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Brooke Gladstone: One topic dominated headlines this week and last.

Judd Legum: Joe Biden is old.

[laughter]

Judd Legum: I'm sorry you all had to find out this way.

Brooke Gladstone: Flood the zone coverage of the president's advanced years made for some awkward moments.

Chris Wallace: Is Biden's age now a bigger political problem than Trump's indictments?

Brooke Gladstone: If so, why? From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Jon Stewart is back on late night. Will his once cutting-edge political commentary hold up today?

Jordan Klepper: Did you save democracy yet?

Jon Stewart: No, I didn't.

[laughter]

Jordan Klepper: Okay. Your '90s brand of snark and both sider-ism.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a pop star turned politician in Uganda on his journey from the slums of Kampala to the leader of a pro-democracy opposition movement.

Bobi Wine: I said, "Okay, now since the Parliament has refused to come to the ghetto, the ghetto will come to the Parliament." [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Late last week, Special Counsel Robert Hur, announced that he won't be charging President Joe Biden for the classified documents found in his residences. Hur's several hundred-page report explains that Biden fully complied with the investigation in contrast to the "serious aggravating facts in Donald J. Trump's classified documents case." The report also included a line that came to define the news cycle.

Presenter 1: Hur's report also described Biden as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory and diminished faculties in advancing age.

Presenter 2: He allegedly forgot the years when he was vice president and when his son died of brain cancer.

Presenter 3: In the last hour, the administration has mounted an angry rebuttal of the counsel's quotes.

President Joe Biden: I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I've been president and I put this country back on its feet.

Micah Loewinger: Biden, at a press conference last Thursday when he fanned the flames with this comment about his handling of the war in Gaza, mixing up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.

President Joe Biden: Initially, the president of Mexico El-Sisi did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in.

Sean Hannity: The Democrats and the left, they are waking up to what we have been telling you on this program for years now.

Micah Loewinger: Sean Hannity of Fox News.

Sean Hannity: That is the White House has a massive problem with Joe Biden. It's an age problem.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, the legacy media, where balanced, clear-eyed coverage might be expected, we saw a rush to flood the zone without much scrutiny of the basic premise, but heaps of speculation on the political implications.

Presenter 4: I'm sure you saw the opinion pieces pouring it over the weekend in The New York Times. Why is the age issue is hurting Biden so much more than Trump?

Chris Wallace: 76% say they have a major or moderate concern about whether Biden has the necessary mental and physical health for a second term.

Micah Loewinger: CNN's Chris Wallace.

Chris Wallace: 76%, while 61% have major or moderate concern about Donald Trump facing multiple felony charges. Lulu, is Biden's age now a bigger political problem than Trump's indictments?

Micah Loewinger: New York Times writer and CNN contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro joined Wallace last Saturday.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I don't mean to laugh, but this is what we're left with. Is the man who's 81 and might die in office in a worse position than the man who's facing absolute legal jeopardy?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, both men are old. Both have had their recent senior moments captured on tape, but age is just one issue among many. Despite their focus on it, political reporters aren't even covering it well.

Charan Ranganath: The problem is people aren't being specific.

Micah Loewinger: This is Charan Ranganath who wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, I'm a Neuroscientist: We're Thinking About Biden's Memory and Age in the Wrong Way. He says people too often conflate recall problems with memory problems.

Charan Ranganath: There's forgetting and there's Forgetting. Forgetting is basically when you have the memory there, but you can't pull it up when you need it. It's not like as if he doesn't know the difference between Mexico and Egypt. It's just that the wrong word came out and so it was an articulation issue. As a memory researcher, I wouldn't even call that a memory issue.

Micah Loewinger: Ranganath takes issue with Special Counsel Robert Hur, a lawyer, not a doctor, noting Biden's struggle to remember the year his son Beau died and the year his vice presidency ended.

Charan Ranganath: These were cited as signs of poor memory. Now, remembering when something happened is not the same as remembering what happened. I would be concerned if somebody were vice president and they didn't remember anything from their last year of the vice presidency, or if there was something very important that happened, I would be worried.

Judd Legum: Yes, Joe Biden is old. I think that's without a doubt a fact, and I think it's a legitimate thing for voters to take into consideration.

Micah Loewinger: Judd Legum tallied the amount of coverage of this issue for his newsletter Popular Information.

Judd Legum: I looked at three major outlets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, The Wall Street Journal, and found that in the four days following the release, there were 81 stories.

