Life on Earth Two

like dictator, Nazi, you know, authoritarian in the making. He was caught on a hot mic saying, you know, Kim Jong UN's people like when he talks, like they listen, And that's what I want. He's a fucking dictator, a pariah on the world stage. But all you want is absolute fucking power and people kissing your ring and your feet, and you being thought of as the most intelligent, the best looking, the thinnest, the most athletic, right genius that

ever walked the face of this earth. Except guess what, that would be a fucking lie, because for the rest of us that live on Earth two, that's not where we are. I'm calling it Earth two now, folks, because you know, I know that they'll say Earth one is the original Earth. Earth two. No, because I want to get the fuck I want them to have Earth one. Do you know what I'm saying. I want to be somewhere else because it is just getting to be so fucking much to take in, and the media is once

again failing, failing, failing. I see headlines like, oh, Donald Trump, you know, uh speaks out of turn or goes off script. No, you fucking idiots, He's not going off script. Being an authoritarian is the script, that's the play, and to not call it out, to not say what it is, is fucking malpractice. I just I'm beside myself. I'm beside myself.

It doesn't make any sense. It really doesn't. Continuing on the theme of Donald Trump and just, you know, not making any sense, is that, you know, basically he can't come up with the money that uh Tis James was awarded in the New York fraud case. He needs in order to be able to appeal the decision of four hundred and I believe fifty four million dollars. In order to appeal that you have to post the bond for

that exact amount of money. Well, if you're keeping track at home, he already posted a bond of ninety one point whatever million dollars for the Egene Carroll case to appeal that, so that she wouldn't get that money, right, But he can't come up with the four hundred and fifty four million, and you sure as fuck can't go to the same people. And so his attorneys are saying, well, you know, they'd they've faced some considerable hurdles. Yeah, those hurdles are a whole bunch of no's. You know why,

because he's not fucking good for it. So how is it that Donald Trump's attorneys at once walts into a courtroom and say that he is a multi billionaire, but you can't come up with half a billion? So one of these things ain't right.

blink of an eye. And I honestly, I would like to go backwards right Like I would like to just take a time machine. Which is why, you know, frankly, I'm excited for my next guest coming up. Uh Susie Banikarim, who is the Emmy Award winning journalist behind the podcast in Retrospec where each week her alongside New York Times editor Jessica Bennett, revisit a pop culture moment from the eighties and nineties that shaped them to try and understand what it taught us about the world and a woman's

place in it. And I thought to myself, like, how fun is this? Right? Because who didn't love the eighties and the nineties and so many moments that like, when we look back at them, we're like, wow, this was like a moment. How do we think about it now? And through which lens are we actually looking at it with? So Susie and I get into really good conversation about her pod, but also about politics in general and the ways in which we look at things in the responsibility

of journalism. So I'm really excited for you to hear that conversation, which is coming up next. Folks. I am very excited to welcome to OOKF Daily for the very first time, Susie Banakurem, who is the host of the podcast In Retrospect, who is an Emmy winning journalist and filmmaker, and also directed the twenty twenty documentary Enemies of the People,

Trump and the Political Press. So, Sissy, first, I would like to talk about your documentary because I think that where we are right now, where my anger is and remains, is in what seems like the mainstream media's inability to handle a character, a figure like Donald Trump. And so talk to us about your twenty twenty documentary film and what you learned.

It's like they don't adapt in that era in the twenty sixteen election very quickly to the fact that now he's the front runner and they do have to treat him like a serious candidate, and they have to ask serious questions about the policies he's presenting, the way he's presenting them, And so he gets kind of this past in the twenty sixteen election, right, he gets to do a lot of things that no normal candidate would be able to do, which is like just give endless speeches.

He gets tons of free airtime, he says lots of controversial things. But you know, when I made the film, the sort of premise of it is that I went back right after the election in twenty seventeen and I asked a bunch of people who had either covered him or who had made coverage decisions about them, what do they feel they might have done differently. So I interviewed Jeff Zucker from CNN. I interviewed Maggie Haberman from The Times.

I interviewed people from The Washington Post, from all across the media, and you know, almost instantly they did say that there were things they would have done differently. But now we're watching this election and I think there are

some things they're doing differently, but not enough. And the one that I find most frustrating, to be honest, is there's this thing that happens in media, especially on cable media, where a lot of Americans still get their primary news, which is that the news media feels like to be balanced, quote end quote balanced, they have to give equal negative

airtime to both candidates. And because Trump is such a chaotic candidate, because he does so many crazy things in a row, nothing really sticks to him because no one can figure out what is it is he's doing. But then one narrative ends up sticking to his opponents in a way that kind of crushes them. So in the twenty sixteen campaign, that was Hillary's emails. They couldn't really think of a lot of other things to talk about with Hillary. There wasn't news breaking about her every day.

