John Dickerson: When the Media Helps Rewrite Reality

The Bulwark Podcast - The Bulwark

John Dickerson discusses media influence, Iran negotiations, and political rhetoric at the Aspen Ideas Festival, reflecting on how public perception shapes reality. He critiques the lack of meaningful progress in diploma

Key takeaways

• Media amplifies escalation without context

Transcript preview

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast I'm your host Tim Miller we have one Monday without Bill Crystal because well I could not turn down this beautiful setting for those of you on YouTube we're at the Aspen Ideas Festival so I searched for a suitable replacement among the global elite the thought leaders the aluminatei and among all of the notables here the only choices of course the former host of CBS Daily News and the politics podfather himself John Dickerson and I hear you have a sub-stack oh I do I have a sub-deck like it like everyone like all humans now must have a sub-stack I think you're born with them I have one that is nice it's good to see you it's great to see you Tim this is nice doing this in Aspen yeah I mean what I don't know if you're at the end of the day everything looks you know is totally haze yeah when we got in yesterday morning it was a little spooky yeah you know with the blood red sun it's a little ominous all right we got a bunch to get to we'll do a little media talk at the end there's is any media news that you think what you might be worth that there is huge mountainous media news I am in the flatlands of my ability to weigh in on it I'll enjoy ducking your question I don't know about that we'll see my questions might questions might I'd write this down because since Friday's podcast here's what happened can I run you through the events Iran launched a drone offensive on ships in the straight they were mad that Oman had opened an alternate lane for ships they said that that other route violates the MOU the US retaliated we bombed Iran again Iran then hit back against eight US military targets in Kuwait and Bahrain those were countries so you might remember we're on Marcos all as well trip just last week we retaliate again then Trump threatens Iran with an annihilation again then Trump threatens Iran with Ann with Ann with Annihilation again again then and then our friend at Axios Brock Rovid reports, well we've actually now agreed to stop escalating right before the market's open and we plan to meet again this week talks Tuesday in Doha. For the New York Times Iran has not yet confirmed their sending reps so we'll see. So that's the state of affairs on our ceasefire. Yeah it feels like this is the state of affairs every Friday weekend and Monday because the weekend war. One of the sub-stact things I do is a compilation of the week's news news and every Friday end and I think, oh, oh, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, you're, there's, you're, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're at the end of Friday the president was often saying like we're ready to sign a deal I think oh you know I haven't really accounted for that but then it washes away by the time you get to Monday so this feels like a similar thing I mean the fact is that all of the issues the key issues are so up in the air they can't even get to the other issues that are up in the air and that shipping lane you know if you look at the number of ships that are still able to get through it's tiny compared to the 130 a day that we're a couple of days they had 78 and they've got to go through that narrow non-mind lane even in the best of terms and we should talk about what that even looks like this is just super slow going a half a foot forward two steps back and the two things that just stand out on this which you will note are not we're not neither of these things were part of the reason why we went into the war as as particular hold-ups here as Lebanon. Item number one of the MOU mentioned Lebanon three times so I think Iran was pretty clear about what was important So that makes things challenging when that's out of our hands and then when it comes to the straight It seems that there is like maybe an intentional miscommunication I don't know what a miscommunication is about like what an open Strait is Right and I think that's Seems like Trump is at least pretending like or acting like an open Strait Mean straight means ships can just go through and Iran means no an open Straight means that you know you get our approval you send in a TPS report like we let you know if you can come through and that's open Right and that's a precursor to Iran saying We're going to charge people to go through this this is which is a new arrangement pre-war This didn't exist and so all this conversation about the straight either What's going on now or what will happen after the MOU is over Is all leverage points that Iran gained by the war and so as we measure Was this worth it which is the question we should always be asking about everything that happens everything that's being debated was didn't exist as a point of leverage or a complex complexity beforehand So it's a new thing that's a new thing that's been created leaving aside all? leaving aside all? another one that was not originally a leverage point but now is as a part of these negotiations on Iran's side. J.D. the Vice President has been a point man on this lately. I like this little fact that I read. During negotiations in Switzerland last week one of the things that Vance thought was important that they agreed to is that there's a hotline in the US military in Iran because we haven't been able to get a hold of them. They keep saying like, oh, the Iranians are in caves. And so we don't know. And then then like Tazn't Tazn't'asn't'n't'n't'n't'n't'n't'n't'n't'n't'n't'em or whatever, It seems like we can get to them, but they keep acting like it's hard to get all of them. So we're supposed to have a hotline that Iran