Micah Loewinger: 18 from The Wall Street Journal, 33 from The Washington Post, and 30 from The New York Times. The Post and Times disputed his numbers. We reviewed Judd's list, which includes newsletters, wire stories, blogs, and videos. Let's zoom in on the Times coverage, which he's sorted into three buckets.

Judd Legum: There were some straightforward articles just talking about the report, the fact that Hur did not recommend criminal charges, and that he made these judgements about Biden's memory. Then there were the news analysis pieces, which essentially painted this as a political crisis. Then I think the third category were the opinion pieces where things really got even ratcheted up to another level. You started hearing things about how Biden was slipping into dementia, that it proved that he has no business running for reelection, that his mental state was responsible for the emboldenment of America's rivals.

The New York Times editorial board said it was a dark moment for Mr. Biden's presidency. What I think is disingenuous about some of these pieces is that it purports to be just observing and describing what's happening, but actually it's the stories themselves that are creating the crisis. Meaning in the absence of this flood of alarmist coverage about these comments, there really would be no crisis.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, The Times is so gifted at helping set the terms of the national conversation while pretending that that very conversation is playing out without its role.

Judd Legum: Yes, and I think that a lot of the justification for how much coverage there was of these comments by the Special Counsel is justified by noting that in public opinion polling, many people are concerned about Biden's age. That's true, but those concerns are developed through impressions that people gain through reading media coverage. It becomes a bit circular.

Micah Loewinger: In your newsletter, you wrote that incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by some of these same outlets.

Judd Legum: Yes, there's been a whole bunch of incidents involving Trump that could reasonably raise some questions about his memory. Not from a medical expert perspective, but just from an outside lay observer. He called Viktor Orbán, who's the leader of Hungary, he said he was the leader of Turkey. Also said that Orbán shared a border with Russia, which is not true of Hungary or Turkey. He warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which did happen some time ago. He claimed that he defeated Barack Obama, which was someone he never ran against, that actually never lost a race for the presidency.

The one that actually got the most coverage of all of these incidents was when, recently in a speech in New Hampshire, he repeatedly confused Nikki Haley, who's his primary opponent with the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and essentially talked about how Haley on January 6th, 2021, made all sorts of mistakes about security in the Capitol. Not just once, but this was a lengthy portion of his speech where he mixed this up multiple times. We looked at the same three outlets, that incident was covered a total of 15 times, 9 in The Washington Post, 4 in The New York Times, 2 in The Wall Street Journal. Obviously much less coverage of that incident than of this report about Biden.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to the focus on Biden's age, Judd Legum echoed a sentiment shared by many in the press this week, including Margaret Sullivan in her latest Substack piece, it's not a question of whether to cover this, it's how and how much.

Judd Legum: It's important not only to cover the issues, but to put them in their appropriate context. In my judgment, having read 81 or so articles about this topic, I think that they've missed the mark in this case.

Micah Loewinger: Jack Schaefer, senior media critic for Politico disagrees.

Jack Schaefer: The people who object to the coverage also do score of how many stories were published. What they neglect to mention here is that inside a paper like The New York Times, there are various beats. There's a Justice Department reporter who wrote on it. There's a White House reporter who wrote on it. There's a political reporter who wrote on it. There were at least three or four columnists. This is what typically happens when big news breaks.

Micah Loewinger: Judd Legum, who was reporting on the first few days of The New York Times' coverage of the report, showed that there was a consistent narrative in much of the news analysis that we saw from The New York Times. It was called "a political disaster, a political nightmare, a political crisis, a political mess." A report that was inflicting "a searing political damage on the campaign." Not one of those articles even mentioned that this report was not medical in nature whatsoever.

There was one article during that period of time, it involved interviews with medical professionals who described the limits of what can be gleaned about Biden's mental acuity, his physical strength, how it relates to his ability to govern and lead. That article was not featured in print. That's where I see lack of balance and a lack of, I think, important context.

Jack Schaefer: I'll give you this, The Times coverage wasn't perfect. I think that the Gina Colada story that you're referring to probably should have been into print. Though, if you talk to people at The New York Times or the general reader, the print paper itself is no longer the instrument of record.

The second point is I'm not a doctor either, but during the 2020 campaign, I wrote a piece saying, "Biden is too old and too infirm to run for president." I don't remember any huge outcry during the Trump administration where there were hundreds of articles about Trump's mental state and people were diagnosing him left and right as a paranoid schizophrenic or a crazy man, or a narcissist. No one said, "Well, you can't possibly say this because you're not a psychiatrist."