She wasn't calling for a Muslim band one day and then you know, talking about, you know, the menstrual cycle of a Fox News host the next day. Right, she just wasn't doing these sort of really chaotic things, and so whenever they had to talk about her, they really only had this one issue to talk about. How much were the email is going to matter, how much was it going to stick to her? What was the FBI

going to do about it? And what we're seeing in this cycle is that same pattern, but with Biden's age, so they don't know what else to talk about with Biden. He's not particularly chaotic, He's not doing crazy things. He's kind of a boring candidate if you're press person who wants like an exciting story to cover. So they're just hammering him on age when Trump is frankly showing a lot of the same you know issues that Biden is

on age, right. I mean he's also forgetful and mixes things up, but they don't talk about that with him because every day he comes out and gives some sort of press conference, and every day there's a new court filing, and I think people can't keep track of it the

way we do, right. People aren't as like plugged in, and so all they hear is that Biden is old and the Trump is just being chaotic like he usually is, and that is not a fair comparison of what's happening in the in the sort of political sphere.

no states rights. And this is me at living States rights really only exist if you are a red state governor taking away people's rights right and flooding your state with guns. Outside of that, we get to decide what a state can and cannot do. And that is the decision that they made in Colorado that said no, Donald Trump is going to be eligible and be on the ballot.

And Amy Coney Barrett, one of my least favorite justices, had the audacity to talk about in the decision that we need to bring America together, right, yes, and that this decision, you know, we need to be thoughtful about how we bring together America. Is that right?

absolute immunity. They can't do their job otherwise. I don't know, because I'm pretty sure the forty four that came before him weren't abject criminals, right, yes, And so here we are, and I'm sitting back and I had to turn my TV off because I don't like to have that kind of negativity inside my home. Right, Like my blood pressure is I enough?

cable TV. This time, he's not getting that. So what he's figured out, though, is that if he does press conferences related to the court cases, the news media feels like they have to take those because they're newsworthy in quotes, right, They feel like it's a product of the news rather than a campaign rally. And you know, that's debatable because what Trump does with these speeches is not illuminate the trial, you know, decision in any way, or the court decision

in any way. He just uses it as a campaign platform and talks about all sorts of things, Like on that day with the Supreme Court ruling, he was talking about migrant crime, which, as we know, you and I both know, there is no spike in migrant crime. In fact, migroant crime percentage wise, is less than the overall population. But he gets to put in these talking points that he knows actually resonate, right. I mean, I think the thing about Trump is is that he's you know, not

all there in some ways, right. I mean, I think you know, he calls his wife by a different name. He confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, he's often referring to the president as Obama. But what he's always been really good at as a candidate is messaging and finding like a thing to say that sort of breaks through the noise, and he just says it over and over again until people on his side and also people in the middle right, who frankly are the ones who decide elections,

start to believe the thing. And so migrant crime, this idea that there's a migrant crime wave. He's done a pretty good job of making people believe that that's a thing, right, And so when the news media just airs these speeches and doesn't interrupt them, or doesn't you know, wait until he's given them, and just air a couple of soundbites, they are playing into his games again. And I really don't understand it. I mean, and I think one of the worst examples of this was when CNN put him

live on a town hall. You know, It's just was crazy. I was like, did you guys literally just not pay attention to the twenty sixteen election? Were you sleeping for that? And you know, the president who of CNN at that time is no longer there, so I mean, maybe he wasn't up for the job in more ways than one.

But I was really shocked by that decision. And you know, no amount of fact checking changes the visuals that you describe, right, what you were just describing standing in front of the American flag like poly si one oh one, that the image you present, I mean, that's a real Reagan you know lesson, right is it almost doesn't matter what you're saying. Sometimes if the visuals are presidential, if they are validating, if they give him a sense of authority, that is

huge for him. And I think that is really you know, something that if you're a political reporter you're not thinking about and you're not thinking about actively, you're not doing your job anymore. Like we know who this candidate is. It's time to really think about that in a clear way.

And I think what's hard for me is that I do, you know, have a lot of friends and colleagues at CNN who I respect, who I think do think about these issues deeply, But I think you know, either their voices aren't always heard or also, in the chaos of breaking news, lots of decisions get made that aren't thoughtful, and that really concerns me because, as we know from twenty sixteen, it has a real impact on the country when the information people are getting is not high quality,

and that's just not high quality content.

in a dictatorship. And so you would think that for your own self preservation media networks, that you would then cover this person as the real threat to our democracy and to your job, right, because it in dictatorships, in communist countries and authoritarian regimes. You know what channel they got, They got one, They got one state run television, right.

