[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. David Remnick is with us, editor of The New Yorker, of course, and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC. We'll talk about something he wrote for the magazine, an interview he did for The Radio Hour, and something in today's headlines. We will just let that much stand as a teaser with no spoiler as David Remnick joins us. David, always great of you to join the live radio world. Welcome back to the show.

David Remnick: Delighted to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I'll get right to the thing in today's headlines. We learned in the last day that Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of the company that owns Fox News, stated under oath in a lawsuit that several of his Fox News hosts promoted the stolen election lie, basically saying he knew it was a lie but failed to stop the host from being mouthpieces for it. I'm going to read a few lines first before I get your reaction as an editor of a news organization. This is from The New York Times story on this, for listeners who haven't heard it yet.

It says Murdoch, "Acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them, but didn't." Court documents released on Monday showed. Murdoch said, "They endorsed," he said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox Host, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems.

Then another quote from him in this deposition, "I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight," he added while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud. Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdock responded, "Yes. We thought everything was on the up and up." David, when I saw this last night, and knowing that you were coming on today, I thought of you in your role as a commentator, yes, but also in your role as The New Yorker's editor. If you knew that one of your writers wanted to publish something you considered a lie, what would your professional standards require that you do?

David Remnick: That they'd be fired. What else could I say?

Brian Lehrer: That's simple.

David Remnick: If a writer or reporter knowingly, deliberately, tried to get a-- we're not talking about a mistake here, but a lie into the publication, they would be fired. Look, let's call things as they are. It comes as no fantastic surprise that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo would be capable of this. All you got to do is watch and listen every night.

Brian Lehrer: As the reporting notes, Murdoch was responding to a question about not one host, but for Fox News hosts, the ones you just named again, when he responded, "They endorsed, and I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight."

David Remnick: Oh, come on, come on, come on. Who is Rupert Murdoch trying to kid? This is the very definition of cynicism. Fox News is doing what it does because it makes a tremendous fortune. It's not because it has a high-minded attitude toward another viewpoint or trying to embody conservatism. It is just incredibly cynical what it's trying to do. It does it with great profit and success, and the accumulation of power.

Look, Fox News, in many ways, was the invention of Roger Ailes, who came out of the Nixon operation, one of the most cynical players in public life in this country in the last 50 years, and whose career ended with countless Me Too charges, and now, he's gone. Rupert Murdoch has been doing this for so many decades as a newspaper entrepreneur and then in electronic media, and it's just for us to raise the pinkie and act surprised about what he had to say, in a minimalist way, in a deposition because he was cornered in the legal sense, should come as no surprise.

Brian Lehrer: The context is that testimony under oath, which looks like a big admission, comes in a lawsuit, which is against Fox News for damages by the Dominion Voting Machines company which proponents of the stolen election lie claimed was making machines programmed to switch votes away from Trump. The Times article says after his admission about the hosts endorsing lies, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. "Not Fox," he said. "No, not Fox."

David Remnick: What does that mean? His top-rated people are blathering on about this on a daily basis.

Brian Lehrer: They did project Biden, the winner, when enough votes were counted, I think ahead of the other networks, and some other hosts stood by that.

David Remnick: Congratulations. In other words, that once in a while that falsehood is peppered with the occasional truth, it's not something to give a standing ovation to.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing on this. This made me look up, again, last night, just how much of the country continues to believe the stolen election lie, and the latest thing I found was the Monmouth poll in September, which found 61% of Republicans still do not believe Biden won the election. Is there any way to guess at how big Fox's role has been in leaving that many Americans in a deluded state?

David Remnick: Well, some people will point out that in a given moment, the total number of people watching Fox is not that huge when you consider the size of the country. It's a few million people in a country of well over 300 million, but what Fox says becomes a feeder system into all kinds of right-wing social media and smaller media outlets. I think we've discussed many times, you have certainly on your program, and on The Radio Hour and elsewhere, that this is the way we live our informational lives now in these silos where an algorithm feeds you that which you want to hear.

Once you're in a silo that's telling you that Dominion is cheating, and the Democrats are controlling the outcome of the election, and the deep state is in charge, once you enter that algorithm, it takes a kind of act of will to jump outside of it. In order for any American to be well-informed, it requires gymnastics that didn't exist before the rise of the Internet. I'm not saying it's necessarily better or worse. There are many things about the internet that are a great deal better than the system we had before. It's only a technology.

The question is how we use it. Many, many, many people, either willfully or not, get stuck inside of an algorithm, in a silo that feeds them nonsense, and they believe it. They believe it. We talk a lot about Russian propaganda and the Russian system of propaganda and how difficult it is to come outside of that and understand the real source of, say, the invasion of Ukraine, but it's not as if we are free of this to some degree. Thank God, we have a great, great deal and more choice. I don't want to make any false equivalence between the two such situations, but even in our system, it's very difficult, if you place yourself in the wrong silo, to think otherwise about Dominion or any number of other issues.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you just about made the segue to topic number two for me. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker, Host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on the station. Related in a way, right? You wrote an article about the invasion of Ukraine at one year, called A Year of Putin's War Time Lies. Why did you emphasize lies, in addition, of course, to the crimes against humanity?

David Remnick: Remember, the invasion last year of Ukraine wasn't even the first invasion. We forget at our peril that in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and captured the Crimean Peninsula and infiltrated large parts of the Donbas, eastern part of Ukraine. That was, in itself, an invasion, and it has precedents, too, in Georgia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. That's number one. Number two is that what happened here was preceded by a propaganda campaign by Putin that was quite extraordinary, including him publishing a long article. I don't know how much of it he wrote or how much of it his aids wrote, but I believe it was 7,000 words long justifying what he has been saying for so many years to foreign leaders and his own countrymen, which is that Ukraine is not a real country. He has a phony baloney history to justify this or try to justify this. That is one thing.