Micah Loewinger: I do recall psychiatrists writing op-eds basically saying, it's considered a cardinal rule of our practice to not diagnose a patient you haven't seen. I remember having that voice on our show. I'm not saying that that was a particularly well-represented viewpoint, but it was there and I'm seeing some of that again now with respect to Biden. I agree with you that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden could be more forthcoming about health.

Part of my concern is that this coverage is falling into a political game that Republicans are playing in Congress and in the right-wing press one they've been playing for four years. Around the same time that Biden was interviewed by Robert Hur, Politico reported that former house speaker Kevin McCarthy "mocked Biden's age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the President sharp and substantive in their conversation." I think that's pretty useful context for following this storyline. This fits into a very politically fraught messaging campaign.

Jack Schaefer: Now we're onto a different subject that's not about The Times coverage. Obviously, I agree with you that politicians will use any information available to them for their political advantage. During the Trump administration, Democrats were in the foreground talking about Trump's instability and mental dangerousness, so I would give you that point, but once again, this is politics. I don't think that the press has been particularly taken advantage of by Republicans saying that Biden has lost a step.

Micah Loewinger: You were not a fan of Margaret Sullivan's comparison to The Times coverage of Hillary Clinton's email servers ahead of the 2016 election. You don't see any similarities between the Hur report now and then.

Jack Schaefer: I'm going to blow your mind because I also believe that the coverage of Hillary Clinton's email was completely warranted. Hillary Clinton violated existing standards for how emails are supposed to be handled. When this was finally revealed, the emails were released, and one of the reasons when you go in and do the extra search and you find the amazing amount of coverage is that the emails were released in 19 installments between the first one and election day. Yes, it's a feeding frenzy. Who is responsible for chumming the waters for the press? It was Hillary Clinton's behavior.

Micah Loewinger: Again, I don't disagree that the Hillary Clinton email server was newsworthy. It's really a question of contextualizing that coverage with other coverage about the election. I revisited a 2017 study published in the Columbia Journalism Review that found "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." That's what I'm concerned about The Times floods the zone, and as a result, sidelines the big stakes coverage of what this election is about, what the policies that Trump and Biden stand for, and what their administrations would look like.

Jack Schaefer: I couldn't disagree with you more. The emails provided additional context for the Benghazi disaster. It showed that she broke the laws covering the retention of documents for her whole tenure. It exposed sensitive email to potential exploits by hackers. It spilled the details of her confidential diplomatic activities, interactions with foreign leaders. Do you want the press to just write three-line summaries? Practically, all news organizations covered this story heavily because she was running for the presidency of the United States.

Micah Loewinger: I'm just making a case for balance. I'm saying cover these big stories when they happen, but don't get lost in the sauce. The point of the Hillary Clinton comparison was to say that when we had a similar feeding frenzy eight years ago, the stakes did get sidelined. If we just look at the numbers.

Jack Schaefer: I want to go back to 2016. It was only after Clinton lost that people started to scramble for an excuse for why their candidate who they thought was invincible or lost, and they settled on the emails. The fact that he is currently leading the polls, shows that there is some sort of appeal that Trump has to the voters that is beyond the can of political analysis.

Micah Loewinger: Donald Trump's popularity could also be seen as a large number of voters not being that well informed at how potentially disastrous his second term could be.

Jack Schaefer: You think it's disastrous, and I think it would be potentially disastrous. There are lots of voters who actually caught into the ideas of deportation of a private army of a man who says he'll be dictator for a day.

Micah Loewinger: What voters are voting for are two old men. One of them appears much more old and frail, definitely. Let's be honest, the other seems pretty much corrupt to the bone. Both of them will bring staffs into office, and if neither of these men survive their next term or have to fade into the background, their policy agendas will live on. I think that's what's at stake.

Jack Schaefer: You're not satisfied with the choices either.

Micah Loewinger: No.

Jack Schaefer: You would prefer in a heartbeat, a 60-year-old Biden versus an 81-year-old Biden running for reelection, right?

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Jack Schaefer: We should pull out the champagne and celebrate because we finally agreed.

Micah Loewinger: We definitely agree.

Jack Shafer: We finally agreed on something. Rebecca, go get some champagne and I want good stuff.

Micah Loewinger: Jack, we agree. I think the majority of Americans have made it pretty darn clear in their polling that they are not happy with a Biden versus Trump matchup. The fact is that's what this election is about right now. What I'm trying to get at with you is how does the press, given the material playing field of this election best inform voters about what that matchup really means? It's not just Biden is too old.

