← On the Media
On the Media
Off the Radar
00:50:30
How the media are covering, or ignoring, the Mueller indictments; NPR responds to sexual harassment in its own ranks; and Guantanamo gets unredacted.
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- [00:02]
Bob Garfield
From WNYC in New York, this is on the Media. Brooke Gladstone is away this week. I'm Bob Garfield and this is Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity. Tonight, we have a major crisis in this country. Does America have equal justice under the law? It appears tonight the answer is no. No, but probably not in the way you're thinking. There's one justice system for the Clintons, the left, liberals and all their cronies, and another one for everyone else. To bolster its premise that President Trump is being persecuted while the true villains run amok, Fox spent the week proffering misdirection, misrepresentations, and ultimately dangerous provocations that began as soon as word of the indictments broke. Its first instinct was not to cover the breaking news, but to bring on Trump's mistress of alternative facts to change the subject. Here with news host Brett Baier is Kellyanne Conway. We were fed the steady diet of.
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Sean Hannity
Russia, Russia, Russia, collusion, collusion, a complete hoax, as the president has said.
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Bob Garfield
Then you turn it around now and.
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Kellyanne Conway
You realize that you have the Clinton.
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Sean Hannity
Campaign and the DNC working with a.
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Bob Garfield
Foreign national, Mr. Steele. Foreign national? Does she mean the ex spy who was hired by the Democrats to do opposition research on Trump? Yes. Christopher Steele. Is British and Russia involved somehow? Yes. His dossier was about the Kremlin's efforts to influence Trump. But she makes it all sound so sinister, which is the art of manufacturing doubt. The same goes for the constant Fox chatter about the Uranium One deal, a purchase by a Russian firm of a Canadian company's, mainly Kazakh Natural Resources. Some of the principals were big Clinton foundation donors. So Hannity spent the weekend treating it as a smoking Gatling gun of Democrats collusion with Putin. In 2009, our government, including then Attorney General Eric Holder, the FBI director at the time, Robert Mueller, and then District Attorney Rod Rosenstein, they all knew that Russia and Vladimir Putin were trying to corner the uranium market right here in America. No. As has been widely reported, the US uranium involved represented about 1 28th of 1% of world production. It is not allowed for export without a permit, and the deal was unanimously approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Clinton's State Department was indeed on that committee, but it was headed by the Secretary of the treasury, and hers was one vote of nine. When Fox did address the Mueller indictments, it attempted to undercut every aspect of the investigation, beginning with the very lawfulness of its scope. Keep in mind that today's indictment never mentions Donald Trump's presidential campaign or the 2016 election. It only mentions Russia in passing, even though Russian meddling was the pretext for this investigation in the first place. Also, keep in mind that this is just the beginning. But beyond that, as Tucker Carlson well knows, the law and the specific Justice Department brief both unequivocally permit Mueller's team to pursue any illegality by principles in the investigation uncovered by the investigation. As we've previously observed on this show, Fox voices aren't merely passing along White House talking points. They're offering talking points to their biggest fan, Trump. And what they're offering takes their partisan activism into a new dimension. Here's former prosecutor and Fox host Jeanine Pirro. His role as head of the FBI.
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Sean Hannity
During the uranium deal and the Russian.
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Bob Garfield
Extortion case, his friendship with Jim Comey demand his firing the fire Mueller advice, by the way, was remarkably similar to an editorial the same week in the Wall Street Journal, which, like Fox, is controlled by media baron Rupert Murdoch. Sean Hannity worries about subverting the rule of law. He should. His organization is actively attempting to undermine a Justice Department investigation into the previously secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian figures that may or may not have encouraged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Misleading its audience with debunked conspiracy theories is just Fox being Fox. But suborning the obstruction of justice crosses the Rubicon. It is dishonest in a way that should leave us disgusted. It is anti democratic in a way that should make us very scared. Rupert Murdoch and his empire have a lot of fish to fry at the moment. They're still seeking approval from UK regulators for increasing their stake in sky tv. They're dealing with an investigation into possible fraud for hiding sexual harassment hush money payments from their own shareholders. And their pet president of the United States is under siege. Yet even with the ascension of Murdoch's relatively apolitical sons into top management roles, Murdoch Media Properties are hardly laying low. Sarah Ellison is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of War at the Wall Street Journal. Sarah, welcome to the show.
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Sean Hannity
Thanks for having me.
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Bob Garfield
I remember about, oh, I don't know, 10 years ago when the Wall Street Journal was as arch conservative a bastion of political thought, as existed now compared to the Breitbarts and the Daily Callers and the Infowars of the world. It's, I hesitate to say moderate, but it's no longer towards the fringe, huh?
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Sean Hannity
Yes. I mean, I think that that is generally the case, certainly compared to a Breitbart or an infowars. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page always had a very staunch free market position. And it was something that people really, you know, used to be sort of shocked by. But it's very much moved into the mainstream given the current political climate.
