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Can you beat Mastermind? It’s Clive Myrie’s Christmas quiz! Imagine yourself in the big black chair on the general knowledge round, with the G2 quiz of the yearTopicsLife and styleG2 quiz of 2021US politicsTelevisionquizzesReuse this content More
In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical historyby Steve Rose“I’m still pinching myself that my dad, my own flesh and blood, had Ernie on one hand and Bert on the other,” Eli Attie says. “It is like he got to sit at Abbey Road studios and watch the Beatles record I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Attie’s father was the photographer David Attie who, in 1970, visited the set of Sesame Street in New York City during its first season. His images lay forgotten in a wardrobe for the next 50 years, until Eli recently discovered them. They are a glimpse behind the curtain of a cultural phenomenon waiting to happen. Here are not only Bert and Ernie but Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch with his original orange fur (he was green by season two). And here are the people who brought these characters to life, chiefly Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the Lennon and McCartney of Muppetdom. What also stands out in Attie’s images are the children visiting the set. As in the show itself, they are clearly so beguiled by the puppets, they completely ignore the humans controlling them.Eli himself was one of those visitors, although he has no memory of it. “I was in diapers, and as the story goes, I was loud and not to be quieted down, and was yanked off the set,” he says. His parents and older brother Oliver at least made it into the photos. Oliver was even in an episode of the show, in the background in Hooper’s Store, Eli explains, with just a hint of jealousy.Fifty-two years and more than 4,500 episodes later, Sesame Street remains the premier address in children’s entertainment. It is still watched by hundreds of millions around the world, and broadcast in more than 140 countries. One attempt to statistically measure the show’s impact on American society failed because nobody could find a large enough sample group who hadn’t watched it. Sesame Street’s place in US culture was bizarrely underlined last month when Big Bird announced on Twitter: “I got the Covid-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” He was promoting the rollout of vaccinations to five- to 11-year-olds, but Big Bird’s tweet, combined with Sesame Street’s recent introduction of a new Korean American muppet, has prompted a conservative backlash. Texas senator Ted Cruz responded: “Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” Cruz later doubled down, tweeting a cartoon of the Sesame Street characters sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, with a dead, cooked Big Bird in place of a turkey.Others piled in. The influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressly banned Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters from its next conference, and CPAC organiser Matt Schlapp called for PBS, which broadcasts the show (although new episodes now air on HBO Max), to be defunded. “They just won’t stop in their push for woke politics,” he complained. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers went even further, declaring: “Big Bird is a communist.”Beyond the optics of beating up on universally beloved children’s characters, in the context of David Attie’s images, these takes could hardly be more wrong. Attie had been commissioned to photograph Sesame Street by Amerika, a Russian-language magazine funded by the US state department and distributed in the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was a cold war propaganda project. Soviet officials would regularly return copies of Amerika to the US embassy unsold, saying their citizens were not interested. In truth, the magazine was so sought after, it became a black-market commodity, explains Eli Attie. “One embassy official said to me they had traded two copies of Amerika for these impossible-to-find ballet tickets in Moscow at the time,” he says. So Sesame Street was used as government propaganda, just not in the way Cruz and Rogers might imagine.You could say that Sesame Street had a political mission from the outset, as the new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (to which Attie’s book is a companion piece), lays out. One of the show’s co-founders, the broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney, was involved “intellectually and spiritually” with the civil rights movement. The other, psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, was concerned about a widening education gap in the 1960s US, which was leaving behind socioeconomically deprived children, particularly African Americans. These children were often spending long hours at home watching television while their parents were busy working. Instead of jingles for beer commercials, Cooney and Morrisett reasoned, why not use television to teach them literacy and numeracy?With an $8m federal grant, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop spent two years researching how to make content that would not only be educational but entertaining. That’s where The Muppet Workshop came in (even if the hippy-ish Henson was initially distrusted by his more academic colleagues). Not to mention the songs, the anarchic comedy sketches, the surreal animations, and the improvised child-with-muppet segments. The whole thing was an experiment. Nothing like it had been done before and there was no guarantee it would be a success, but everyone seemed to be on the same page.As Cooney puts it in the documentary: “We weren’t so worried about reaching middle-class children but we really, really wanted to reach inner-city kids badly. It was hardly worth doing if it didn’t reach them.” This explains why the show was set on an ordinary New York street – a radical move for children’s TV, a familiar place for the target audience. Equally radically, the show was multicultural and inclusive from the start, with white, Black and Latino actors alongside non-human characters of all colours. Even the title sequence and the guests reflected the US’s diversity (the first season featured James Earl Jones, BB King, Mahalia Jackson and Jackie Robinson). As the long-running writer and director Jon Stone said of the show’s inclusive approach: “We’ve never beaten that horse to death by talking about it; we simply show it.”Sesame Street has taught kids about all manner of life topics. Not only racism (most recently with the