Booksmart Studios

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Channel • 2 Shows

Society & Culture

Society & Culture

Updated weekly
Society & Culture

Society & Culture

Every two weeks

24/04/2023

Picture of Health

Some languages adopt their “health” word from the concept of wholeness — a metaphor that makes perfect sense. Other languages, however, adopt their “health” word from trees. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

24/04/2023

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26 min
21/08/2023

What Is Miami English?

A recent study suggests that a new dialect is emerging in the southern part of Florida. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

21/08/2023

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29 min
17/09/2021

What Would Jesus Inject?

Bob looks at how the so-called “religious exemption” for COVID-19 mandates is the latest assault on secular law and a grave risk to the nation. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

17/09/2021

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18 min
13/08/2021

It Wasn't Me. It Was My Dog.

Bob talks with Princeton scholar Orestis Papakyriakopoulos about the social media titan’s latest assault on transparency, and the all-too-familiar blame-shifting that followed it. That has become standard operating procedure from a company Bob describes as “amoral, except when it’s immoral.” TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 4: It Wasn't Me, It Was My Dog. Last week, Facebook abruptly shut down a research program by scholars, at New York University's Ad Observatory, who had been monitoring the company's political advertising inventory. NEWSCASTER: Now, this whole battle started on Tuesday when Facebook disabled the accounts of researchers at the NYU Ad Observatory, Facebook explaining, quote, “NYU’s Ad Observatory project studied political ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook in violation of our terms of service. We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people's privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC order.” BG: Yes, Facebook's product management director, Mike Clark, claimed in a blog post that the company's hands were tied by the government. You know, just like Son of Sam claimed it was his dog who ordered him to kill. Within 24 hours, Wired magazine and others revealed that the FTC consent order provided no such thing. Even the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection weighed in, with acting director Samuel Levine writing to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying, quote, “I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter.” Please note that Levine didn't say surprised, just disappointed, because the history of Facebook is the history of Facebook conducting itself in disappointing ways, voicing shame and regret from the bottom of its heart, and then returning to deceptive and greedy business as usual. MARK ZUCKERBERG (MONTAGE): We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake. This was a major breach of trust and, and I'm really sorry that this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data. And if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.NEWSCASTER: In 2003, Zuckerberg apologized in the Harvard Crimson for any harm done after his website FaceMash asked users to rate people's hotness. Three years later, Zuckerberg said Facebook, quote, “really messed this one up,” following user complaints that the newly launched news feed invaded their privacy.NEWSCASTER: Zuckerberg apologized once again in 2007 for an uproar over the company's Beacon advertising system, saying, “I know we can do better.” BG: That last part courtesy of CBS News. So the FTC wasn't surprised about the latest phony excuse for systematic opacity, and neither was Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a postdoctoral research director at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He's speaking to me from Athens, Greece. Orestis, welcome to Bully Pulpit. ORESTIS PAPAKYRIAKOPOULOS: Glad to be here, Bob. BG: All right, we'll get to your work shortly. But I want to begin with the NYU project. What were they studying? OP: So, the NYU researchers had an Ad Observatory project. They were trying to monitor what ads are placed on Facebook and who sees them, like which demographics are targeted and so on — in order to provide additional transparency on how online advertising takes place. BG: And what was the method? Were they, in fact, scraping content or metadata from the site in some clandestine fashion, as Facebook alleged? OP: No, actually, they've developed a plugin that you put on your browser, the Ad Observer, and they asked users all over the world to use their plugin, and practically the plugin was recording what the users saw. So in this way, they could see which ads a user was targeted. BG: Wait, so when Facebook invoked protecting user privacy, all of the users had proactively downloaded the browser extension and were giving explicit permission to the NYU people to see what ads they were being served. OP: Exactly, but when Facebook uses the term users, they mean the advertisers who placed the ads. The advertisers did not give their permission to NYU to collect the information about the targeted ads. BG: [chuckling] OP: Yeah, exactly. BG: I see, so the advertisers who pay money to have their ads seen we're skittish about having their ads seen. OP: Exactly. BG: Now, the whole point of the Facebook algorithm is that consumers get more and more content they have demonstrated interest in by clicking on it or commenting or sharing. That very same algorithm, though, takes the same user behavior data and allows advertisers to micro target to exactly the consumer profile they're most interested in, whether to buy a car or toothpaste or a political worldview. OP: Yeah, so Facebook's business model until today is to use this data they collect to place personalized advertisements and they sell the space and they sell the tool they've developed so advertisers can place their ads. BG: Selling the tools they've developed. This gets to the next sensitive area of privacy, because the FTC order that the company invoked last week came with a five billion dollar fine for violating an earlier 2012 consent decree after Facebook was caught not only being careless, but mercenary with users personal data. Can you remind me what the specifics were of the original complaint? OP: Sure. So back in 2012, the FTC claimed that Facebook was violating numerous privacy rules. And more specifically, for example, users believed that they had put their accounts to private settings or some information that they had on their profile were not public, but advertisers still had the opportunity to collect this data. Another example of what was violated back then is that although users were deleting their profiles or saying that taking their information down, third party entities were still able to collect this data, although the users had removed their consent access on the platform. BG: So then came the new order in 2019, in which the FTC said Facebook was found to be, quote, “deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.” Can you summarize the 2019 case? OP: Sure. So going back to 2012, because Facebook violated specific rules, the FTC said that Facebook needs to change how it functions to make more clearer representations of what holds in privacy terms and what not, to inform users as well as to switch off all these back doors that gave data about users to third party individuals. And although Facebook started doing that, for example, what happened is that although new apps were not able to get this data, if you had an older up, you still were able to collect information. And this is the window that was exploited also by Cambridge Analytica, that the company used an app that was created in the past for a different purpose and started collecting data about users, and these data the users have not given their consent to give the data to the company. BG: And this wasn't like, oops, careless of me. This had to have been done with malice aforethought. OP: Yeah. So definitely Cambridge Analytica did it because they found an opportunity there to collect all this data. I don't know if Facebook knew about the backdoor or not, but definitely they did not do their job right. BG: And then sat on the information for two years before the story finally blew up in the media. OP: And going back to now to 2019, the FTC said, hey, Facebook did not conform to our claims. There are still issues with data privacy and Facebook need to conform to the older rules. Plus, there were some new issues that appeared. For example, Facebook need to make more transparency in how they use their face recognition technology and their platform. The FTC implemented stronger accountability mechanisms in cases that Facebook violates against the norm, and so on. BG: So once again, disappointing but unsurprising. And just ,as is was the case with Cambridge Analytica, simply astonishing indifference to the abuse of its targeting algorithm. And this is whether permitting Trump friendly or Boris Johnson friendly foreign agents to spread toxic lies in a political campaign, or the Myanmar Buddhist military to incite pogroms with false accusations against the Muslim Rohingya minority. I've often described the company as amoral, except when it is immoral. Would you care to argue against that proposition? OP: So definitely Facebook as every company, they look at their self-interest. This is what they were doing in the past and they are keep doing now. Their model is to collect as much data they can and find ways to sell it to get the most profit out of it. That also means that not disclosing a lot of things that are going on on the platform because these might make them accountable and also make them impose restrictions on their business model. BG: And in fact, in the Cambridge Analytica affair, there were a number of universities and the United States Senate trying to look into how it could have all taken place. Facebook vowed transparency, but instead actually tried to stymie some researchers by failing to make its API fully available and so on. How cooperative were they even when they were most in the crucible following Cambridge Analytica? OP: Generally, Facebook I think that transparency efforts of Facebook belong more to the marketing part of the company rather than an actual effort of the company to be more open with scientists and policy makers and so on. So they always try to give minimal data under rules that protect them 100 percent. And also the quality of the data information they provide usually is not able to answer key questions about the nature of the platform, how does i