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Bob Garfield
And then there's Fox News Channel, which listeners have just heard me describe not only as a propaganda organ for the White House, but having entered some new and frightening dimension. But it has not entered it alone. All of a sudden, in calling for the firing of Robert Mueller, it has joined arms with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And I wonder if this has to do with something that's happening not in the newsrooms, but in the executive suite, namely with Rupert Murdoch himself.
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Sean Hannity
Well, it's hard not to draw that conclusion when you look at the common denominator of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Neither organization would say that they take their marching orders from Rupert Murdoch, but Rupert Murdoch is running Fox News newsroom. Roger Ailes passed away and Rupert went in very directly and took a very enthusiastic place at the top of that news organization. And what's interesting about Murdoch is that he has looked for decades at a way to get in with the sitting American president. He's done that in other countries. He certainly did that with David Cameron. He did that with Tony Blair. He's never gotten the ear of a president the way that he has with Donald Trump. And he has sort of traded his prized position and the way he always describes himself as a newsman for a position that is very much a businessman looking out for his own business interests. Through this friendship with Donald Trump, he's constantly advising him. They're on the phone multiple times a week. And he is not just talking about the Mueller investigation, but through his news outlets. He can influence things like who's going to be the Fed chair, what are people going to think about the tax policy. There are all sorts of small stories and not so small stories that he has the opportunity to influence through his, through his news outlets and through his behind the scenes conversations with Donald Trump.
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Bob Garfield
It kind of reminds me of that scene in Godfather Part 2 where Hyman Roth is talking about working hand in glove with the Cuban dictator. For the first time, a partnership with a sovereign government were bigger than General Motors, he said. But I myself, I'm not sure if you're aware of this. I'm not a business tycoon. But if I were Rupert Murdoch at this point, considering how much he is depending on British regulators to approve this Sky TV deal that he's been working on for something like, is it 20 years and considering his potential legal exposure in the Roger ailes and Bill O'Reilly hush money payments, the last thing I would do is start calling for the firing of a special counsel. The last thing I do. What could he possibly be thinking with Murdoch?
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Sean Hannity
He's always been a major fan of being counterintuitive and going against the grain. And at the very least, that's what this is. I do think there is a risk to this sky deal, which is incredibly important for the health and future of the company that he founded and built up for this to go through. And despite what people believe, he doesn't call in opinions to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I think that Roger Ailes, in fact, did do that at Fox News. And Rupert is less overt on that front. But I think that he's at greater risk in the sky deal over the settlements with Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes because that involved possibly covering up and using company money to pay for these sexual harassment lawsuits. But if you're sitting in a British regulator's seat, the last thing that you would want to see as a member of the British government or as a regulator in that country is somebody who could use his outlets to call for your resignation or your ouster. And I think that, you know, I don't know exactly what he's thinking. I can't pretend to know what he's thinking. But it does seem like it's a risky stance.
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Bob Garfield
Roger Ailes is deceased and the nominal bosses are now the sons of. But Fox has not become a more moderate voice. On the contrary, it's become increasingly extreme in the past, let's say, nine months. This you attribute to what I think.
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Sean Hannity
That what Fox News normally found in previous administrations was that it always did better when it was in the opposition, and it always historically worked that way. Now we're seeing such a bifurcation in the way people think about politics is that they don't want to watch the news about a president that is not of their political ilk. They all they want to watch is something that absolutely confirms their political ideology. And so Fox is really benefiting from Trump's presidency and backing him so wholeheartedly because the people who are Trump's base, all they want to hear is sort of good news about Donald Trump.
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Bob Garfield
I think what you've described for Rupert Murdoch is a win win. Murdoch has the benefit of having not only the personal ear of the president of the United States, but a president who is very much in his debt. And if Trump loses, well, then Fox News Channel would conceivably be the voice of the revolution and have an even more rabid following, presuming the Murdoch boys don't intervene.
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Sean Hannity
Well, I think that there's one issue with that plan and that it's that the media environment and the conservative media ecosphere has shifted so much since Fox News was founded. And not only is there Fox News, but there's Breitbart, there's infowars, there's this Sinclair broadcasting company that is possibly going to be a part of Tribune. And so the fissure in the Republican Party is absolutely mimicked by that same kind of division in conservative media. And so Fox News is, is by no means guaranteed a place in the conservative revolution. In fact, it is the place that could be upended. To answer your question about what would happen if James and Lachlan Murdoch actually took over, they've already made a real decision to not change the market position of Fox News. Fox News makes a billion and a half dollars in profit every year. For them, it is absolutely something that they cannot mess up. And the problem is that it historically has been a place that has required a true believer run it. And so I think that the danger is that even if they don't try to, they will inevitably change it.