introduction of two new African American characters, post-Black Lives Matter) but also poverty, addiction, autism, HIV and Aids, public health (Covid was not Big Bird’s first jab, he also got a measles vaccination in 1972), and gentrification (in 1994, the street was under threat of demolition from a loud-mouthed property tycoon named “Ronald Grump”, played by Joe Pesci). Sesame Street has even tackled the concept of death: when Will Lee, who played storekeeper Mr Hooper, died in 1982, the show featured a wrenching segment in which neighbours, clearly tearfully, explain to Big Bird that Mr Hooper is dead and is never coming back.It wasn’t just “inner-city kids” Sesame Street was popular with. While his father was working, Eli Attie’s artist mother would also put him and his brother in front of the TV to watch it so she could paint. “There was a block of hours that it was on public broadcasting stations in the New York region. So she just thought: ‘Hallelujah. I can place them here, they’re entertained,’” he says. “We were learning to count, we were learning to spell and we were learning a kind of comedy: we both became fans of Monty Python and standup comedy and I’m sure this was the gateway.” Attie went on to become a TV writer and producer, working on shows such as The West Wing, House and Billions.Sesame Street’s inclusive, humane, progressive agenda has always had its enemies. Mississippi broadcasters refused to air the first season back in 1969 on account of the show’s desegregated setting (they backed down after a few weeks). In the past decade, the conservative chorus of disapproval has been getting louder. Before Cruz and co, the show and PBS have been targeted by the likes of Mitt Romney, Fox News, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.“Sesame has never been a political show; it has been a very socially relevant show,” says Trevor Crafts, producer of the Street Gang documentary. Although the political climate today has echoes of the 1960s, when Sesame Street was created, he feels. “It was a very similar time. There was a lot of social unrest, and here we are again. It just shows that you need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively.”Where some might see a political agenda, many more would simply see a model for the kind of society the US would like to be. “I think it showed everybody: ‘This is who we should be in our hearts,’” Eli Attie says. “It was utopian. It was optimistic, it was challenging and smart. And it didn’t talk down to children.” As well as a family album, his father’s photos capture that spirit of playful idealism. “I see now that’s part of who I am,” he says. “And it’s part of who we all are.” TopicsChildren’s TVUS televisionTelevisionPhotographyThe MuppetsArt and design booksfeaturesReuse this content More
Meghan uses Ellen DeGeneres interview to call for paid family leave in USDuchess of Sussex renews call to ‘put families above politics’ as Congress considers Biden bill The Duchess of Sussex has renewed her call for the US to implement paid family leave, in an interview with the chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres.Appearing on NBC’s The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday afternoon, Meghan stressed the importance of paid leave, which is included in Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill but is opposed by Republicans and at least one key Democratic senator.“I think that people truly forget, or don’t even know, that in this country, it’s one of the only six countries in the entire world and the only wealthy nation in the entire world that does not mandate and have a federal paid leave programme,” Meghan said.“Everybody knows, especially if you have had a child and even if you haven’t, you know how hard it is and how critical it is in those first few weeks, if not months, to be together as a family.“And the fact that we don’t offer that here is something that now, as a mom of two, I will do everything that I can to make sure that we can implement that for people.”Meghan wrote an open letter to the top congressional Democrats Chuck Schumer, the majority leader of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, in October, advocating for legislation mandating paid leave.“This isn’t about right or left, it’s about right or wrong. This is about putting families above politics,” Meghan wrote of her new cause.Can Harry and Meghan succeed in reintroducing royalty into US politics?Read moreMeghan’s appearance on the TV show had been kept secret until Wednesday, when DeGeneres posted a trailer for the interview on Twitter.The pair also discussed how Meghan and her husband, Britain’s Prince Harry, had secretly visited a Halloween party in 2016, just before their relationship was made public.And Meghan revealed that Harry, whom she sometimes refers to as “H”, is enjoying California.“The lifestyle, the weather’s pretty great. We’re just happy,” Meghan, who was born in Los Angeles, said.Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey earlier this year created headlines around the world.In that interview, Meghan said she had experienced racism from a member of the royal family, and said she had experienced suicidal thoughts as a result of the environment created by the British tabloid media, and the institution of the monarchy.The conversation with DeGeneres on Thursday stayed mostly light, however, with the Duchess and the chatshow host discussing their plans for the Thanksgiving celebration next week. Meghan planned to cook for the event, she said.This is the final season of DeGeneres’s long-running show, which was plunged into crisis last year, after allegations of behind-the-scenes sexual harassment and racist behavior on the show.BuzzFeed News reported that it had spoken with 36 former employees, many of whom corroborated incidents of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault. The outlet reported that allegations included sexual misconduct between executives and lower-level employees, including requests for sex.DeGeneres apologised and said she had “not been able to stay on top of everything and relied on others to do their jobs as they knew I’d want them done”.The show may have appeared an odd platform for the Duchess to choose, but she, Harry and DeGeneres have been friends for some years and DeGeneres has previously defended the couple against unforgiving media scrutiny.Meghan and Harry broke away from the British royal family early last year and later moved to LA.DeGeneres has previously described them as “the cutest couple, so down to earth” and said: “I see them get attacked and it’s not fair.”