Jack Shafer: Every time you want to pose this question to me, I'm going to come right back to you. Our business is not to engineer coverage, so the right guy wins. It's to put your hand in the stink and bring it back and show the reader the odor. I think that The New York Times has distinguished itself.

Micah Loewinger: Jack, thank you very much.

Jack Shafer: You betcha.

Micah Loewinger: Jack Shafer is Politico's press critic a Times spokesperson said that its coverage of the Hur report was comprehensive, well-rounded, and fair, and said that the paper had conducted many investigations into Donald Trump. To read the full statement, head to onthemedia.org.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, is there a problem with Jon Stewart?

Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Monday evening, after nine years away, guess who's back?

Jon Stewart: Welcome to The Daily Show. My name's Jon Stewart. Now, where was I?

Brooke Gladstone: And to be there on Mondays throughout the election season. There was much speculation about how well his pioneering form of political comedy would've aged, but even his critics agreed that he was funny and bracing. When it came to the comedy, there was no problem with Jon Stewart. It was the politics as ever. That was problematic, at least to some, and the focus as always this week was Biden's age.

Jon Stewart: They're both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world. What's crazy is thinking that we are the ones as voters who must silence concerns and criticisms. It is the candidate's job to assuage concerns, not the voter's job, not to mention them.

Brooke Gladstone: To those terrified of Trump reducts, it seemed like a kind of misplaced idealism. Of course, we should talk about Biden's age, but with more expertise, more real political context, more comparisons with Trump, which is why many of Stewart's viewers might have preferred the take of his erstwhile protege Stephen Colbert.

Stephen Colbert: We are where we are unless something drastic happens, it's Biden versus Trump. Voters are just going to have to choose between a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory or a contemptible malicious elderly rapist with a poor memory.

Brooke Gladstone: Stewart's first show back as part-time host drew nearly 2 million viewers, the most for a daily show installment in almost six years. It was tight and smart. Cannily anticipating the objections of the skeptical. Here's Jordan Klepper.

Jordan Klepper: You must be so proud of yourself of all these little satirical bits exposing the absurdities of our political process.

Jon Stewart: Well, it was fun. We had a fun day. We had fun making this stuff up.

Jordan Klepper: Oh, I bet it was, did you save democracy yet?

Jon Stewart: No, I didn't.

Jordan Klepper: your '90s brand of snark and both centrism "Oh, George Bush is dumb. Al Gore's so boring." Wow. Searing Jon.

Lili Loofbourow: Klepper specifically accuses him of basically demotivating a generation of people who watched him by teaching them to just laugh and therefore accept the status quo.

Brooke Gladstone: Lili Loofbourow writes about television for The Washington Post.

Lili Loofbourow: The more I thought about Stewart, I watched him a lot and his effect on me I think was to actually model a political affective orientation towards politics.

Brooke Gladstone: What's that mean?

Lili Loofbourow: He has called it spitball throwing from the back of the room, like his style of comedy. There's this idea that you're the kid at the back of the class puncturing the pretensions of the teacher in front. He was modeling a way that you could watch the news as an outsider who can see through the structure and see the hypocrisies that are operating underneath

Brooke Gladstone: In the past, did it teach people to laugh instead of act?

Lili Loofbourow: I'm not convinced that it was his job to motivate people to take to the streets, but there's a reason we love comedy. It does make us feel better. It makes us feel like, "Oh, other people think this is ridiculous too." In creating that sense of companionable despair, I think that yes, there is a way in which that can be demotivating.

Brooke Gladstone: How about now?

Lili Loofbourow: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Didn't you see a move towards activism in his remarks. I could have done without him diminishing the importance of voting. I thought that was gratuitous.

Jordan Klepper: People are going to tell you to rock the vote and be the vote and vote the vote and [unintelligible 00:23:07] the vote.

Brooke Gladstone: His remark that the days leading up to and every day after the election is as important as the election itself did seem to be a call to action.

Lili Loofbourow: Well, absolutely. I think that's what's different where that becomes confusing. I think incoherent is where, yes, he's mocking, get out the vote efforts, which literally are people civically engaged, volunteering, trying to help the country, precisely the call to action that he is giving. He was exhorting people to a state of constant vigilance, like before November 5th, and after every day you have to be working to make the country better, but in the process, he can't help. Also, mock people who are making those phone calls. I think that he has not quite figured out what he's trying to say.