13/08/2021

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27 min
27/08/2021

Crime of the Century

Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. He discusses the tobacco industry’s 20th-century campaign to make its addictive and deadly product somehow acceptable — and its 21st-century campaign to do it all again. * FULL TRANSCRIPT * GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I’m Bob Garfield with Episode 6: Crime of the Century. OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body. If you eliminate the combustion, you actually can achieve a very, very significant reduction in exposure to the toxicants. GARFIELD: In our last episode, we heard from Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak as he boasted about Philip Morris’s plan to convert half of its business to non-combustible tobacco products by the year 2025 — a strategy that impresses Wall Street and part of the public-health community, but to others is merely reminiscent of a century of Big Tobacco manipulation, cynicism and fatal lies. In that story we heard briefly from Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. This week, we return to the professor and the subject of the Cigarette Century, so deadly and corrupt.Allan, welcome to Bully Pulpit. BRANDT: Thanks so much for having me. GARFIELD: The tobacco industry has a long and dark history, going back at least to the early 50s when the evidence of smoking's dangers became an existential threat to cigarette sales. Can you tell me what the research was at that turning point? BRANDT: There’d been a lot of research going all the way back to the middle of the 19th century about the possible harms of smoking, but there wasn't fully substantiated knowledge, I would argue, til right around 1950. But then things changed quickly and radically because a group of early epidemiologists, both in England and the United States, began to study smokers and what happened to their health, and they began to study lung cancer patients and what their smoking behaviors had been. And they came up with incredibly robust and important findings that were published around 1950, ’52 and three, more studies by 1954. And all of them reached one absolute conclusion, which was that smoking was actually a cause of lung cancer and likely other diseases that would be studied subsequently, especially heart disease, stroke and other cancers. GARFIELD: So of course, the industry said, oh my God, this is terrible news. We can see that we're merchants of death and we will henceforth get out of the cigarette business and into selling wintergreen candy. Right? BRANDT: That's not exactly what happened. Here you have a multi-million dollar industry confronted by scientific evidence that their product causes disease and death. And so the tobacco executives started to put their heads together and figure out, how do we respond to this? Do we say the science is bad? Do we just disregard it? Do we try to incriminate the scientist who produced this? And eventually what happens is that in December, 1953, the six major CEOs of the big tobacco companies get together at the Plaza Hotel in New York to consider the way forward because they knew that they were in a massive crisis in terms of their industry. And they called in probably the nation's most powerful and influential public relations executive, John Hill, to consult with them. And he listened to them for a while. And then he said, I don't think you understand how to do this. What you need to do is create uncertainty. Don't deny that these studies have appeared. Just say there's much more we need to learn. We need more science. And in a sense, one of the things that Hill told them is if you don't like the science that's coming out, begin to develop your own science. Find skeptics, find marginal scientific and medical people, give them grants and have them produce science that will serve the interest of your industry. What the tobacco industry really introduced in the early to mid 50s was the idea: How can we confuse science? How can we obscure what's coming out? How can we make people say, you know, there's a debate, we just don't know? A lot of physicians and scientists were coming out, 1952, 1953, saying we need to regulate cigarettes, we need to tell our patients to quit. A lot of doctors did quit and by the early 1960s, the industry's campaign — based on Hill’s principles — really led to people saying we just don't have enough evidence yet. GARFIELD: Now, as you mentioned, 70 years ago the research showed the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer based on health outcomes and behaviors for large study populations. But it wasn't laboratory science on a cellular level. So this opens some space for creating doubt, circumstantial evidence, blah, blah, blah. You have identified the industry's three pronged strategy. BRANDT: Yes. The three points were essentially that the evidence of the harms of smoking were inconclusive, that cancers had many causes and what we would really need is much more intensive research to resolve a publicly important question and that no one was more committed to the idea of learning more, investigating more completely and resolving this question. And then, of course, if we ever do find anything in cigarettes that might be harmful, we will take the lead in fixing our product and assuring the health of the public. GARFIELD: Yeah, like this Chesterfield commercial from the late fifties. The interviewer was a familiar face to the audience of the day: George Fenneman. GEORGE: As you watch, an electronic miracle is taking place as a stream of electrons creates this television picture. Here tonight is another electronic miracle, destined to affect your lives even more than television. This new electronic miracle, AccuRay, means that everything from auto tires to ice cream, battleship steel to cigarettes, can be made better and safer for you. Now meet Mr. Bert Chope, brilliant young president of Industrial Nucleonics. Well Bert, exactly what is AccuRay? CHOPE: Well, George, it is a device by which a stream of electrons passes through and analyzes the product while it is actually being made. They transferred what they see to this electronic brain, which adjusts the production machinery for errors down to millionths of an inch. GEORGE: Well, I always ask the question so many people ask me. How does AccuRay make Chesterfield a better cigarette than was ever possible before? CHOPE: Every cigarette made with AccuRay control contains a more precise measure of perfectly packed tobaccos, so Chesterfield smokes smoother, without hotspots or a hard draw. GEORGE: That’s why Chesterfield tastes better and is best for you. Bert, what’s your cigarette? CHOPE: You see, I know what AccuRay can do. GARFIELD: “Better for you,” like Kent’s micronite filter and Marlboro Lights were supposedly — but not actually — better for you. But apart from — excuse the expression “puffery” — they stacked the deck with putatively legitimate scientists. BRANDT: They found a group that was hostile to epidemiology, that was committed to the idea that cancers have to be genetic. They hired a lot of people who were highly sympathetic to eugenic notions of genetics and elitism. And then the other thing they did is they gave out a lot of money to scientists. So in my research, I found a young scientist — his grant from the government had run out and they were very good at identifying these folks who were not really fully succeeding and saying, well, we can give you a grant and here's what we want you to do. And then when they produced papers, they edited the papers, they turned them around. Whenever there was a paper that seemed to be hesitant about the connection between smoking and disease, they would make sure it appeared in the press. And they really said there are two sides to this story. The media, in a sense, supported the Hill principles because the media was very committed to the idea that every story has two sides. GARFIELD: The same kind of false balance in, let's say, climate coverage, where climate denialists are given, you know, equal time with global scientific consensus. BRANDT: What the climate science world is based on are the principles of what today are widely called the tobacco industry playbook. So you set up these, like, industry funded, so-called independent research agencies — you know, the Center for Indoor Air Research. And what it turns out is that they're funded by industry and they collect scientists and materials as if they were independent. And the tobacco industry worked very, very concertedly to produce this alternative. And one of the arguments I'm prepared to make is the tobacco industry invented disinformation at this scale. GARFIELD: You were talking about the the cult of false balance, which is a longstanding journalistic reflex. But there's something else, and that is that as a revenue source, tobacco advertising was one of the two or three largest sectors for television and newspapers and magazines. So while the harm of tobacco was reported, there were huge disincentives for the media into taking sides. Do you think that that disincentive was corrupting? BRANDT: I do. I think that one of the things that the tobacco industry also invented, in a sense, were these very powerful conflicts of interest and in the largesse of the companies and their deep pockets really corrupted a number of critical social institutions, to some degree journalism. But in many ways, I would emphasize how it corrupted our political processes. And today, we give a lot of