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
TopicsMeghan, the Duchess of SussexUS politicsEllen DeGeneresUS televisionnewsReuse this content More
As Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart begins, the documentary-makers and old friends discuss conspiracy theories, the problem of ‘activist journalists’ and what happened to Ceaușescu’s socksby Fiona SturgesJon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the “satanic panic” who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronson’s new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceaușescu’s belongings?Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.AC I bought Ceaușescu’s cap, and a pair of socks.JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I don’t even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.AC I do, actually.JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find I’m asking you questions because I’m trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: “Don’t think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here.” There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, I’m trying to remember when we actually met.JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: “Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.”JR She probably said: “I can’t take it any more. He won’t stop agonising.”AC But when we met you didn’t agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other – and it’s been the professional bond between us – is that we’re both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.JR I’m really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what it’s like to be an obsessive individualist, but we’ve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which you’ve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. I’ve always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that you’ve done it. You can’t post anything online. When you say that to people, they can’t conceive of it.JR I really like that idea.AC The other thing that we both do when we’re interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly they’ll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. It’s like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that there’s a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.AC We’re talking about sincerity? Don’t go there, Jon! You’ll be writing poems next.JR [Laughs] Well it’s really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that I’ve worked hard to come to the thoughts I’ve come to.AC Yes, I agree with that.JR I guess what we have in common is we’re not ideologues. We don’t go into a situation with a set of agendas. We’re more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that we’re forced to keep an open mind. I don’t even have a list of questions in my head when I’m interviewing somebody. I’m literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And it’s absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what we’re calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What I’m increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What you’ve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show that’s about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didn’t want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church minister’s wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasn’t having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at – in fact, shots were fired from both sides – and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].AC By Roger McGough!JR Yes. It was a poem [1967’s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: “I don’t think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent.” So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: “Hang on, this isn’t quite as bad as she thinks it is.” And then, Jon’s brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. It’s good versus evil – that’s where journalism has got to now. But yours doesn’t do that.JR I’m interested in everybody as a human being and I’m quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that it’s just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, it’s extraordinary. It’s a conspiracy theory. That’s as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: “Oh my God. All this time I’ve just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trump’s election, George Floyd.” So they think it’s not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think it’s completely understandable and, in some cases, it’s a great thing. But then in other cases, it’s really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that they’ve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think it’s going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that there’s something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. It’s almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. It’s become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someone’s got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.TopicsJon RonsonAdam CurtisPodcastsPodcastingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