He was so involved in trying to help 9/11 first responders. That was a very targeted effort and he did incredible work there. I think there is a way in which he has not quite connected the dots on how he thinks politicians, volunteers, parties, and people should ideally intersect. I find that a little exasperating too, just on a personal level, because the exhortation to constant vigilance is precisely the position that people were put into during the Trump years. I think the reason the Trump years were so hard for so many people was that there was this demand for unceasing vigilance.

Brooke Gladstone: Exhausting.

Lili Loofbourow: Exhausting.

Brooke Gladstone: One thing that jumped out at me that I didn't see a lot of commentary about in his premier episode. A moment in his interview with The Economist editor in Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, in which he reduced these epic battles over fascism and equality and decency to woke versus anti-woke. That concerned me a bit. It seemed to be an awfully broad brush reading of a very complicated time.

Lili Loofbourow: Yes, I thought that moment was interesting. It was a disappointingly facile reduction, I think, and also frankly, a concession to conservative framing, which I was kind of surprised to hear him use. Perhaps in his zeal to not reflexively engage in what he has in the past called conversation stoppers. He has in the past objected to calling people who are arguably war criminals war criminals because that prevents a conversation from happening.

Perhaps along the same lines, he's disinclined to call people who are fascist fascist, Godwin's law. It's this idea that once you call somebody a Nazi, it's over because you've gone into hyperbole. Reasonable discussion is off the table table. I think that he may still subscribe to some version of that, and so as a result, I think his framing is strange and disappointingly basic.

Brooke Gladstone: That said Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?

Lili Loofbourow: He was electric. To see him sit back in that chair, it was watching Jon Stewart come back as Jon Stewart in a way that I have not really seen him. Also watching The Daily Show come back as a Daily Show that I also have not seen in a long time. That feels like a very particular combination that works. It was a mixed bag in terms of content, but in terms of style, he has really, to my surprise, not missed a step because that was not true on his other show. He seemed sadder and angrier and very, very quick to confront people adeptly. It seemed like he had taken a turn towards a more dour and grim approach to things that was not in evidence on Monday.

Brooke Gladstone: Jon Stewart, good for democracy, bad for democracy.

Lili Loofbourow: Oh gosh [laughter] Honestly, I don't know if he can move the needle for democracy anymore. His argument for coming back was that he said that he thought that this side needed to be as relentless and tenacious as the other that was coming up with these counter-narratives. I don't think he's necessarily wrong, but I also don't think that coming back one night a week to a television show is the relentlessness that is required. I'm very curious to see where he takes this.

Brooke Gladstone: Me too, Lili. Thanks so much.

Lili Loofbourow: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Lili Loofbourow is the TV critic for The Washington Post.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, older leaders are a global problem. In Uganda, the president changed the constitution to stay in office after he'd aged out.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In 2018, Uganda became the first country in the world to tax social media.

Presenter 5: More than two and a half million Ugandans have reportedly abandoned social media to protest the govern imposed tax on 60 online services, including Twitter and WhatsApp.

Bobi Wine: We are opposed to the social media attack because it is a personal attack on the young people of Uganda. Social media is the last platform for us to express ourselves as the young people of Uganda after being oppressed for so long, 32 years.

Brooke Gladstone: That last voice was Bobi Wine, the pop star turned politician who used social media to criticize Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni in power for 38 years, who changed the constitution to enable him to run for multiple terms and then changed it again to overturn the age limit for the office so he could rule for life.

The Oscar-nominated new documentary, Bobi Wine: The People's President follows Wine on his political and personal journey from his election to parliament in 2017 through his presidential run in 2021. As he used his music to reach Uganda's population of disenfranchised youth, to explain what their rights were under the nation's battered constitution in a country where political critiques can literally kill you. Heads up, there's a brief description of torture about nine minutes from now.

Bobi Wine: [singing] One day everything is going to be fine.

Moses Bwayo: Everything's going to be fine.

Bobi Wine: One day everything will be all right.

Moses Bwayo: [vocalizing]

Bobi Wine: Oh Yes [laughter] Let's go, Moses.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Bobi Wine and Moses Bwayo, one of the doc's two directors testing the levels on their mics. Welcome to the show.

Bobi Wine: Thank you very much for having us.

Moses Bwayo: Thank you for having us.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi, you grew up in the slums of Kampala. In the film, you refer to yourself as a ghetto child.

Bobi Wine: [foreign language]

Brooke Gladstone: What is a ghetto child?

Bobi Wine: In Uganda, a ghetto child looks at themselves as only worth it to live to the next day. Our dreams are as limited as wanting to make sure that mama gets three meals a day, that there's a guarantee of a shelter over our heads. Those are the dreams, and in most cases, they're not achieved.

Brooke Gladstone: You told Barbie, your wife, who's a crucial part of your story about having grown up in the slum without a mother or a father.

Bobi Wine: When I met Barbie, she impacted my life. She challenged me to believe that I can impact other lives. That's when I started thinking big. That's when I started thinking, changing lives and ultimately started thinking of challenging for the highest office in the land.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me, Moses, growing up in Uganda, when did you become aware of Bobi's music and give us a sense of how young people were experiencing his music?

Moses Bwayo: In Uganda, Bobi is that figure who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps. He had built a great life as an artist. His music resonates with the whole population. He has always responded to misrule with a song. Consistently, we've listened to him and he's inspired the generation, and Uganda at large. When he decided to become a politician, we trusted him. Every five years in Uganda, when there's an election, the Museveni dictatorship, pays artists a big sum of money and they bring together like 10 main big artists in the country. As long as I can remember, he never joined that group.

Brooke Gladstone: From the beginning before Barbie. Was your music like that from the start?

Bobi Wine: No. I started out as any other young and excited artist, sing about the girls and the rides and the money and the bling bling. That went on for quite some years until this one day at the height of my success when I was beaten by a security agent. The only reason was that I was showing off in a brand-new Cadillac Escalade with 24-inch spinning wheels. That offended the security officer who actually slapped me and asked me why I was showing off.

For me, that was a wake-up call. It reminded me of how so many other citizens have been violated and humiliated. Many of them in my sight and I didn't do anything or say anything about it because it had not happened to me. I was a superstar who thought nothing like that would happen to me. Well, it was happening to me now. That is 2005 or thereabout. Since then, I even changed my music from entertainment to edutainment.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] I know edutainment.

Bobi Wine: Oh yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about the lyrics of some of your songs you sing about the importance of education.

Bobi Wine: Oh, yes. That's when I started addressing those injustices. I started singing about the corruption, the discrimination, the dictatorships, and all that. It went on like that until eventually, which is after about 10 years of revolutionary music. What I thought was life-changing music and also using my music to call out the government on its ills, but it was not changing. In 2017 I said, "Okay, now since the parliament has refused to come to the ghetto, the ghetto will come to the parliament."

Brooke Gladstone: Your song Freedom became a real anthem.

[MUSIC: Freedom by Bobi Wine]

This is a message to the governments.

Expressing what the exactly on the people's minds.

Brooke Gladstone: What is the purpose of liberation?

Bobi Wine: [sings] We are living in a time similar to the one of slave trade.

This operation is worse than apartheid.

The gun is the master and the city enslaved.

The pearl of Africa's bleeding.

Question,

What was the purpose of the liberation when we can't have a peaceful transition?

What was the purpose of the Constitution when the government disrespects the Constitution?

Where is my freedom of expression when you charge me because of my expression?

Look what you doing to this nation, what are you teaching the future generation?

See our leaders become misleaders and see our mentors become tormentors.

Freedom fighters become dictators.

You see that?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: You've mentioned in one of your songs, Uganda I think says this very clearly. Three-fourths of the population is under 35, but the political leaders are notably old, including President Museveni. In the film you say--

Bobi Wine: Museveni used to be my favorite revolutionary and it's very, very disturbing that I'm at war with my once favorite.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me what the president represents today.

Bobi Wine: He used to represent revolutionary ideas, transformational ideas. Today he represents a breed of African tyrants that are so out of touch with reality that are corrupt and are trading Africa to either the West or China or whoever is ready to agree with this continued state in power at the cost of human rights and democracy and the rule of law.

Brooke Gladstone: Your view about him evolved. Did it change at that moment when you got smacked or did it happen before then?

Bobi Wine: I was slapped to sobriety. I woke up to the realities of what my fellow citizens were going through. That's when I started seeing that there are more churches in the ghetto than schools. That's when I started realizing that indeed it was deliberate to ban political education, to ban sensitizing and empowering and awakening programs on radio. Indeed, eventually, my own music was banned and my name was also banned on radio.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi, in 2017, you ran for a seat in the parliament, you won handily. You fought against Museveni's effort to amend the constitution, but the bill to remove the age limit passed. That was so evident in the film, a huge disappointment. Even though you kind of saw it coming.

Bobi Wine: Yes. We saw it coming, but we did not just want to sit back and watch it happen. When he removed the age limit to stand for the election, I decided to challenge him. We were massively supported. I was supported by the young people, the old people, all Ugandans from all walks of life.

Brooke Gladstone: We see you traveling, standing on the back of trucks saying, "Keep your hands off the constitution."

Bobi Wine: Oh yes. We had to first resist that abrogation of the constitution. If we succeeded, we probably would have a different Uganda now.

Brooke Gladstone: Soon after the vote, you were arrested by the military. What happened in your detention?

Bobi Wine: The government considered to having me tortured very, very bad. I having tweeted that I was in detention, there was international outcry. I was eventually charged with illegal opposition of firearms, charged with treason, and I was charged with annoying the president. Today I am out on bail. I'm having a treason charge hanging around my neck, and that attracts the death sentence. My possession of illegal firearms charge was dropped out of extreme shame.

Brooke Gladstone: There's Barbie's description in the film of the torture.

Barbie: He has a swollen head, he has red eyes and they're swollen. His ears are swollen, the whole face is swollen.

Brooke Gladstone: It was a kind of relentless beating.

Bobi Wine: Everything nasty happened to me. From beating to having testicles squeezed, to having ears pulled with pliers, to having needles injected in my nails. I don't want to talk about it.

Brooke Gladstone: That's fine. I just wonder your determination didn't flag, but it seemed like you were in some ways a different person, like it was something impossible to entirely recover from.

Bobi Wine: Yes. Nelson Mandela said, "It's always seems impossible until it's done."

Brooke Gladstone: Do you feel you've recovered?

Bobi Wine: I don't know. Some things honestly will never recover from them. The only way I can recover is knowing that it can never happen to me again, but now I'm not sure that it's not going to happen to me when I go back to Uganda. I am going back to Uganda. I'm not very sure if it'll not happen to me or any other Ugandan.

Brooke Gladstone: The torture you experienced didn't deter you from running for president against Museveni in 2021. The crackdown on your campaign was brutal. You were arrested twice. Your campaign headquarters was raided. All of those signatures that you'd assiduously collected had to be collected again. The money that was necessary in order to register to be on the ballot was stolen by military. Dozens and dozens of your campaign staff were abducted and detained, people who showed up at your rallies were subjected to horrifying brutality themselves.

[gunshots]

[screams]

Brooke Gladstone: Watching it all unfold in the documentary gave a real sense of the chaotic nature of the repression, and yet you feel that perhaps there wasn't enough violence in the film.

Bobi Wine: That's true. I must say I'm thankful that our film is seen by the world and I'm thankful that the world appreciates our pain, but honestly, what you see in the film is just a scratch on the surface. It is a brutal violent regime.

Brooke Gladstone: Moses, you were there filming profound moments.

Moses Bwayo: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Intimate moments.

Moses Bwayo: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: You were in the hotel when he was surrounded by the military.

Moses Bwayo: Right.

Brooke Gladstone: How many years were you filming?

Bobi Wine: We followed Bobi for five years.

Brooke Gladstone: What was the most difficult scene to film?

Moses Bwayo: Wow.

[laughter]

Moses Bwayo: There was a few of those very tense moments, so many, but one very particular one we spent days in house arrest after the election, Bobi, his wife, and myself.

Bobi Wine: In fact, right from the day of the election, as soon as I cast my ballot, I was locked up.

Moses Bwayo: In his house and thought that they will break into the house any moment because a lot of his election committees had been arrested. His election aides were kidnapped actually.

Bobi Wine: Around 60 of them are still in prison.

Moses Bwayo: Today as we speak. This is a current story. It's not over yet. In fact, before him and his wife traveled here, they were under house arrest for like a week or something.

Bobi Wine: The day we received the news of the nomination of this film, we were under military detention. We were under house arrest. Right now, as we speak, three of our colleagues are missing. They were abducted two weeks ago. They've not been seen. It is constant. It is ongoing.

Brooke Gladstone: There is a scene between Bobi and Barbie, and Barbie says, "We are going to have to send the kids away."

Bobi Wine: We'll never be safe here until Museveni is gone. Can never.

Barbie Kyagulanyi: The children can't stay there. If the children got to stay, one of us would have to stay with them. That means you'd have to stay here.

Bobi Wine: What does one do?

Moses Bwayo: There were those difficult moments, hard decisions.

Brooke Gladstone: Did they ever tell you to get lost?

Moses Bwayo: No.

[laughter]

Moses Bwayo: Not actually. How did we get access? In the beginning, we were focusing on the political journey of Bobi Wine, but then increasingly we saw the danger. We saw how the camera had become a protective tool around him and his family, so more and more the access grew. Actually, my absence was noticed, but my presence was never noticed. When I wasn't around, they would pick up the phone, "Moses, where are you? What happened?