27/08/2021

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34 min
28/01/2022

Nobody Knows Anything, Part 2

In the second part of Bob’s conversation with author Emer Gentway, they discuss the capacity of Zen to open our minds and diminish our dangerous levels of certainty. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

28/01/2022

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25 min
20/08/2021

Where There's No Smoke, There's Fire

The 174-year-old tobacco company spent much of its life blowing a cloud of deceit around the deadly effects of its signature product. Now eager for a do-over, PMI’s highly advertised “Unsmoke the World” initiative seems strangely noble, until you start asking questions. * FULL TRANSCRIPT * TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I’m Bob Garfield. This is episode five: Where There’s No Smoke, There’s Fire. It’s been a hot and violent and infectious and altogether unsettling summer, in the midst of which — in the New York Times and all over the internet — emerged this: Philip-Morris International CEO Yatzick Olczak in an ad campaign speaking about the dangers of cigarettes. OLCZAK: The science exists today and there is no time to spare to solve the problem of smoking. The problem of smoking? From the maker of Marlboro’s? There’s an attention getter. A bona fide Merchant of Death vowing to phase out cigarettes in favor of so-called smoke-free products, like his company’s non-combustible IQOS. TUTORIAL: Say hello to new IQOS heat control technology. Using it couldn’t be easier. Remove the IQOS holder from the pocket charger, insert the tobacco stick tobacco side down in the holder and up to the silver line. Turn on, and when the LED turns solid green you can start to experience the true taste of real tobacco by heating, not burning it. The goal, Philip Morris says, is for smoke-free products to represent half of the company’s revenue within four years. “Unsmoke the world,” is the slogan. OLCZAK: The prime cause of harm generated by the smoking is an outcome of the combustion. Okay? When you burn the cigarette, when you burn the tobacco you release the thousands of the chemicals. Many of those chemicals, they are very bad for the human body. Olczak says this as if it’s a fresh revelation, but it’s still jarring to hear Phillip Morris, of all institutions, speak of smoking as a scourge. And to bet the corporate future on a gizmo that aims to obsolete its core product. Listen to the man’s frustration that there are skeptics who are not immediately accepting IQOS as a triumph of science and technology. OLCZAK: I do recognize that there is still a group of people who don’t believe us. That’s fine. So, it’s perfectly okay to disagree with us, but it is not perfectly okay to deprive yourself from the ability to have a dialogue with us, to listen, to have a conversation, to read our science. We know that our vision is right, because of the impact PMI has on the society to solve the problem of smoking and the faster we recognize this whole thing and start working on a strategy, the better we all together will be. Oh, OK, now he’s playing more to type — informing us that it is unacceptable to ignore Big Tobacco on the question of reducing tobacco’s harm. Oh, is it now? Those of us of a certain age can vaguely remember — whaddayacallit? — the 20th century, during the entirety of which Big Tobacco denied, for example, any link to cancer. REP. WAXMAN: In a deposition last year, you were asked whether cigarette smoking causes cancer. Your answer was, quote, “I don’t believe so.” Do you stand by that answer today?TISCH: I do, sir.REP. WAXMAN: Do you understand how isolated you are in that belief from the entire scientific community?TISCH: I do, sir. That was from a 1994 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, in which Congressman Henry Waxman famously confronted Lorillard CEO Andrew Tisch and six other tobacco bosses. But “isolated” wasn’t the half of it. For decades, the industry denied links to heart and lung disease, denied the addictiveness of nicotine, denied chemically augmenting nicotine’s effects, denied marketing to children — all the while actively undercutting scientific findings, actively producing junk science, falsely claiming filtered and so-called “light” cigarettes were safer and propping up a variety of sciency-sounding front groups — such as the Council for Tobacco Research — that seemed all distinguished and s**t but existed only to obscure the deadly truth about smoking. Which is why, by the way, when Philip Morris noisily pledged $80 million to help underwrite The Foundation for a Smoke Free World, both the World Health Organization and the UN General Assembly cited conflict of interest in telling Big Tobacco to butt out. Nonetheless, the promise of getting the deadly smoke out of smoking has captured many an imagination, including Wall Street’s, which has rewarded Phillip Morris and other tobacco makers with bigger share prices and rosy outlooks from stock pickers. Because, the thinking goes, while it’s counterintuitive to steer