They may not think they do, they may think they're skeptical, but the reality is we've lived in America a long time, and so you know, Americans tend to sort of just believe that things will somehow work out, that Donald Trump

won't be able to prevail against these institutions. But you know, I come from Iran, so I don't have that kind of certainty, you know what I mean, Like, I was born in a country where things do fall apart, and so I know that countries do go through really like negative transformations, like it is possible for Donald Trump and as we've seen even the results of the twenty sixteen election, to have a really negative impact on democracy. But it's really hard, I think for people to wrap their head

around that. Even well intentioned, good reporters sometimes struggle with that dichotomy because they are just used to covering things in a very traditional way and they don't know how to make this adjustment without feeling or being accused in a bad faith accusation of being biased. So it's this crazy thing where the idea of balance and lack of bias objectivity as we're sort of taught in journalism schools,

is weaponized against journalists. So they don't know how to cover Trump because they're like, oh, I'm not objective if I call him a liar. I'm not objective if I say that he's having this mental decline, but that's just the reality of what they're seeing. Your job as a journalist is to tell people what you're seeing. You know, that's not biased, to call things what they are. And I don't know if you remember in twenty sixteen, it took them months and months and months to even call

lies lies. There was so much debate about it, So we call a lie lie. The New York Times like came out with all this sort of like justification for why they didn't call them lies. And you know, now, at least, I guess we should be grateful we have that they at least say when he's lying. But even that they do pretty sparingly just wild kids. He lies, Like I'd say, he probably tells more lies than truths in any given speech.

There is instability that happens. And I want to ask you one like, I'm not sure when you left when you left Iran, but you know, what we learned here in America through the protests that had been going on for over you know, well over a year, was that, you know, prior to the mid nineteen seventies, Iran had been a place that was flourishing right until religious zealous

took over and completely destroyed freedoms there. Can you just give us like your thoughts on that and the lack of ability for Americans I think to have a madination beyond what it is that they know. Do you know what I'm saying to imagine that something could end?

Iran essentially. And I think you know, one thing that's worth noting is that Iran, even before this religious regime wasn't a democracy, right, There was still a king, there was a shaw, So you know, there were lots of issues with that government as well, but certainly far more freedoms. I mean the Iran my parents described to me as a child, like women did not have to wear a

head job, which is a covering over their head. You know, women could drive, women could you know, I mean women, which I know these sound like basic rights, but those are rights that in a lot of Middle Eastern countries women do not have. Right in Saudi Arabia, women can't drive,

et cetera. And so I think what I learned from sort of hearing my parents' stories about this life that they had that was like really fun and there were like parties and this very like Western life, and then all of a sudden they see the sort of stirrings of this revolution, and they don't take it seriously, right, They sort of do the same thing that I'm describing, which is they just sort of assume that this is noise and that the institutions will somehow survive them, whether

or not those institutions were perfect to sort of beside the point. They just believed in the sort of momentum of life that if you're going a certain way, that things will continue that way. And they were genuinely shocked when the revolution resulted in this religious regime that completely tore the country apart. And listen, I don't know that I think America can become what Iran is. I don't think it can, right. I mean, that's a very specific thing.

But you know, look, people said in the twenty sixteen election that there was no difference. There were people like, let's say, Susan Sarandon, who I know gets more heat than probably she deserves because she's not, like, you know, the person who decided the election. But there were people who said Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the same, that voting for one versus the other wouldn't make a difference, that it was all the same, sort of like corporate politics. Well,

we see that that's just not true, right. We see it in the reproductive rights issues that have come up since then. We see it in the way the Supreme Court is stacked to sort of push conservative issues. We see it in terms of, you know, the income disparity that grew under the Trump administration. So it does make a difference who you vote for. And I think that is really complicated for Americans because we believe in the democracy.

The story of America so much or not necessarily we you and me, but people in general tend to really have faith in that people, especially who those systems have mostly worked for, So they tend to not have the imagination for what could come. And I think that's why so many of them were actually surprised when Roe was overturned, when people who'd been paying attention had been saying for years that that was going to be the result.

the directions that things can take. Susie with you know, last question for you, I just want to give you the opportunity to tell folks about your podcast, your iHeart podcast in Retrospect and what you discuss, what they can expect and why they should tune in.

but it is media criticism. So there is a thread which is, you know, we look back at stories from the eighties and nineties, that's why it's called in Retrospect that we loved, you know, pop culture moments, and we re examine them to sort of ask ourselves, how did the media cover them at the time, What were the ways which we viewed them at that young, younger age,

and how do we see them differently. So one of my favorite episodes is actually about Robin Gibbons and the sort of way in which she was really vilified by the press at that time. You know, there's this moment, this very famous moment where her and Mike Tyson given interviewed to ABC News, and she admits he's abusing her, and the result of that is not that he is sort of condemned, but that she is condemned, and that she is literally called on the cover of People magazine

the most hated woman in America. So those are the kinds of things we're looking at. Some of them are more fun and some of them are a little more serious. We're doing one coming up on Miss America and Vanessa Williams and how she was the first Miss Black America and you know, she was dethroned essentially at the end

of her reign. We did one recently on devil Ware's Prada, which is a movie I really love and in the two thousands, and about how ambition is part of that story and what it means about our ambission and how we saw it when we were younger, and how we think about our emission now. So it's a way to talk about sort of a broad set of issues through a pop culture.