TV reviewTelevisionFour Hours at the Capitol review – a chilling look at the day the far right ‘fought like hell’With Trump’s words ringing in their ears, a violent mob descended on the US Capitol on 6 January. This powerful film details what happened – and their horrifying lack of remorse Lucy Mangan@LucyManganWed 20 Oct 2021 17.30 EDTNick Alvear started believing in Trump “because 800,000 kids in America go missing every year – held captive, tortured and killed … enslaved sexually … I’m part of the first wave bringing awareness of this.”It is perhaps the greatest of Four Hours at the Capitol’s many strengths that it gives space to those who were most eager for battle. They call themselves insurrectionists, while others in the BBC Two documentary that details the unfolding of the 6 January assault on the meeting place of the US Congress refer to them as domestic terrorists.Jamie Roberts’ film (he also directed The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty) lays out the timeline of that extraordinary day in exhaustive but never exhausting detail. Phone footage shot by Eddie Block, a member of the far-right group Proud Boys, shows them beginning to gather at 10.35am. By 12.06pm they have heard enough of Trump’s Stop the Steal speech to have started marching towards Capitol Hill. Viewers are reminded of the barely veiled exhortations to action that were ringing in their ears: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness … If you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country any more.”The film hears from many of those on the other side of the fight, including some of the 40 or 50 officers who did their best to hold back the 1,500-strong mob as they came up the steps and broke into the building, and from members of Congress (Republican and Democrat) and others who found themselves trapped inside. The latter include Leah Han, a staffer in Nancy Pelosi’s office, who recounts how she and her colleagues relocated from the room that bore Pelosi’s name to an anonymous office down the hall and hid under the desks as the noise of invasion got louder, hoping that they would not be killed or raped before help arrived.The accounts of those trapped and of the officers hopelessly outnumbered outside are as harrowing as you might expect – whether they are recollected with stoicism (“For hours we were sitting there, the president not saying a word,” says Republican representative for Illinois Adam Kinzinger. “To me that was beyond the pale”) or fury (most of the officers). Foremost among the second group is Mike Fanone, who was grabbed by the mob as he and others battled for hours to keep protesters out of the tunnel that would have let them flood the building. He was Tasered and beaten before being passed back to safety. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack. “That I and a shit-ton of my fellow officers almost lost their lives pisses me the fuck off,” he says.The documentary passed lightly – too lightly, maybe – over the lack of preparation by Capitol and Metropolitan Police Department officials on the day, given the known combustibility of the situation and the hesitant response from the National Guard and others to pleas for reinforcement. However, overall there was a much-needed sense of the true human impact of what happened. From the outside, ruined by Hollywood spectacle as we all have been, perhaps it didn’t look that bad. Once we were taken inside – shown the mentality and mechanics of the crowd, and given the proper scale by which to judge – it was that bad, and worse.Most chilling of all was the lack of remorse among the rioters interviewed, coupled with their unassailed – and one must presume, at this point, unassailable – devotion to the man they believe commanded them to storm the Capitol. There was also a generous portion of denial and doublethink from people like Couy Griffin, part of the Cowboys for Trump group, who insists he was standing among thousands of “peaceful patriots” and thinks that “you’re really stretching it to say it was supporters of Trump that did it … just because they have a Trump hat or a Trump T-shirt on”.Three protesters outside the Capitol died from medical emergencies, 140 police officers were injured, one died and – since January – there have been four deaths by suicide among those who were on duty that day. The rage still visibly emanates from Fanone. “I still haven’t made sense of it,” he says, eyes blazing. “And it certainly doesn’t help when the elected leader won’t even acknowledge it occurred.”The underlying collective testimony furnished by Four Hours at the Capitol is that the age of Trump has not yet ended – and the true day of reckoning in the United States is still to come.TopicsTelevisionTV reviewUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More
Emmys 2021Australian journalist Jonathan Swan wins Emmy for his viral interview with Donald Trump The Axios political reporter, whose facial expressions launched a meme, grilled the US president on his response to Covid and fact-checked his misleading statements Amanda MeadeWed 29 Sep 2021 00.57 EDTLast modified on Wed 29 Sep 2021 01.36 EDTAustralian journalist Jonathan Swan has won an Emmy award for his widely acclaimed interview with Donald Trump in which he bluntly fact-checked the president’s misleading statements.In August last year the national political correspondent at the Axios news site grabbed international headlines when he doggedly but politely questioned the US president about his response to the Covid-19 pandemic.“I’m deeply honoured to have won this award, and grateful for the gifted, generous team who helped make the interview a great piece of journalism,” Swan told Guardian Australia after winning the Emmy award for outstanding edited interview.Who is Jonathan Swan, the reporter who grilled Trump? And what do kangaroos have to do with it?Read moreSwan’s myriad facial expressions during the Axios on HBO interview also attracted the attention of social media, launching a popular meme.The #NewsEmmys Award for Outstanding Edited Interview goes to “President Donald J. Trump: An interview,” @HBO @axios. pic.twitter.com/E5uMmHhKvp— News & Documentary Emmys (@newsemmys) September 29, 2021
The 36-year-old had Trump shuffling through his papers as he put him on the spot about the death toll in the US.“Well, right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories,” Trump said. “We’re lower than the world.”Swan: “Lower than the world? Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population.”00:59Another part of the interview which was startling was Trump’s claim that he had “done more” to improve the lives of black people in the US than the late civil rights leader John Lewis.Ben Smith wrote in the New York Times that it was “perhaps the best interview of Mr Trump’s term”.Congratulations to @jonathanvswan and #AxiosOnHBO on an #Emmy win!!!!So proud to make this show with @perripeltz and the team @axios @HBODocs @DCTVny We’re back on the air 6pm Sunday night! Tune in! @HBO https://t.co/0sQCMAEjGR— Matt O’Neill (@MattODocs) September 29, 2021