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Bob Garfield
Sarah, thank you very much.
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Sean Hannity
Thank you.
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Bob Garfield
Sarah Ellison is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of War at the Wall Street Journal. One of the great frustrations for the media in the age of Trump is that the commander in chief leaves very little to the imagination. An industry that lives to decode the political words said and unsaid, to interpret legislative smoke signals, speculate on strategy, intent and feasibility finds itself faced with a president who blurts and tweets out exactly what's on his mind, exactly when it's on his mind. No matter how pathological, decode. It's like decoding a kidney stone. But this week's announcement of first indictments in Robert Mueller's special investigation, now that's a mystery cloaked in an enigma shrouded in a grand jury. Three arrests, a guilty plea, and a.
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Kellyanne Conway
Surprise proactive cooperator who was actively trying.
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Bob Garfield
To collude with the Russian government. Months of secrecy broken by an announcement crafted to send distinct messages to the media, to the public, to the administration, and not least to the next defendants. To understand the president, you just need Twitter. To understand these indictments, you need a Virgil. Marcy Wheeler is an independent national security journalist and longtime observer of high profile prosecutions. Virgil, welcome back to otm.
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Marcy Wheeler
Thanks for having me back.
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Bob Garfield
All right, for Those who have been overwhelmed by the cascading news this week about the indictments. Walk us through the basics, please. Who was named and what for?
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Marcy Wheeler
So there were indictments of two people and a plea agreement released. The the indictments of the two people were Paul Manafort, who was for a time last year Trump's campaign adviser, and his long term deputy, Rick Gates, for basically garden variety money laundering. And then a guy named George Papadopoulos, who was rolled out in March as a foreign policy advisor, was interviewed in January and February of 2017 and asked about some people with close ties to Russia, as well as somebody he believed to be the niece of Vladimir Putin. And he lied both about how serious he thought those people were when he talked to them, and very importantly, he lied about whether he could have shared news that one of them had heard about dirt on Hillary Clinton in Russia, which was basically thousands of Clinton emails. And in July, the FBI arrested him as he came back in the country and flipped him. So now he has been chatting with the FBI about what actually went on in the campaign ever since.
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Bob Garfield
Okay, so those are the charges. And concerning Manafort and Gates, they are conspicuously absent of anything to do with the campaign or with the Kremlin connection. But there's a reason for this, right?
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Marcy Wheeler
What Mueller basically rolled out on Monday was an attempt to use Papadopoulos to flip Manafort. The charges themselves were meant to do that. He charged Manafort with fairly easy to plead guilty to charges that don't, for example, accuse him of having spied for Russia. And he rolled out the Papadopoulos plea agreement, making it clear that he had other information about what Manafort had done in the campaign. It's basically Mueller nudging them and saying, hey, we know that in May, you, Manafort and you, Gates had a conversation about hiding efforts to reach out to set up these meetings with Russians. We know more, but we're not going to tell you what else we know, giving him one more reason to want to plead guilty and again, cooperate against others in the campaign.
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Bob Garfield
Tell me some of your misgivings about the general coverage of the indictments and the aftermath.
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Marcy Wheeler
It really behooves the press in high profile cases like this to explain things that are normal in any kind of prosecution. One that involves Manafort, for example, is in the back and forth on release provisions. Earlier in the week, the prosecution listed some things that look spectacular to you.
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Sean Hannity
And me, including the new news that Paul Manafort had three different passports with.
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Marcy Wheeler
Three different numbers, which is common for people who travel to countries where you.
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Sean Hannity
Need visas, that he was using a phone that he obtained in an alias.
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Marcy Wheeler
Name for foreign travel that's becoming more common as phones get searched at the border. So they listed a bunch of things that make it look like Manafort is a flight risk, and they kind of pitch it in the worst light. That's normal. Yes. Those are kind of really interesting things, that Manafort has three passports. But I think the press should educate viewers and let them know that there's this back and forth for every single detention hearing where the prosecution says flight risk and the defense says, normal guy has family, yada yada. With Papadopoulos, earlier in the week they said, well, he must have been running around wired up for the last two months.
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Bob Garfield
Today he is called a proactive cooperator. Does that mean, as has been speculated all day, that he was wearing a wire?
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Marcy Wheeler
Well, guess what, Mr. Lewandowski, if in fact Papadopoulos was wearing a wire, you'll be reminded by Robert Mueller, and it's clear that Papadopoulos is cooperating. His lawyers have said that the plea agreement says that. But in this day and age, you don't necessarily need a wire. For people like the Trump campaign who weren't thinking very much about hiding from the FBI. Papadopoulos was carrying these discussions out with Russian handlers over Skype and Facebook, which are easily accessible to the FBI because they're overseas. These people are easy targets for overseas surveillance. So in the age of Facebook, you don't necessarily need to send a witness wired up to go incriminate other people.
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Bob Garfield
Discuss the willing suspension of disbelief. One of the principles in all of this is this guy, Sam Clovis, a Republican who until Thursday at least, was President Trump's nominee for a top position at the U.S. department of Agriculture. Tell me about him and what the media did when his lawyer got involved.
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Marcy Wheeler
Clovis is an Iowa Republican who very early on supported Trump. He was a co chairman of the campaign. And he's described in the Papadopoulos plea agreement as having in August 2016 said to Papadopoulos, hey, if you want to continue to pursue setting up these meetings with Russians, go ahead, see if you can pull it off. After the plea agreement was released, his attorney, Victoria Tuncic, who is kind of this long term Republican scandal monger who likes to play the press, went out and said, sam is cooperating. He testified before the grand jury. Here's what he said. And that's interesting for two reasons. One is she got her spin in this is how what looks very incriminating about my client isn't. But she also let anybody who didn't already testify know what story Clovis is telling. And this is what happens when you get approached by defense attorneys. But for readers and listeners who don't know it, it's really useful to remind them that the press can be a way that one can legally tell others. Victoria Tunsig can tell, for example, Corey Lewandowski. Here's what Sam said before the grand jury. If you haven't already testified before the grand jury, you might want to kind of coordinate with my story so it looks better than George Papadopoulos.
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Bob Garfield
All right. Now, as you're reading the prosecutorial tea leaves, you also see something else brewing concerning Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Now, he is not included in any of the indictments, but your antennae are raised. Why?
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Marcy Wheeler
Not just my antenna, but also a bunch of senators. In the plea agreement, There is a March 31 meeting described of Trump's foreign policy team. The president was at that meeting. Sessions was at that meeting. And at that meeting, Papadopoulos explained that his role on the campaign was basically to broker a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Just this meeting by itself is yet another indication that Sessions has lied when he's been asked as recently as two weeks ago.
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Bob Garfield
You don't believe that surrogates from the.
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Kellyanne Conway
Trump campaign had communications with the Russians?
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Marcy Wheeler
Is that what you're saying?
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Sean Hannity
I did not, and I'm not aware.
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Bob Garfield
Of anyone else that did.
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Marcy Wheeler
We now know there was a meeting where it did happen and he didn't disclose it. So there's more to the Session story.
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Bob Garfield
One more thing, Marcy. On Wednesday, the president once again asserted, I think, to the New York Times, that he is not under investigation. My question is, is it possible, is it even possible that the president is not under investigation?
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Marcy Wheeler
Not at all. I mean, we already know that the president is under investigation from what they've been asked for. One of the things that I think has surprised everybody in DC Is that the Papadopoulos plea agreement was kept secret for so long. Not only is that a testament to how locked down the Mueller team is, but it's also a testament to how many other things may be going on that we would not know about. But it's clear that he is being investigated.
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Bob Garfield
Marcy, thank you.
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Marcy Wheeler
Thanks so much.
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Bob Garfield
Marcy Wheeler is an independent national security journalist who blogs@EmptyWheel.net Coming up, when the edict physician heal thyself becomes reporter, Report on thyself. This is on the media. How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here.
- [24:03]
David Folkenflik
Multi vehicle discount Safe driver discount, New.
- [24:06]
Bob Garfield
Vehicle discount Storage discount.
- [24:08]
David Folkenflik
How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodiscounts restrictions apply.
- [24:14]
Sean Hannity
This Supreme Court term isn't business as usual. It's a full blown battle over democracy. Justices are shattering precedent, grabbing power, and even turning on their own. It's messy, it's high stakes, and it's already reshaping how this country works. And our podcast Strict Scrutiny breaks it all down legally, clearly, and with just the right amount of side eye. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
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Bob Garfield
This is on the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. The daily headlines about celebrity harassment share that odd quality of being horrifying and and utterly unsurprising. Because whether it's the Hollywood casting couch or the little manager's office in a saloon, men have extorted sexual favors from subordinates and supplicants since time immemorial or tried. The shock and revulsion comes only in the who. This week, the avalanche of revelation buried one of public radio's own. After a story in the Washington Post revealed ugly episodes going back 20 years, NPR's senior vice president for news, Michael Oreskes, acknowledged forcing himself on young women and resigned. It's shocking, not just because he is a colleague, but because some of his conduct was long known to both newsroom employees and NPR management, suggesting that the culture of impunity infected even our cathedral of political correctness. NPR media correspondent David Falkenflick had the unenviable duty of covering the developing story when he read Paul Ferri's Washington Post scoop, which documented episodes of unsolicited tongue kisses. Twenty years ago, when Oreskes was Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, it had a special resonance. A year and a half earlier, Falcon Flick had chased down a formal complaint lodged against Oreskes by an NPR producer, which involved a boss employee interaction that made her feel preyed upon.
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David Folkenflik
Now, let's be clear about the kind of allegation it was. There was no, as far as my reporting was able to discern, no inappropriate touching, no explicit invitation for some sort of romantic or physical involvement, no explicit talk of sex, no promise of promotion on the basis of engagement, no promise of retribution were it to be withheld. You know, they weren't the things that you think of that make it rise to severe sexual harassment that perhaps merits national coverage. I gotta say, we did look around. Was there anything back then that I could show that There was some kind of pattern. I even talked to folks at the New York Times and the Associated Press. Perhaps if I had spent weeks digging, I could have found more. But in the initial consultations, I couldn't find a pattern. There was a complaint made, but it wasn't news. Well, the allegations that Paul Farhi brought from these two unnamed women who gave accounts of Mike Oreskes physically pressing himself against them in unsolicited kisses, sticking his tongue in their mouths, suddenly the story that I had that didn't seem to rise to newsworthiness took on a very urgent nature.
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Bob Garfield
I think the most institutionally damning line in Farhi's story was that NPR management knew about the old New York Times incidents because those women in the Post's story had been in touch. They had contacted NPR to say, I want you to know who your senior VP for news is. When they got that information from these women, as far as you can tell, what did they do?
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David Folkenflik
We had initially thought that they had informed NPR about this in mid October and that that had led to more significant reviews. And NPR said that it had started to look into this stuff. And the fact that we didn't know all that had happened didn't mean that stuff wasn't happening with seriousness behind the scenes. Okay, fair enough. But through pressing on questions and through talking with corporate executives, we actually learned that the first of the two women making accusations about Mike Oreskes time back nearly two decades ago as the Washington bureau chief, New York Times. She made her report to NPR not in October of 2017, that is a couple weeks ago, but in October of 2016, that is slightly more than a year ago. So as of that time, NPR was in possession of a second data point that his behavior towards women might contain objectionable tendencies. The New York Times woman then got in touch again this year, apparently inspired by the coverage that NPR has done of the sexual harassment scandals besetting so many media companies. She calls to register what happened to her by her account because she's concerned that he might be involved in guiding that coverage. And I just want to be very clear. He certainly had no direct or even to my knowledge, oversight or strong influence on anything I did. It may be he suggested certain kinds.
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Bob Garfield
Of stories, but he didn't try to put the brakes on coverage of other organizations. Sexual harassment scandals?
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David Folkenflik
No, in no way. This was driven by reporters and editors. Jarl Mone, the CEO, sent out a memo in mid October, call it 20 October, basically restating in light of all these scandals that were playing out publicly the company's commitment to an affirming workplace free from harassment and encouraged employees to report to them any concerns or instances that they had encountered or knew of in which people had behaved inappropriately. I assume newsrooms and corporations across the country have sent out memos like that reminding people of policies and of the law. What we didn't know was that was, in a sense, a plea for more specifics to be shared. And Yarl Mond has said, we can't act on rumor, we have to act on fact. And that would have been an opportunity for employees to come forward with their own stories or those that they knew of others who had encountered inappropriate behavior toward them.
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Bob Garfield
Well, I want to ask you about that because, you know, I heard this news and was stunned. But women in the NPR newsroom evidently weren't especially stunned because Mike's conduct was, I gather, a kind of open secret. So Yarrow Mon solicits reports from them. He didn't get them. Why do you suppose that is?
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David Folkenflik
Our colleagues, particularly our female colleagues, they didn't trust hr. They didn't trust the corporation. They didn't have full faith, I guess, in the legal department to address these issues to their satisfaction because they felt issues had been raised and flagged and that they hadn't been addressed. They felt that this was known enough that the corporation should have dealt with it.
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Bob Garfield
Other women materialized with their stories, including a number of your colleagues. How many have you spoken to now?
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David Folkenflik
There are six women, but two of those women never worked at npr and they were essentially discouraged from applying to NPR as a result of his behavior towards them. One of them, he said, I close my eyes at night and fall asleep thinking of you. The other, he essentially tried to invite himself up to her apartment. He essentially walked her home, asked what she was doing later on. It was already late at night. She said, I'm going up. And he said, you know, I'm free all night. I've also spoken to other women who don't work for NPR and have never thought to apply to NPR who say that he used social media as a way of cultivating them, encouraging them, and then when dining with them or meeting with them, turning the conversation to boyfriends and sex.
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Bob Garfield
I want to get back to top management. In the intro, we heard Mary Louise Kelly holding Yarrow Mon's feet to the fire about management response. The Post says that the newsroom is steaming and smells a cover up. Do you have any reason to believe that there is or was a cover up going on? And has Mone put Any suspicions to.
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David Folkenflik
Rest, you said, I think steaming, I would say seething. When Jarl went into the studio down at NPR headquarters in Washington. It's a glass paneled studio in certain portions of it and there were, as I understand it, several dozen employees, mostly female, standing there watching the interview take place. And you don't see that too often. I work up in the New York bureau. I'm not down there very often and so I can't say I physically took the temperature in person over the last day or two. But I've talked to a lot of folks and I think Yarl mon has not put the questions to rest about why there was this gap between the time at which they knew that at least three women had reported inappropriate harassing behavior by Oreskes and why it took until just a couple hours after Paul Farhee posted his story for them to decide to put Mike on leave and take a hard look at this.
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Bob Garfield
Jarl, of course, is the boss of bosses, but he himself has to answer to NPR's board. I'm not asking for your opinion. I'm curious whether you're reporting suggests that he's in trouble with his board.
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David Folkenflik
Here's what I know in terms of timeline. I'm told that Jarl informed the chairman of the board and the vice chairman of the board about these concerns, all three of them by mid October of this year when the second New York Times accuser came to the network and registered her complaint. And by that point you've got three women making specific allegations of different natures and that the full board was only informed on the afternoon of Halloween, which is when of course, Paul Farhi first posted his story and I was proceeding with mine. So certainly senior figures on the board knew pretty much in real time once the second New York Times accusation rolled in. So those figures are in some sense along for the ride. But that doesn't mean the full board was. And I think we're going to see whether there are Fisher's intentions in the board as there have been in the newsroom about all this.
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Bob Garfield
Okay, David, thank you so much.
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David Folkenflik
You bet.
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Bob Garfield
David Folkenflick is the media correspondent for National Public Radio. In an all staff memo late this week and in a subsequent town hall style meeting, Mone apologized to the NPR staff, quote, I should have acted sooner and should have acted more forcefully. He also stated NPR's commitment to an independent investigation by an outside law firm. This is on the media. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.
- [35:22]
David Folkenflik
Multi vehicle discount, safe Driver discount, New.
- [35:25]
Bob Garfield
Vehicle discount Storage discount.
- [35:27]
David Folkenflik
How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autod Discounts restrictions apply.
- [35:33]
Marcy Wheeler
Hi, I'm Willa Paskin, the host of Decoder Ring, Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. On Decoder Ring, we dive down rabbit holes and obsessively explore questions hiding in plain sight, like why has slow dancing gone out of style?
- [35:47]
Sean Hannity
And when did we all become obsessed with hydration?
- [35:50]
Marcy Wheeler
And where did the word mullet, you know, to describe a hairstyle come from? That's Decoder Ring, named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by the New York Times. Listen to new episodes every two weeks and make sure to follow us so you never miss one.
- [36:08]
Bob Garfield
This is ON the media. I'm Bob Garfield. Before President Trump insisted on death for the truck driver accused of killing eight people in lower Manhattan on Halloween, he first mused about sending the suspect to Guantanamo Bay. Are you considering that now, sir? I would certainly consider that. Send him to Gitmo. I would certainly consider that. In 2015, the world got a peek inside with the publication of Guantanamo Diary, the heavily redacted account of interrogation, imprisonment and torture written by inmate Mohammadu old Slahi. A 29 year old Mauritanian engineer, Slahi was first detained in 2000 for his supposed connections to the Millennium Bomb plot. Though quickly cleared in that matter, he was nonetheless kept in custody at the prison for 14 years. Writer and human rights activist Larry Seames edited the book Muhammadu wrote while imprisoned. A year later, Slahi was finally released and he and Seams spent months un redacting the manuscript. Larry, welcome back to the show.
- [37:16]
Kellyanne Conway
Thank you Bob.
- [37:18]
Bob Garfield
Slahi was originally suspected of a connection to the so called Millennium Bomb plot to blow up LAX airport. How so?
- [37:28]
Kellyanne Conway
He briefly moved to Canada in 1999, got there just about the time that this guy named Ahmad Rassam was caught coming into the United States with a trunk load of explosives to try to blow up LAX airport. And because they had gone to the same mosque, Mohammedu fell under suspicion. He actually was living working peacefully in Mauritania through 9 11. After 9 11, the United States picked up Mohammadu and then on November 20, 2001 put him on a rendition plane to Jordan. And that began his ordeal in US custody.
- [38:02]
Bob Garfield
14 years in Guantanamo with neither evidence nor even a theory of connection to terrorism or anything else untoward.
- [38:12]
Kellyanne Conway
He wasn't just mistreated in Guantanamo, he was one of the two most tortured people in Guantanamo. Torture that included extreme isolation, deprivations humiliations, sexual harassment, a fake kidnapping, and death threats to his family. That happened between 2003 and 2004. By the end of that time, of course, they had decided that he wasn't who they thought he was. And they kept him in this isolation hut that they had dragged him into for this interrogation. It was completely sealed off from the camp, but they began to give him, you know, writing supplies. And he had a new guard team come in that was much friendlier to him. What he did during that time was remarkable. He sat down in this desk that he had in his cell and over the period of about eight months, wrote in a series of segments that he sort of framed as letters to his lawyers so that they could be transferred to them safely and not destroyed. This manuscript for Guantanamo diary, which was 466 pages, handwritten in English, his fourth language.
- [39:16]
Bob Garfield
And you edited this into book form and it was published, but heavily redacted by the government. How heavily?
- [39:24]
Kellyanne Conway
Well, there were about 2,400 black bars that had been imposed on the text. You know, his lawyers fought in sort of secret litigation that was connected to his habeas corpus case to get the manuscript declassified. Finally, in 2012, they called me and said, we have this declassified version of the book. Handed it to me. It was a PDF file of this handwritten manuscript with these 2,400 redactions that vary from pronoun length all the way up to multi page redactions. My job was to navigate the challenge of this censorship.
- [39:57]
Bob Garfield
Okay, that was then, this is now. You have unredacted the redactions. How were you able to reassemble his narrative?
- [40:05]
Kellyanne Conway
I got the word that he was being released. A year ago, I got a phone call from an Al Jazeera reporter who said he was going to the airport to meet Mohammadu. There had been no warning. He had been cleared for release earlier in the summer. But, you know, this was the waning days of the Obama administration. Nobody knew whether he'd get out or not. And there he was, apparently landed in Mauritania. And two hours later, I was driving and my phone rang, and it was Muhammadu. He was exactly the voice that I knew from the book. He was relaxed. He said, hey, Larry, how you doing? Two weeks later, I went to Mauritania and visited him. One of the very first things he said was he really thought he owed his readers the whole story. Is it possible to do an unredacted version now? The easiest way to do that, of course, would be to get the original manuscript back from the US government, but that was not going to happen. That will probably never be publicly released. Of course Muhammadu knows the information that's under those redactions.
- [41:01]
Bob Garfield
That doesn't strike me as being an easy process. How were you able to reassemble his narrative?
- [41:07]
Kellyanne Conway
We sort of went from short to long. So, you know, the short redactions he could just go through and he'd pencil them in. This is so and so he knows who that is. But when you have a seven page redaction that describes a polygraph exam, you know, how are we going to reconstruct that? We were asking each other a lot of interesting ethical questions about memory. His commitment all along is to be quite straightforward. So when he couldn't remember something, he was very honest with me. There were moments where he would say, I need some time with this one. I hadn't thought about this. You could see him remembering things.
- [41:41]
Bob Garfield
What is there about the unredacted version of Guantanamo diary that advances the story for the audience?
- [41:50]
Kellyanne Conway
If you look at a redacted manuscript, your first question should be, who's hiding what from whom? If there's one thing that all of these years of looking at censored documents about Guantanamo has taught me, it's that those redactions exist primarily to keep information from us, the American people. The process of the last 15 years since the beginning of the torture program has really been of trying to tear down these wall of censorship that have been built specifically to screen from the American people the crimes that have been done to this day. No writer or journalist has ever been able to speak with a prisoner while they're in Guantanamo. I could have no communication with Muhammadu while I was working with the original manuscript and he was still in prison. The American public should be asking the question, well, wait, what am I not being allowed to see here?
- [42:40]
Bob Garfield
Slavery is over, but it isn't over. It continues to reside in history and in the collective consciousness. The trail of tears, over but not over Tuskegee. Over, but not over McCarthyism. All of these horrific chapters of American history and Guantanamo, which seems to belong in that conversation of our darkest moments, seems to me already to be fading from the public consciousness.
- [43:11]
Kellyanne Conway
It does seem to me that we have a unique cultural challenge when it comes to accountability. I think it's partly because we're a country that was founded on this notion of looking forward, not backwards. But we have compiled and accumulated many, many layers of secrets and crimes over the years that we've not fully addressed and we've not learned how important the process of addressing them is for us as individuals and as a culture. So I am worried about Guantanamo. 41 men are still incarcerated there. Thousands of American men and women are working there. And like you say, most of the country is not even thinking about it. We should do better in confronting our mistakes because it will make us stronger. These crimes are damaging to our character and to our soul. The process of illuminating this darkness is one of repairing something in ourselves.
- [44:04]
Bob Garfield
Larry, thank you.
- [44:05]
Kellyanne Conway
You're welcome.
- [44:06]
Bob Garfield
Larry Siemes is a writer and human rights activist and editor of the Guantanamo Diary. For Siemes, the diary recounts a tragic human rights violation and makes a political plea for Muhammadu Ould Slahi. The pages represent the darkest moments of his life. Muhammadu, welcome to the show.
- [44:26]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
Thank you for having me.
- [44:27]
Bob Garfield
Bob, this nightmare began a little more than 15 years ago with you going voluntarily to your local police station to answer a few questions. What were you thinking as you headed there?