into a skid, that’s the way to regain traction. PUNDIT: This is all kind of part of Philip Morris’s general rebranding away from smoking products and cigarettes. And they’re really seeing the writing on the wall here as cigarette sales in higher income countries continue to dwindle and they’re coming under increasing pressure from many governments to curtail their cigarette sales. It’s really become in their best interest to kind of make this general shift away from cigarettes and nicotine. That’s from Britain’s I24 business news. Lo and behold, analysts from Chase, Stiffel Nicklaus, UBS, JP Morgan, Morningstar Research and stock-predictor engine Trefis, have rated Philip Morris International a buy. At about 100 bucks a share, it’s price has grown more than 40% in the past 10 months. Of course, while stock prices are historically a highly reliable measure of public sentiment, one thing the free market is notoriously free of is conscience. As a universe, investors are concerned with ongoing earnings growth and nothing else, which is why, as the planet burns to a cinder, Exxon Mobil’s share price has doubled in the past year. What’s surprising about the smoke-free strategy is that it also has been embraced by a significant cohort of the public health community. This is an excerpt of a video from Public Health England, in which doctors Lion Shahab and Rosemary Leonard show a dramatic experiment comparing the output of burning tobacco versus the nearly pristine vapor from smokeless cigarettes. SHAHAB: My research shows that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful than cigarettes. A big reason why is the tar, which you can see here, which is not produced by e-cigarettes but produced by cigarettes. The impact of using e-cigarettes in the long-term is very similar to using licensed nicotine products such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum, as you can see here when you compare the control jar with the vapor jar.LEONARD: So, this experiment shows that every cigarette you smoke causes tar to enter your body and it’s the tar that contains the poisonous chemicals that spread through the bloodstream.SHAHAB: Which are linked to diseases such as heart disease, stroke and cancer. That’s one view. There is also an opposite one, as voiced by Dr. Vinayak Prasad, head of the World Health Organization’s tobacco control division. PRASAD: Switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is not quitting, number one. Number two, we don’t see the smokers switch to e-cigarettes 100 percent. The dual use is again very harmful. What we are also seeing is that more and more younger people are taking to e-cigarettes and then later progressing to tobacco. As for Philip Morris, he told the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, quote: If they really want to be a part of the solution, they should go tobacco-free, not smoke-free. If they are genuine about a tobacco-free society, they will readily embrace anything to reduce the demand for all forms of tobacco products. Anything else, he says, is a “criminal act and a human rights violation.” In other words, within the tobacco-control universe, a schism — a polarizing debate hinging on the lesser of two evils. Ruth E. Malone is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor of the journal Tobacco Control. MALONE: We are adding all these new additional products and we are still sorting out what the overall public health impact of that is going to be. So is the impact going to be that, as some people say, it definitely is helpful for them in getting off cigarettes, but others revert back to smoking cigarettes and you just have a larger market of people using tobacco and nicotine products rather than actually reducing the damage from those products. The Public Health England tar experiment would seem to be a vivid and maybe even mic-drop argument for society gratefully accepting smoke-free technology. But to Malone, the whole schism-framing may itself be problematic. She worries that viewing the debate on stark, binary terms obscures a less obvious and highly dangerous element of Big Tobacco’s strategy — namely, as Philip Morris’s Olzcak insisted — claiming that its expertise has earned the industry a role in governmental decisions about tobacco regulations, treaties and laws. She posed a rhetorical question if ever there was one. MALONE: Should an industry that produces the single most deadly consumer product in history be involved in regulatory decisions about what to do about it and other products that are potentially supplanting or replacing or adding on to the damages caused by cigarettes? So, never mind “lesser of two evils.” How about “the fox guarding the henhouse.” MALONE: Part of the problem now is that, as they do periodically with some frequency, some tobacco companies are engaged in a big makeover, a part of which is aimed at undermining the tobacco control movement on a global level. We have to think not just about the United States, but also what's happening globally, where countries are trying to implement the world

20/08/2021

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26 min
15/10/2021

Shopping for a Foxtrap

Bob thinks the repeated chicanery, misrepresentation and outright lies of the self-proclaimed “news” channel might offer an opportunity for prosecution or litigation under RICO — a.k.a. the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. After saying so on social media, and being ridiculed for his naïveté, Bob takes the question to experts. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

15/10/2021

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35 min
10/09/2021

The Outsider

Bob speaks with “The Outsider” co-director Steve Rosenbaum about his film documenting the fraught creation of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 8: The Outsider. It has been twenty years since the bloody horrors of September 11th, 2001 scarred lower Manhattan and the American psyche. Within three years of the terror acts that claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives, plans were underway to commemorate the fateful day and its events for posterity. The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum would be constructed on the hallowed footprint of the atrocity. A decade later, the half-billion dollar project would be opened to the public. Here was President Barack Obama at the dedication ceremony: OBAMA: A nation that stands tall and united and unafraid -- because no act of terror can match the strength or the character of our country. Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us; nothing can change who we are as Americans. GARFIELD: That was perhaps a fitting tribute to a new national shrine, the memorial part of the project that must necessarily dwell in the grief, the sacrifice, the heroism that so dominate the 9/11 narrative. But what Obama left out was the museum part and its role of exploration, illumination and inquiry, such as where do those acts of terror and their bloody toll fit into the broader sweep of history, into America's story, into our understanding of human events before and since? If the dedication ceremony was appropriately a moment for communion and remembrance and resolve, surely the ongoing work of the museum would go beyond the heroism and sacrifice to the complex history and geopolitics that led to 9/11 evil. SHULAN: One of the key meta narratives of this exhibition, one of the most important things about this exhibition, is to say to people, “Use your eyes, look around you, look at the world and understand what you're seeing.” And if we don't do that with the material that we're presenting to people, then how can we give them that message? How will that message ever get through? GARFIELD: A new documentary by husband and wife filmmakers Pam Yoder and Steve Rosenbaum offers an inside view of the creation of the 9/11 Museum. It tells the story of the storytellers as they labor for a decade, collecting artifacts, designing exhibits, and editing the narratives flowing from that fateful day. And its protagonist was a relatively minor character who was propelled by internal conflict among the museum's planners into a central role in this story. The film is called “The Outsider,” available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu, Facebook and other platforms. Steve Rosenbaum joins me now. Steve, welcome to Bully Pulpit. ROSENBAUM: I am so glad to be here, because I've always wanted to be on a bully pulpit. GARFIELD: Uh huh. Well, congratulations. You have achieved your dream, perhaps your destiny. OK, first, a whole lot of disclosure. You and I have been friends for most of our adult lives, so about 100 years, and I've been following your progress in getting this movie made for a long time. And furthermore, at more or less the last minute this summer, I stepped in to help write the narration and ended up voicing it in your movie. So I'm not exactly bringing critical distance into this conversation, but I still have a lot of questions. You ready? ROSENBAUM: I am ready indeed. GARFIELD: OK, so not only have you made a feature length movie about a process, it is a feature length movie about the process of museum curation with most of the action taking place around conference tables. So what I'm saying is Fast and Furious, it isn't. ROSENBAUM: You know, the Blue Room, which is the conference room you're referring to, was both the magical place where the magic happened and also a bit of our albatross because it is, in fact, a conference. GARFIELD: So in the end, though, you do manage to capture quite a bit of drama, quite a bit of drama, but there is no way you could have anticipated, when you got started, what would emerge over these years and -- how many hours of film? ROSENBAUM: 670. GARFIELD: Over how long a period of time? ROSENBAUM: Six and a half years. GARFIELD: How did you come to be a fly on the wall for six and a half years as they undertook this project? ROSENBAUM: So we negotiated with a then non-existent museum to trade them a very precious, valuable archive that my wife and I had lovingly gathered over many years in exchange for access to the construction, design, and development of the museum. And I think at the