

To get proof of.

Showed it to Carla, who was in town at that particular time, and I said, you're not going to believe this, but I've got Cuban TV footage of the proof that there's a Russian ship in port, and she couldn't believe it, and the crew couldn't believe it, So sure enough we put it in and there it was.

The story played on the CBS evening News that very night.

A US naval battlegroup headed by the carrier Ranger has been maneuvering off Nicaragua's west coast for fourteen days. This had been officially described repeatedly as routine exercises. Today, the Pentagon confirmed a warship confrontation with the Soviet Crater. One of the destroyers escorting the Ranger Ute questioned the Russian cargo ship in international waters, then followed it to Nicaragua's twelve mile territorial limit.

The Alexander Uljanov, shown passing through the Panama Canal last week on its way to Nicaragua, has been the object of much attention since President Reagan said it was carrying helicopters and other military equipment. Coarnto is this country's major port city. These scenes from the purchased videotape show East German and Soviet vessels at the main pier. Again, only non military cargo was seen, despite the denials. It's clear the Nicaraguan army has lots of Soviet military hardware.

How it gets here is less clear.

Richard Wagner, CBS News, Managua.

The Nicaraguan government denied it, of course, but for the first time the US had proof that the Russians were supporting the Sandinistas. It was huge. The Managua CBS office received a telex the next day. It read clean Kill, Congratulations, thanks courage, signed by SEB News icon Dan Rather.

That was very satisfying and.

What did it tell you about yourself?

What I felt initially was I hope nobody thinks I got this story because I slept with the guy.

That's not what happened.

But you did sleep with him.

But I did sleep.

With him, But I never dreamed that he was going to throw this in my laugh. And I think he kind of threw it in my lap because I had kind of, you know, dumped it. It was one of my first major scoops. And then, of course the Dan Rather congratulatory telex was just icing.

On the cave. I knew at that moment that I had made It's.

Kind of a validation of the relationships that you.

Create and that even though I wasn't quite sure if I was a journalist, everyone else around me was damn sure that I was.

So Cookie finds a smoking gun an esta a bona fides, But in war sometimes that gun is shooting at you. Next time on Journalista.

All I know is that we were up in the air. I heard three somethings. I looked at one soldier and I said, that's not a.

Good sound, is it? And he went white and he said, no, We're going down. What do you mean We're going down?

The Journalista podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood. Narrated by Steven Esteb, Produced by Sean J.

Donnelly.

Executive producers Jason Wagensback, Roy Laughlin and Ellen k iHeart. Executive producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Esteb. Music by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Steven Tanti, Sound mixing by Jesse Solan Snyder. Special guest Stephen Kinzer Tulain history Professor Justin Wolfe, Carla Ferrell. Special thanks to Esplanade Studios, The Ranch Studios, Jason Gerwitz, Kyle Frederick, Zach Slaff. This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio,