March 19, 2024 • 29 mins
Susie Banikarim is an Emmy-award winning journalist and the co-host of the In Retrospect podcast. She joined Danielle to discuss the media's malpractice when it comes to reporting on Trump and whether any lessons have been learned in the 2024 election news cycle.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to will Kate f Daily
with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, God,
you know I have to say this that I know
that it's Tuesday, but over the weekend, the news that
(00:32):
came out about Donald Trump his hate rally and referring
to immigrants and migrants as animals and saying that there
is going to be a bloodbath if he's not elected,
and it's like, folks, how much more information do you
(00:55):
fucking need? That this man is a fuck the game
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
(01:18):
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,
(01:40):
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
(02:00):
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,
(02:22):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:06):
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,
(03:29):
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
(03:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
He's not a.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Multi billionaire because even if it was tied up in
other assets, you could essentially put up right something else
as saying, well, this is the value of X, so
I can put that up as a bod He don't
have it, folks. It is just the place that we
(04:29):
are in, right, like the place that we are in
that we continually find ourselves. For me is just I'm exhausted.
I'm exhausted most days. You know. It's like the weekends
come and go. They feel like they happen within a
blink of an eye. And I honestly, I would like
(04:51):
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
(05:12):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(07:00):
what you learned.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think that Donald Trump is a
fairly unique figure in American history, and the press just
really has never figured out how to cover him as
a political candidate. In the beginning, they treated him like
he was an oddity, like a joke. He was fun,
he was good for ratings, so they gave him a
lot of attention, thinking he wasn't a serious candidate, and
once he became a serious candidate, they didn't really do
(07:24):
a good job of adjusting, you know what I mean.
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
(07:44):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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,
(08:49):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:30):
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,
(09:51):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:36):
in the in the sort of political sphere.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I want to talk about the recent decision that came
down from the Supreme Court and a nine to zero decision,
which was the Colorado case that kind of started the
domino effect of states removing Donald Trump from a ballot
given the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the participation in
(11:05):
an insurrection. And the Supreme Court comes down and says, no,
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
(11:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Amy?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So here we are we're following that decision. Donald Trump
got wall to wall coverage for his beach on interrupted,
Donald Trump, flanked by a bevy of American flags, talking
a whole bunch of hot trash, right, that presidents deserve
(12:12):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Your TV is gonna be awful lot this same right, Right.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
So when I think about what the press has learned
in that moment, I see that they've learned absolutely fucking nothing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, absolutely nothing. So it's a rough one. That one
is a real rough one, right, because this is a
perfect example of how Donald Trump knows how to manipulate
the media. He knows that they have to take his reaction.
He has found that they no longer take his political rally.
They've sort of got his number on that they know
he's just going to spat a bunch of lies. So
unlike twenty sixteen, where he could just every time he
(13:07):
did a political rally. He just got endless coverage on
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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.
(14:12):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(15:58):
your job anymore. Like we know who this candidate is.
It's time to really think about that in a clear way.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And so my thing too is that I don't say
don't air Donald Trump. What I'm saying is exactly what
you mentioned, which is you know that he's going to
give a presser, right, Yeah, So your job should be
to record that presser, go through it with fact check,
(16:24):
and then pair it down into the clips that people
are going to take in with analysis. That's responsible journalism.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And only to the things that are relevant to the case,
like why are they airing things about all these other
campaign issues he wants to talk about. He'll make a
statement about the Supreme Court case he did at the top,
and then everything else he said was just him enjoying
his time in front of the.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Camera exactly, you know, exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
That, And I don't think it educates anyone or informs anyone.
So if you think of your role as a journalist
not just to entertain, which I think you know a
bit of a danger in the twenty sixteen coverage, then
you know you have a responsibility to do it differently.
And I think what's hard for me is that I do,
you know, have a lot of friends and colleagues at
(17:11):
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
(17:32):
when the information people are getting is not high quality,
and that's just not high quality content.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
What blows my mind about the decisions that are made
whether it is breaking news or just segments in general
for regular shows. Is that Donald Trump has outright gone
after media. Right. There were pipe bombs that were sent
to CNN, right, like we forget these things. He has
said that president again that he is going to bankrupt
(18:04):
or shut down MSNBC. Right. Free press has no place
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
(18:29):
communist countries and authoritarian regimes. You know what channel they got,
They got one, They got one state run television, right.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yes, And if it was up to Trump, we would
just have Fox, and he would own Fox. I mean
that's the truth, you know, And I think you know
what's interesting about that is that, you know, I don't
think that the press sees this in that clear a way, right.
They don't see it as like, oh, this is a
threat to us, because on some love, most people just
(19:02):
believe in the norms, right, They believe in the institutions.
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
(19:23):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:09):
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
(20:29):
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,
(20:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I want to go back to you mentioning your roots
in Iran, and so that makes you understand the fact
that countries lose their way, right like government doesn't remain staple.
There is instability that happens. And I want to ask
you one like, I'm not sure when you left when
(21:31):
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
(21:54):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, I mean, listen, I want to be clear that
Iran is a complicated country with a lot of geopolitical
forces that are obviously very different from America. I don't
want to make it sound like I don't know the
difference between those two places. I left Iran when I
was very young. I left at the revolution. My father,
you know, was in a senior position and was put
under house arrest. We had to sort of escape from
(22:36):
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
(22:57):
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
(23:19):
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
(23:40):
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
(24:03):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:44):
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
(25:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's just you know, I think that
what I encourage, at least on this show is for
there to be a level of consciousness and understanding about
the possibilities, right, and to stop living in a place
of assumptions that things will just hold. The systems. Oh,
(25:44):
the systems held even though Donald Trump was president the
first time. And I'm like, did the systems really?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah? Did they hold?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Right? But who thinks that there was Like they held
so much as a sieve holds liquid, right, Like, you know,
so the buildings didn't crumble, like if that's what we mean.
So I do think that it's important to have clarity,
but to understand and to imagine the possibilities of you know,
the directions that things can take. Susie with you know,
(26:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that, and I would
love for people to listen to it. I co host
the podcast with my friend Jessica Bennett. It is very
different from what we've talked about today. It's not politics.
It's pop culture, which is another thing that I really love,
but it is media criticism. So there is a thread
which is, you know, we look back at stories from
(26:46):
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
(27:09):
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
(27:29):
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
(27:51):
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
(28:14):
a pop culture.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Lens love it so much, and the next time that
you come back, I hope that we dive into one
of those many topics because I love every single one
of the episodes. As you just laid out, and I
often think about films. I rewatch movies all the time,
and so I'm looking at it through my present lens
(28:36):
versus when they came out. As always like a really
interesting way to see your own personal evolution, but also
how society has evolved as well.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Totally, that's very much sort of the premise of the show.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, thank you so much for making the time for
Woke AF and I hope that you come back and
join us again soon.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Susie, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
That is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke
a f as always, power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as
fun
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to will Kate f Daily
with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, God,
you know I have to say this that I know
that it's Tuesday, but over the weekend, the news that
(00:32):
came out about Donald Trump his hate rally and referring
to immigrants and migrants as animals and saying that there
is going to be a bloodbath if he's not elected,
and it's like, folks, how much more information do you
(00:55):
fucking need? That this man is a fuck the game
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
(01:18):
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,
(01:40):
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
(02:00):
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,
(02:22):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:06):
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,
(03:29):
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
(03:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
He's not a.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Multi billionaire because even if it was tied up in
other assets, you could essentially put up right something else
as saying, well, this is the value of X, so
I can put that up as a bod He don't
have it, folks. It is just the place that we
(04:29):
are in, right, like the place that we are in
that we continually find ourselves. For me is just I'm exhausted.
I'm exhausted most days. You know. It's like the weekends
come and go. They feel like they happen within a
blink of an eye. And I honestly, I would like
(04:51):
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
(05:12):
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
(05:33):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(07:00):
what you learned.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think that Donald Trump is a
fairly unique figure in American history, and the press just
really has never figured out how to cover him as
a political candidate. In the beginning, they treated him like
he was an oddity, like a joke. He was fun,
he was good for ratings, so they gave him a
lot of attention, thinking he wasn't a serious candidate, and
once he became a serious candidate, they didn't really do
(07:24):
a good job of adjusting, you know what I mean.
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
(07:44):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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,
(08:49):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:30):
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,
(09:51):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:36):
in the in the sort of political sphere.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I want to talk about the recent decision that came
down from the Supreme Court and a nine to zero decision,
which was the Colorado case that kind of started the
domino effect of states removing Donald Trump from a ballot
given the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the participation in
(11:05):
an insurrection. And the Supreme Court comes down and says, no,
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
(11:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Amy?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So here we are we're following that decision. Donald Trump
got wall to wall coverage for his beach on interrupted,
Donald Trump, flanked by a bevy of American flags, talking
a whole bunch of hot trash, right, that presidents deserve
(12:12):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Your TV is gonna be awful lot this same right, Right.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
So when I think about what the press has learned
in that moment, I see that they've learned absolutely fucking nothing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, absolutely nothing. So it's a rough one. That one
is a real rough one, right, because this is a
perfect example of how Donald Trump knows how to manipulate
the media. He knows that they have to take his reaction.
He has found that they no longer take his political rally.
They've sort of got his number on that they know
he's just going to spat a bunch of lies. So
unlike twenty sixteen, where he could just every time he
(13:07):
did a political rally. He just got endless coverage on
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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.
(14:12):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(15:58):
your job anymore. Like we know who this candidate is.
It's time to really think about that in a clear way.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And so my thing too is that I don't say
don't air Donald Trump. What I'm saying is exactly what
you mentioned, which is you know that he's going to
give a presser, right, Yeah, So your job should be
to record that presser, go through it with fact check,
(16:24):
and then pair it down into the clips that people
are going to take in with analysis. That's responsible journalism.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And only to the things that are relevant to the case,
like why are they airing things about all these other
campaign issues he wants to talk about. He'll make a
statement about the Supreme Court case he did at the top,
and then everything else he said was just him enjoying
his time in front of the.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Camera exactly, you know, exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
That, And I don't think it educates anyone or informs anyone.
So if you think of your role as a journalist
not just to entertain, which I think you know a
bit of a danger in the twenty sixteen coverage, then
you know you have a responsibility to do it differently.
And I think what's hard for me is that I do,
you know, have a lot of friends and colleagues at
(17:11):
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
(17:32):
when the information people are getting is not high quality,
and that's just not high quality content.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
What blows my mind about the decisions that are made
whether it is breaking news or just segments in general
for regular shows. Is that Donald Trump has outright gone
after media. Right. There were pipe bombs that were sent
to CNN, right, like we forget these things. He has
said that president again that he is going to bankrupt
(18:04):
or shut down MSNBC. Right. Free press has no place
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
(18:29):
communist countries and authoritarian regimes. You know what channel they got,
They got one, They got one state run television, right.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yes, And if it was up to Trump, we would
just have Fox, and he would own Fox. I mean
that's the truth, you know, And I think you know
what's interesting about that is that, you know, I don't
think that the press sees this in that clear a way, right.
They don't see it as like, oh, this is a
threat to us, because on some love, most people just
(19:02):
believe in the norms, right, They believe in the institutions.
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
(19:23):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:09):
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
(20:29):
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,
(20:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I want to go back to you mentioning your roots
in Iran, and so that makes you understand the fact
that countries lose their way, right like government doesn't remain staple.
There is instability that happens. And I want to ask
you one like, I'm not sure when you left when
(21:31):
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
(21:54):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, I mean, listen, I want to be clear that
Iran is a complicated country with a lot of geopolitical
forces that are obviously very different from America. I don't
want to make it sound like I don't know the
difference between those two places. I left Iran when I
was very young. I left at the revolution. My father,
you know, was in a senior position and was put
under house arrest. We had to sort of escape from
(22:36):
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
(22:57):
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
(23:19):
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
(23:40):
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
(24:03):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:44):
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
(25:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's just you know, I think that
what I encourage, at least on this show is for
there to be a level of consciousness and understanding about
the possibilities, right, and to stop living in a place
of assumptions that things will just hold. The systems. Oh,
(25:44):
the systems held even though Donald Trump was president the
first time. And I'm like, did the systems really?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah? Did they hold?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Right? But who thinks that there was Like they held
so much as a sieve holds liquid, right, Like, you know,
so the buildings didn't crumble, like if that's what we mean.
So I do think that it's important to have clarity,
but to understand and to imagine the possibilities of you know,
the directions that things can take. Susie with you know,
(26:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that, and I would
love for people to listen to it. I co host
the podcast with my friend Jessica Bennett. It is very
different from what we've talked about today. It's not politics.
It's pop culture, which is another thing that I really love,
but it is media criticism. So there is a thread
which is, you know, we look back at stories from
(26:46):
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
(27:09):
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
(27:29):
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
(27:51):
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
(28:14):
a pop culture.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Lens love it so much, and the next time that
you come back, I hope that we dive into one
of those many topics because I love every single one
of the episodes. As you just laid out, and I
often think about films. I rewatch movies all the time,
and so I'm looking at it through my present lens
(28:36):
versus when they came out. As always like a really
interesting way to see your own personal evolution, but also
how society has evolved as well.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Totally, that's very much sort of the premise of the show.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, thank you so much for making the time for
Woke AF and I hope that you come back and
join us again soon.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Susie, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
That is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke
a f as always, power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as
fun
Host
Danielle Moodie
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