beginning, everyone thought it was fairly harmless. Like, what could go wrong? I mean, the museum will be fantastic and they'll record all of its fantasticalness, and that will be a film. GARFIELD: When you went in there for those six and a half years, it was purely as a matter of documentation, right? You didn't walk in with a premise or a hypothesis or a scenario or an angle, much less an agenda. But there must have been some sort of core interest, some focus when you undertook this project. ROSENBAUM: You have to remember that in the weeks after 9/11, particularly in New York, there was this extraordinary feeling of camaraderie and connectedness, both among New Yorkers and also around the world. And the sense that maybe what would come of this terrible day is some real goodness, that people would understand each other, that we'd be part of a global community. And so, we brought that, what now seems like naive optimism, to the museum. And they, at least in the early days, fueled that. I mean, they said to us, “We're going to build a different kind of museum. It's going to be open and participatory. It's going to be democratic.” And, you know, that worked for us as filmmakers. We thought a different kind of museum in a country that's gone through a terrible day and hopefully will come out of it stronger and wiser and, you know, more introspection-- GARFIELD: But as of at least a year ago, you really didn't know what your film was going to be about. You didn't really have a movie scenario. ROSENBAUM: Well, you have to start with the problem that we had as a filmmaker, as filmmakers, which was a) No one gives a s**t about museums and how they're made. There's zero public interest in that. And then secondly, as it turned out, no one really gave a s**t about the museum. Nobody went to it other than tourists. Thoughtful people, historians, scholars, New Yorkers, media people didn't go there in droves. So, we're like, “How do we make a movie about a museum nobody cares about?” And in fact, the museum opened in 2014 and we spent three or four years fumfering around trying to get our arms around a movie we could make and pretty much gave up. And then Pam, my filmmaking partner and life partner and smarter person than I am, came to me one day and she said, “You know, I think there's a scene that might help.” And she came out with this little -- in her hand, this little Hi 8 tape, she handed it to me, said, “Put it in the deck.” And it was this exhibit in Soho. It was a photo exhibit, which I actually remember going to and some of your listeners may remember as well. It was called “Here is New York,” and it was literally the first crowdsourced photo exhibit in history. All of these people with little mini cameras made pictures of 9/11. And this character, a guy named Michael Shulan, who is a kind of a failed author, owned a little storefront gallery that had been essentially empty, put a picture on the window. And what exploded there was this spectacular collection of real person pictures. And so, the scene that Pam found was of this guy, who we had at that point never met -- one of our camera people had recorded him -- telling the story of why they gathered these pictures. SHULAN: We've asked basically that anyone bring us their pictures and we will display them. And to date we’ve probably had sixty or seventy people who’ve brought in pictures in the past two days. GARFIELD: So two things. One, this clip Pam found was from video you guys had shot twenty years ago for a previous movie about 9/11’s aftermath called “Seven Days in September.” And you watch it and you're like, “Holy hell, that's Michael.” He is one of the guys who wound up on the museum planning staff, and you have been filming for six and a half years. ROSENBAUM: You know, we have 500 hours of the day of 9/11 and 670 hours shot at the museum construction. It is the definition, the filmmaking definition, of a needle in a haystack. We literally didn't know we had the Shulan scene until Pam magically pulled it out of -- the rabbit out of the hat. And Shulan was one of the five people we had chosen to follow for all six and a half years. And so, the combination of that -- and “Here is New York” is a wonderful kind of mile marker for where the film began because Michael talks about democracy and openness and sharing and letting people kind of find their own story in the photos. And that's exactly what the museum began as. GARFIELD: You say it was a needle in a haystack, finding this film of one of your characters surface. It was also very serendipitous because Shulan, who had the title of museum creative director and who is the “outsider” of the title -- of your title -- is not a professional museum executive or even a professional curator. He had this storefront where he crowdsourced this enormous collection of, you know, amateur images of the day and its aftermath. SHULAN: I live in this little building on Prince Street in Soho, which was inside of the World Trade Center. On the storefront of the empty shop, someone had taped up a copy of the 9/11 morning's newspaper and people were touching this thing and seeming to take some solace in this. And I suddenly r

10/09/2021

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32 min
24/09/2021

Airing Dirty Laundrie

In the ongoing drama surrounding the murder of Gabrielle Petito, Bob realized that the media are telling us everything under the sun, except for what matters most. TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I’m Bob Garfield with Episode 10: Airing Dirty Laundrie. GABRIELLE PETITO: Hello, hello, and good morning. It is really nice and sunny today. It’s only ten o’clock in the morning, but it rained all afternoon yesterday…oh, my God! GARFIELD: That’s from a YouTube post a few weeks ago by wannabe travel vlogger Gabrielle Petito, documenting her cross-country van journey with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie. We see them hiking, taking in sunsets, eating camp-style, hugging and kissing and frolicking, doing cartwheels on Santa Monica beach — two attractive young people living the dream. That the dreamy footage obscured a gathering nightmare, of course, is by now, hardly news to you. FOX NEWS REPORTER: Yeah, good morning Todd and Gillian. Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito were on a cross-country trip they were documenting for their YouTube series, but on September 1st, Brian returned home alone and has been hiding out at his parents’ house, right behind me.Yesterday, North Port police named him a person of interest in this case. GARFIELD: Now, people go missing all the time in this country. One this month was Gregory Martin, a 70-year-old Buford, Georgia man, afflicted with dementia, who strayed away from his optometrist’s office. You did not see anything about him on the news before he turned up safe and sound. You probably haven’t heard of Quawan Charles, who was 15 when he went missing last year from his rural Louisiana home. If you were to Google “missing teenagers 2020,” you wouldn’t find his picture. A lot of white schoolgirls, not a lot of black male schoolboys. His disappearance did not captivate the nation, or even the local police. LOCAL TV REPORTER: The family called the Baldwin Police Department and St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s office to report him missing. Although the family asked that an amber alert be issued, officers declined to do so. The family claims the police downplayed their concerns, including speculating Charles may simply be attending a football game and not answering his phone. Charles’ body was found days later, on November 3rd, in a wooded area about thirty minutes from his hometown. GARFIELD: And incredibly, in 2019, more than 5,590 Native American women were reported missing. You cannot name a single one of them. But when I say Natalee Holloway, or Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy — all of whom were TV news fodder for weeks or months at a time over the past couple of decades — you can most likely tell their heartbreaking stories, most likely in intimate detail. This is called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term coined twenty years ago by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, and lately invoked by the New York Times and others in a “here-we-go-again” sort of way. This was Good Morning America: GOOD MORNING AMERICA REPORTER: Gabby Petito is one of so many reported missing each year. At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing persons cases. 45% of those cases: people of color. Petito’s story has renewed debate about which cases get attention and the media’s seeming infatuation with missing white women. GARFIELD: If anything about that surprises you — I mean, anything — I don’t even know what to say. Lookit: by American TV-news standards, the fact that Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson were brunette was practically affirmative action. So, of coursethe fate of skinny, blonde Gabby Petito, unlike Quawon Charles, has gripped the country as an irresistible true-crime mystery played out in real time. Clue by clue. Revelation by revelation. Twist by twist. Newsbreak by newsbreak — tragedy as infotainment, costumed (with all the obligatory sobriety and furrowed anchor brows) as journalism. LOCAL TV REPORTER: That’s right Keith, good evening to you. North Port police admitted this search warrant last week. The detective writes that Gabby Petito’s phone had been shut off for at least fifteen days. The investigator also says... TRAVEL BLOGGER 1: This is most definitely Gabby Petito’s Ford transit van. TRAVEL BLOGGER 2: And I slowed it down, so you can possibly see it a little bit better. ABC NEWS REPORTER: In the last 24 hours, we’ve gotten more information on the final days leading up to Gabby’s disappearance. Police just released audio of a 911 call out of Utah, where the caller reported seeing a domestic fight between Gabby and Brian on August 12th... CLARK COUNTY 911 CALL: “We drove by and the gentleman was slapping the girl.”“He was slapping her?”“Yes. And then we stopped, they ran up and down the sidewalk, he proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car, and they drove off.” ABC NEWS REPORTER: Police in Utah pulled the couple over last month, after responding to calls of a domestic incident while they were road tripping across the country. Officers said Petito was crying... POLICE BODY CAM: “What’s your guys’ names?”