starts bombing on Friday, or starts droning the Strait again on Friday, and JD sends out a tweet that's like, I wish they would have called fee. And they should have just called. And as of, I guess Saturday, I don't know if the hotline, if the hotline's become operational since then, we still didn't have a hotline. It feels like the hotline. It feels like when people are in salary negotiations with a job, they can't give them a hotline was the thing they could name as a piece of progress when there was no actual progress. On the other hand, it has been reported throughout these negotiations that one of the challenges for the US negotiators for JD Vance and others is like who's in charge. Remember that first round of meetings that the Pakistani spent more of their time trying to adjudicate the arguments among the Iranians, let alone then between the Americans the Iranians. And so getting a person on the other end of the line would be nice because it would mean there was one person on the other end of the line. On the other end of the line. On the line. On the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand, on the other hand, on the the reason I'm being a little bit glib about it is because this war has taken place by social media essentially each side acting and then threatening in public for a variety of their different reasons so a hotline is like It's a little late because it's all happening in real time on social media You're here for your wisdom. Do you have any wisdom about where things go? Well, I don't know. I have no wisdom about where they go, but I do have what I hope is wisdom about what I do? Was the war worth it? And I think there are three things three ways you measure that. Was it worth tearing up the Obama era JCPOA which was negotiated by several countries had a series of constraints on Iran which President Trump tore up and thinks he's gonna get a better deal? Let's talk about just one little thing inspections. When the JCPOA came out Senator Tom Cotton and others said the inspection regime is too puny it has to be inspections anytime anywhere. just announced before things fell apart that the Iranians were going to have inspections again. They were not anywhere anytime inspections. So if you measure the inspections that they might get out of this deal against what was the previous standard, this war has not been worth it. So you measure the war against the JCPOA, you measure it against where things were before the bombing started, because there was, there were negotiations, the Strait of Formoans was not a leverage point, and then you measure it against what the President Trump said this war was about. So keeping. things in mind every time there's a development like the hotline great okay hotlines a development but if you measure that against all the previous situations like a hotline's meaningless development yes so I just think you want to keep those three in mind because the problem is when there are some of these agreements like to reopen the Strait of Hormuz it's treated by the White House as a great development okay without thinking about the context maybe it's a great development but the context is it wasn't a point of contention before the war was open it was opener keeping those three things in mind every time there's development I think is I mean given those three things I don't see any path back to something that looks even remotely like success like honestly I can even if you think about what a best case outcome from here could be like it's hard to see how it would be any better than the pre-war status quo or the JCPOA I think that's right and by the way if you're really doing the math you've got to then calculate all that's that's another thing worth keeping in mind because there's really nothing more important for a president than the decision to go to war and so this isn't some decision about a reflecting pool this is like at the center of the presidency the only thing that would be worse in terms of a president using or misusing their power would be if they encouraged some sort of a kind of an attack on the free and fair elections that are a part of the American constitution back to JD last week he was at the Nixon foundation or something libraries and this was not He was a prepared comment. He planned to go to this event and announce that he thinks that Richard Nixon's having a renaissance, actually. Actually, he says actually a couple times. And that if Watergate happened today, it'd be a 12-hour story. I did say on Friday's show, I said that that was not true. That's all that Dixon's having a renaissance and I follow a lot of, you know, political, I'm a political watcher, I haven't seen any of this. My colleague Will Summer did correct me. on right wing Tik-Tock where they do Nixon edits to Charlie X songs so it's a brave new world. So there's like maybe a small small renaissance happening there. Your mother Nancy Dickerson was there. She was covering all of it. She was there. She actually she was covering the White House for NBC and Nixon during the period that where there were protesters on the mall. She gave a press conference and she asked him why don't you. speak to the protesters and his answer was you know a traditional press conference answer but then he called her later that night and he had been drinking a great deal he also called Helen Thomas that night and he said I love those kids and I and then he later that was the night that he went down on the mall and and met with the protesters it was a very odd conversation after he was drinking yeah and Haldeman writes about this in his diaries the drinking part I mean and this period we're going down to the young protesters and this period and this period we're going down to the young protesters it was not a deep interaction but that was one and she knew Nixon going back to when he was on the hill in the 50s because she had been working on the hill and she also did a documentary about Watergate so yeah so how do you think she'd process the notion that Watergate wasn't that big of a deal and do that he's now many years later having a supposed renaissance going to the new vice president yeah defining deviancy essentially is what's happening I you know there has been a line of thinking and among obviously his defenders that they all do it Nixon just got caught that was that that's been around for a while that abuses of power happen in every white house you know the Kennedy blah blah blah and the old Trump line about oh were so great when Scarborough was asking him about you know what Putin had done yeah exactly right who are we to talk about Putin's throwing people out of windows we're not so great ourselves I think what what struck me about what And Nixon, certainly, if you read the tapes and you listen to him, he was obsessed with the deep state and the bureaucrats in it and the liberals in the media and everything. But the problem for that argument is that if there was a deep state, it was Nixon's mouth. I mean, the thing that got him in trouble is the smoking gun tape. He's Nixon himself saying to have the CIA stopped the FBI investigation into a break in a political party's headquarters, which is, you know, again, messing with elections. So you can't define that. Also, we should just say also about the deep state at the time. This is kind of this amorphous word and I was trying to figure out like what he's talking about because, you know, when Trump was talking about the deep state, you know, when Trump was talking about the deep state, you know, he was going after him, he was talking a lot about like the intelligence services. And the intelligence services were working for Nixon. It was like there were some lower level people, but like the attorney general. had happened, Mitchell, but was like part of the planning on the front end while he was still attorney general of the United States. Right. You know, the obvious benefit of this politically for JD Vance at the moment is to connect their sense of grievance about any questioning of presidential power with a big popular thing you know and to try to say essentially that it has a modern valence which really has nothing to do with Nixon but which has to do with basically like these ninnies who think that what think that what has to think Nixon did was bad. They're the same ninnies, you know, barking at our heels and the whole thing is just the product of elites and not actual law-breaking caught on tape. I mean, think about what J. D. Vans is trying to do. This is literally the definition, smoking gun, right? Literally the definition of evidence that is so powerful it is unfalsifiable, except think about one of the projects of this administration and J. J. Vans in particular. He said essentially, okay, maybe they aren't Haitians eating their dogs, but if I have it's okay. You know he called them domestic terrorists in Minnesota which they weren't and in which there was no evidence of for Renee Good and Alex Preti and and that project of taking things you can see and know with your own eyes and trying to cast it as something else is essentially what's happening in that in that Watergate exchange? Ninnies or Nattering Nadering Nabeops of negatism yes that was the other vice president. I also think it's shady Van saying it's okay for us to do the crimes. There's a certain group that we're tough on when it comes to the rule of law, but us in Washington, if you're on our side, you can do it, it's fine. It's a big deal. Right, when a president says it's law, which is a version of, or I'm paraphrasing what Nixon said. But I think that's right, you define down any previous crime, any previous abuse of power, any previous obstruction of justice. So then when you were accused of the same, it's like, oh, oh, this is the same, these are just, these are just, these are points of on and that's always there's always been a sort of etiquette critique by elites in Washington it happened with Nixon and now you know it's happening to us to to downplay the severity of breaking essentially your constitutional oath here's another reason they want to downplay it's a New York Times story this morning the government is actively doing critical minerals deals with join a guess how many different companies that have financial ties to Trump or Lutnik oh dozens 14 I don't know a dozen a dozen plus. Yeah. Fourteen different companies. It's worth in total about nine billion. Nine billion. How much was in the paper bags that Agna was taking? It's like 20 grand or something. Hold that I just want to do one example of that. The meeting last September, Trump, Lutnik, and the president of Kazakhstan. After the meeting, it resulted in an exclusive deal for an American company, Kaz, to mine Tungsten in the country. Both Trump and Lutnik family soon announced a highly... lucrative business connections to the deal. Tungsten mining in Kazakhstan. That's some creative corruption. Yeah, well, well, every time I hear about one of these deals and you know there've been a lot of them or the business that comes the way of the Trump family and also obviously this is shot through all of the Middle Eastern negotiations going on. It's hard to keep up with. I mean it's hard to keep up with what's in the MOU and what's not getting dealt with just in the MOU, but then all the relationships in the Trump family to the that's very hard to track. That's just one thing. What I keep thinking about is the President Trump's first inaugural address, and when she said, this period where the elites in Washington protect themselves and ignore the forgotten men and women of this country, that ends right now. That there will be no more of this using the system to... Well, what Nick and Whitcough kids were the forgotten man of the country. What we didn't know is that what we didn't know is that they were the forgotten. you see a perfection of the use of or the benefit of people