The second thing is he didn't even call the invasion of Ukraine, a war or an invasion. He called it special military operation. For many, many months, they insisted on that terminology, and that's what you heard night after night on official state television, which is the only kind that exists.

Brian: I'll remind the listeners that long before you were editor of The New Yorker, you had a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, which culminated in your Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and you've been following Russian affairs ever since. You're not just sitting at a desk in lower Manhattan or something and finding on Russia. There's a new documentary that made headlines just yesterday with Zelenskyy predicting in the film that Putin will be assassinated. The quote is, "The predators will eat a predator. They will find a reason to kill a killer." Do you have any basis on which to think Zelenskyy might be right or wrong about that?

David: No, I think this is a psyops, psychological head game. The geopolitical equivalent of Michael Jordan getting in the face of another player to psych him out. I don't think that we know, and I'm not sure that Zelenskyy knows much more than the rest of us. The Kremlin and, for many years now, has been a very hived off isolated place. Putin relies on fewer and fewer people. They tend to come from the former KGB, the FSB, and other such ministries. His circle gets smaller and smaller.

One of the developments, one of the tragedies associated with the war, with this horrific war, is that so many of the best and the brightest and more liberal part of the society has left the country, hundreds of thousands of people, and that's thanks to Putin, too. It wasn't so long ago that we'd see magazine covers that describe Putin as the grand strategist, the great chess player who plays a bad hand boldly and well while the rest of the world is a bunch of nudniks and can't get anything right.

Well, it's hard to see how he's made his own country better in recent years, in particular, by hundreds. Tens and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died, many, many more have been wounded. A lot of the best and the brightest have left the country. He certainly hasn't improved the economic status of Russia in the short-term or the long term. The international reputation of Russia has been diminished and the best he can hope for is to start to become a junior partner with China. How in the world has he done anything other than struggle to keep his own power? How has he improved a lot of Russians, let alone the Ukrainian people?

Brian: Topic number three. I said we were going to do one from the headlines of today. That was the Rupert Murdoch admissions, one from The New Yorker magazine. That was David's article on Putin we've been talking about, and one from the Radio Hour about another shocking anniversary that's now upon us, the third anniversary of the start of the pandemic, thinking about how it was three years ago today that I was in a restaurant with a friend who had just returned from Thailand. I was nervous about it because this thing was just starting to be reported as coming from that part of the world.

On the New Yorker Radio Hour, you had a wonderful conversation with your contributor, Dr. Dhruv Khullar about which countries actually got the pandemic response the most right. I'm going to play for our listeners a 40-second clip of Dr. Khullar after he says the first thing the best countries did right that we did not do was to have a strong test and trace program. That was the first thing.

Dhruv Khullar: The second one, I think, is something that's really been overlooked but incredibly important and this is the idea of trust. I think both interpersonal trust but also trust in institutions. That is something, I think, no one will be surprised to hear that the US is tremendously lacking in right now, but if you look at some countries like Japan or South Korea. Japan's constitution actually makes it very difficult for it to implement the types of mandates that we even see in the United States.

Lockdowns are out of the question because of Japan's constitution, and they rely really on peer pressure. Another way to think about that is social cohesion, social trust. Mask became known as face underpants. You wouldn't want to be in public without your underpants on. You wouldn't want me in public without your mask on.

Brian: He got to laugh at you there, David. [laughter] I plan to invite Dr. Khullar to come on this show too, and do this assessment with lessons for the future based on his New Yorker work with you, but what a contrast between the countries he mentions and ours where basic prevention like mask-wearing in crowded places before there was even a vaccine became an artifact of the culture war here. Do you or does Dr. Khullar think we've learned anything as a society from the 1 million US pandemic deaths, because chances are, there will be a next time some time with another virus?

David: Well, one thing we learned is not to elect Donald Trump president again. It seems to be forgotten in this whole mix how much he injected into the conversation a sense of denial and lying and so forth. Remember his crazy recommendations about what might work, remember his undermining of his own health bureaucracy and leaders. That was a very sorry spectacle and it's, of course, very hard to calculate what percentage of Trump's behavior was responsible for our poor performance and the death count in the United States, but it could not have been positive.

Look, the challenge in the very best of circumstances in a mobile society like ours where people were coming from China to Kennedy Airport just routinely very quickly and in large numbers. The challenge in any circumstances is enormous, particularly in a large country like ours. You're right, and I think drove above all is right is that the innate distrust of institutions which has a multiplicity of reasons behind it, whether it's a federal government that in living memory lied about why it should go to war in the Middle East, or the media system that we talked about before, the conspiracy-mongering that has become so rife in our country. It's hard to know how to slice this in which proportions, but I think Dhruv is right that it played a big role.

Brian: Well, you brought it full circle to Donald Trump's multiple lies in 2020, one bigger than the next in terms of the cost to democracy and to human life. I'll close David with one of our Wise Guy Listeners who tweeted after our conversation about Murdoch and the Fox News hosts promoting the big Lie. Wise Guy Listener tweets, "Regarding Fox News personalities promoting the stolen election narrative, Fox's tagline should be news will not replace us." [laughs] David, always a pleasure. Thank you very much.

David: Okay, bye.

Brian: Keep it up in the magazine and on the air.

David: Thanks. Thanks so much, Brian.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.