“Gabby.”“I’m Brian.” “Gabby, Brian. Ok. What’s going on? Why are you crying?” “I’m not crying. We’ve just been fighting this morning.” FBI PRESSER: Human remains were discovered consistent with the description of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito. CNN REPORTER: The news coming as the search is intensifying for Gabby Petito’s fiance, Brian Laundrie, whose parents told police he disappeared a week ago today. LOCAL TV REPORTER: Yesterday, they, along with the FBI and several other agencies, spent the weekend scouring through the Carlton Reserve at the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park. They have not found anything yet. The search ended just after six pm last night. North Port police have yet to tell us if they plan to resume that search there today, but I can tell you it is a very large, dense place with lots of shrubs, so it will take some time to get through. LOCAL TV REPORTER: Detective work, DNA and digital foots prints. The FBI is fanning out and zeroing in. From a North Port family home to Wyoming. GARFIELD: Gabby’s death is obviously an unspeakable tragedy for her, for her loved ones, and for the loved ones of Brian Laundrie. For almost everyone else on the planet, it’s merely pulp non-fiction — undoubtedly destined to be formally Hollywoodized in a four-part streaming series. Which, wholly apart from the implicit racism, is tragic itself. There are deep problems in this world, politically and environmentally, and the media and audience both have invested their scarce time resources in a morbid drama that offers virtually no significance, no insight, no meaning to anyone but the principals. There is one flicker of possibility, about which more in a moment, but I need to remind you what all-Gabby-all-the-time has squeezed out of the news. VALERIE MASON: With further warming in the coming years, we expect to see new extremes that are unprecedented in magnitude, frequency, timing, or in regions that have never encountered those types of extremes. GARFIELD: That was climate scientist Valerie Mason-Delmotte, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a couple of weeks ago, joining the UN General Assembly in declaring Code Red for Humanity. ABC NEWS REPORTER: The report’s authors are essentially sending the world’s leaders a final wake-up call: Curb emissions and dramatically reduce consumption, or face a world that is fundamentally different. GARFIELD: Yeah, that lasted one news cycle. One. The end of life on Earth as we know it. One news cycle. Oh, we’re awash in coverage of national politics and the latest on Trump’s every utterance, including talking in his sleep, but the death spiral of the media business has meant vastly shrunken newsrooms, vanishing local coverage, empty statehouse bureaus — and the biggest stories in the history of the planet treated like wheat germ occasionally to be sprinkled on the Trump-ruptions. CNN REPORTER: Trump sent a letter riddled with lies to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to decertify the results in Georgia, citing all sorts of debunked claims. GARFIELD: Celebrity crap. REPORTER: The Crown’s Emmy nominated actress, Emma Corrin, made a bizarre fashion statement in a strapless frock and bonnet, quite a different look from her Princess Diana role. GARFIELD: And anti-vaccination a******s disrupting school board meetings. ANTI-VAXXERS: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! GARFIELD: To which we can now add the story of Gabby Petito, who went on a travel adventure seeking fame, and achieved it, posthumously, like some sort of sick cosmic joke. But, as I said, a glimmer. A glimmer of something of value to be drawn from the morbid fascination with this mystery — namely, that it is not especially mysterious. Because as we comb through the endless clues and tidbits gathered by investigators, the press and random online civilians, we discover lurking within this saga a lesson. You’ll recall the traffic stop, by Utah park police, who had seen the couple’s van speeding erratically. The stop lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes, and the bodycam footage displays remarkably engaged and conscientious cops trying to get to the bottom of the couple’s argument, in which Brian got scratched on the face and arms and Gabby had her face squeezed like a dog whose owner is trying to shut it up. What the police discovered, from both subjects, was that the two frequently triggered one another, leading to violent arguments that sometimes got physical. Brian said Gabby was very anxious and emotional and, you know, the girl crazy. And Gabby said, it’s true. This led to a piece of advice from one officer to a crying Gabrielle. The relationship, he sai

24/09/2021

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14 min

Exploring the power of language to inform and misinform. Podcast by Mike Vuolo, Bob Garfield and John McWhorter. If you haven’t yet, please consider a paid subscription to Lexicon Valley. Visit BooksmartStudios.com!

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