Bobi Wine: "Are you alive?"

Moses Bwayo: Exactly.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Moses, what's been the response to the documentary in Uganda? Has anybody seen it?

Moses Bwayo: Just recently, NUP, the political party that Bobi leads, they did this big screening and invited so many Ugandans and supporters to see the film. Also, National Geographic has made the film accessible on their YouTube platform for free in the whole of Africa. Ugandans have been seeing the film on their phones. We also have something we call chibanda and they're video halls that hold about 400 people. Some Ugandans have screened the film that way.

Brooke Gladstone: The government is just looking the other way?

Moses Bwayo: They don't know most of this is happening.

Bobi Wine: It's done secretly. Actually, the day that we screened it, that's when three of our colleagues were abducted. It's dangerous to screen it, but the people still watch it. Ugandans are stubborn. They're young, and they are out to defy the regime.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you, Moses, have any plans to return to Uganda?

Moses Bwayo: As we speak today, I cannot live in Uganda. I had been identified while I was following Bobi. There were two attempted kidnaps on my wife. I had been locked up in prison, interrogated. We couldn't live in the country anymore. We had to flee to the US and we are here seeking political asylum. If leaders like Bob Wine and what he represents come into power, I hope to return to my country one day.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you hoping that the Oscar nomination raises the profile of the struggle for democracy in Uganda?

Moses Bwayo: The military and police that had cordoned off Bobi's house withdrew because of the news of the nomination. Now, as we speak, the current regime run by Museveni, they're backtracking on a lot of the repression that they had done, so we hope that all democracy-loving people of the world will see this film, share it, and keep their attention on Uganda. Don't ignore the Ugandan struggle. Please, do not ignore us.

Brooke Gladstone: Is there anything that you could possibly do in a future political campaign to try and limit the violence that your supporters suffered at the hands of the military?

Bobi Wine: Yes, to appeal to the international community to stop sponsoring that brutality.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a telling moment in the film when a reporter asks what you expect from the West.

Bobi Wine: I will not say what I expect, I'll say what I request. The United States gives way beyond $100 million to Uganda. The European Union supports Uganda a great deal. Question is, do they know what they are supporting? The people of Uganda, while they appreciate the assistance, would want the European Union and America and all development partners, to make respect for democratic principles and human rights a precondition for all that aid.

Brooke Gladstone: Has anyone reached out from the US State Department or the EU?

Bobi Wine: Not as yet. I've spoken and met the EU delegation at my house, at my office, and all that.

Brooke Gladstone: Not the US.

Bobi Wine: I've met the US Ambassador and I've had a few meetings at the State Department, but apart from acknowledging that indeed there's a flaw in democratic governance in Uganda that should be fixed, we've not had more than that. I am, however, hopeful that one day the US will decide not to be associated with any oppressive or dictatorial regime.

Brooke Gladstone: There's another part of the film that really got to me. A reporter asked you--

Reporter: "What would stop you from becoming like the president is now? What would stop you from becoming someone who just kept hold of power and became the same as the man that you would replace?"

Bobi Wine: Well, that's a fear. Why? Because many of the things I'm saying today, our president said when he was my age. The only way we can be sure, not me, but we can be sure that nobody will hold onto power is by not making it about an individual. No. Is to make sure that even during our liberation efforts, we do it together to ensure that no single human being will ever rise to claim that he or she liberated us. We want to liberate ourselves as a nation and guarantee that we can do that again and again and again if anybody ever turned into another Museveni.

Brooke Gladstone: As you say for that, you need institutions, you need the rule of law, you need courts, you need fair elections, you need a robust media. Do you have any of that?

Bobi Wine: We don't have any of that now. What we have in Uganda is absolute state capture. When we finally free Uganda, we want to free institutions and empower them to be independent of the executive.

Brooke Gladstone: Getting it is hard, keeping it as we're learning here in the US--

Bobi Wine: It's even harder.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles]

Bobi Wine: Our situation is not only a lesson to Uganda, it's a lesson to everywhere. Those that are aspiring for democracy and those that have democracy, to know that democracy is always fragile and must be guarded jealously, and is always one step of sliding out of your hands. For people that have democracy just like you, the US, guard it jealously.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine]

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Bobi Wine: Thank you very much for having me.

Moses Bwayo: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi Wine and Moses Bwayo, their documentary is Bobi Wine: The People's President.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On The Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On The Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

[00:50:16] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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