- [44:44]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
I really wasn't afraid of the US Government back then because my only information about the United States of America is what I learned through movies and TV shows like Married With Children or Murder, She Wrote, Law and Order and stuff like that. So I see that America is a country of law. If you didn't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to be afraid of.
- [45:13]
Bob Garfield
And what did they want?
- [45:15]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
He told me, look, we don't know why the American government is so adamant. They told us to arrest you and they will come and interrogate you.
- [45:26]
Bob Garfield
We don't know why you got sucked into this system and you were eventually interrogated about the Millennium Bomb plot that they suspected you may have had a connection with. It immediately became clear to them that you could not possibly have been involved in that plot because you didn't show up until the people had already been arrested for trying to smuggle explosives over the Canadian border. And yet you were kept in custody.
- [45:53]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
This is the problem, what I call the Securitat apparatus, very much hijacking the democracy in the United States of America. They don't make mistakes. They don't come and say, you know what? We're sorry, we really thought you did it, and we really apologize, then try to mend the wrongs. That's not how it operates, especially outside the mainland. So they say, ah, okay, maybe you didn't do it, but you must have done something else. And who is going to ask a second question about an Arab African guy kidnapped from Africa because he was trying to harm honest Americans? No one.
- [46:33]
Bob Garfield
As it turns out, there were people who cared about You. There is this crazy paradox that while you were hidden from the world for 14 years in Guantanamo Bay without a voice, you were given a voice by various surrogates, lawyers, activists. Larry Seams in particular. I wonder how you even processed the idea of having so many allies fighting for you from within the very country that was depriving you of your basic liberty.
- [47:07]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
I don't define humanity as American and non American, just as decent people who want justice for everyone who can look beyond your skin color or where you born and people who just hate themselves. No one helped me more than my good American brothers and sisters.
- [47:29]
Bob Garfield
Mohammadu. Anyone who has ever had psychotherapy knows the process of revisiting bad memories and how traumatic that can be. You endured not just bad memories, but 14 years of hell on earth. How hellish was the process of reliving it line by line, page by page.
- [47:55]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
I was so scared, so afraid. Because like you said, they say that subconscious does not know the difference between actual stuff and stuff that we think about. It's not easy. I'm not going to play the hero here. It was very painful work and a lot of thinking spending night. What was this? What was I talking about here? And so, and with the help of my good friend and brother Larry, we got the product that you have now.
- [48:30]
Bob Garfield
Many of the reviewers of Guantanamo Diaries remarked on the spirit of your book, the tone, the absence of bitterness. How can you not be weighted down with bitterness and resentment and rage and even vindictiveness?
- [48:51]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
Because I want to win. I hate to lose to anyone. I figured if I'm a bitter person, if I give space to someone who doesn't deserve it, in my head, I let them win. I will not help you destroy me.
- [49:06]
Bob Garfield
So you're such a sore loser that you won't condemn the benefit of your rage?
- [49:14]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
Absolutely. I don't have guns. I don't have planes. I don't have dictators around the world on my payroll. I don't have the media, all the above. The US government has. So they define the narrative. They define who is good, who is bad. I don't have any of that. But I have one thing. I don't have to hate anyone. I don't have to vindicate what they say I am.
- [49:43]
Bob Garfield
During the Obama administration, the fate of Guantanamo and those prisoners was the subject of an ongoing debate, hand wringing in the Obama White House about the conflict between trying to keep the homeland protected and also to afford basic human rights to detainees. There is no such tension in the current administration. Guantanamo is off the radar. What is your greatest fear about that?
- [50:20]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
I always hope and pray that they close Guantanamo Bay, because Guantanamo Bay is a travesty of justice. American people are better than that. And my fear, I hope that I am wrong is that America carries on this tradition of kidnapping and torturing people without the rule of law, and that they carry on the legacy of Guantanamo Bay, even expanding it, because now people start to accept it. And that is very, very fearsome to me.
- [50:56]
Bob Garfield
Muhammadu, thank you very, very much.
- [50:58]
Mohammadu Ould Slahi
God bless you. Thank you for having me.
- [51:00]
Bob Garfield
Mohammedu Old Slahi is the author of Guantanamo Diary, which was released last month in its unredacted form. That's it for this week's show on the Media is produced by Alana Casanova Burgess, Jesse Brennaman, Michael Loewenger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Monique Laborde, and our show was edited this week by our executive producer, Katya Rogers. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Sam Baer and Terence Bernardo. Jim Schachter is WNYC's Vice President for news. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote. Our theme on the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Bob Garfield.
- [51:50]
Sean Hannity
On the Media is supported by the Ford foundation, the John S. And James L. Knight foundation, and the listeners of WNYC Radio.
- [51:58]
Bob Garfield
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