Swan is a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist who moved to the US in 2014, and is the son of ABC health editor Dr Norman Swan.So proud of my son @jonathanvswan winning an Emmy just now. Fabulous work. I love you.— Norman Swan (@normanswan) September 29, 2021
Father and son have been covering the coronavirus for almost two years, albeit from different perspectives and on different sides of the world.Norman and health reporter Tegan Taylor host the hugely popular Coronacast podcast on ABC.Jonathan achieved early success in Australia, winning the prestigious Wallace Brown young achiever award for journalism in 2014 after a string of scoops about the questionable use of taxpayer funds by politicians, which led to an overhaul of the rules governing parliamentary entitlements and expenses. The judges commended his “dogged determination”.All the best reactions of @jonathanvswan as he listened to @realDonaldTrump’s responses. Which is your favorite? @axios #ItIsWhatItIs pic.twitter.com/TWL5bOvESX— Joel Lawson (@JoelLawsonDC) August 4, 2020
The 42nd Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards were announced by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in New York on Tuesday night US time.TopicsEmmys 2021Australian mediaTrump administrationUS politicsAustralian Broadcasting CorporationHBOTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More
US television‘This is about power’: the truth behind Impeachment: American Crime Story A new series relives the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and here, those involved remember and reflect on a national scandalDavid Smith in Washington@ More
TV reviewTelevision9/11: Inside the President’s War Room review – astonishing and petrifying This remarkable documentary shows exactly how 9/11 unfolded for George W Bush, from the multiple prayer breaks to the anti-anthrax pills – and the vow to ‘kick ass’ before he knew whose ass to kickJack SealeTue 31 Aug 2021 17.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 31 Aug 2021 17.26 EDTThere is a particular kind of political documentary that tries to put us “in the room”, to tell us how historic decisions were made and how the fallible humans who made them felt. But on 11 September 2001, when planes hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists destroyed the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, the chaos was such that there was no single “room”. President George W Bush and his advisers, afraid for their own safety and constantly searching for information, were on the move all day and had to conduct their business in airbase bunkers, the back room of a school and aboard the president’s jet, Air Force One.Nevertheless, 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room (BBC One) gives the sensation of being in the room in a way that few documentaries ever have. That day has often been described as a disaster movie no screenwriter would dare imagine. Here, it is a horrifyingly tragic but also propulsive story, with twin narratives following the president’s movements and the developing carnage on the ground, minute by minute.The film’s archive footage has plenty of Adam Curtis moments, such as Bush killing a fly on the Oval Office desk, seconds before giving the gravest speech of his life, to underline that every moment of 11 September had something odd or terrifying in it. But as every relevant government official shares their recollections on camera, the vivid pictures are outstripped by personal anecdotes. We hear from the situation room captain, who recalls having to brace herself against the president’s desk as Air Force One made a steep emergency takeoff – “I went partially weightless. I was petrified” – and the deputy communications director, who got flustered when Bush’s doctor handed out anti-anthrax pills and took his whole week’s ration in one hit.Chiefly, though, this is an insight into the mind of the star interviewee: George W Bush. At first, we see his notorious folksy simplicity, apparent in his eerily counterintuitive decision to ignore, for several long minutes, the news about the second tower being hit, for fear of being impolite to a class of Florida seven-year-olds having a presidential visit. Bush also called for those around him to stop and pray, more than once, while still in the eye of a storm of unknown lethality and proportion. “Prayer can be very comforting,” he says here.Such reactions could be read as bizarre in the face of doom, or natural responses to a situation where what could immediately be achieved was unclear. One interviewee says that, while analyses of Churchill or Roosevelt in wartime look at actions that took weeks to complete, Bush on 9/11 is a study of a leader being forced to make epic choices on the hop.This is where Inside the President’s War Room is most revealing. We hear how anger became the strongest of Bush’s conflicting emotions: fear and sorrow and a determination to safeguard US citizens had to make room for the desire to, in Bush’s words, “kick their ass”, before it was known whose ass or how. By that evening, the president had publicly formulated the “Bush doctrine”, which said harbouring terrorists was to be treated as the equivalent of perpetrating terror. A new American pathology, the “war on terror”, was born in haste.The consequences of this are clear from the fact that this documentary, marking 20 years since 9/11, airs just as the ensuing military intervention in Afghanistan concludes. The thought of that war and, moreover, the US and its allies’ 2003 attack on Iraq, hangs over the whole piece, making the simplest emotional moments complex. The politician expressing the helpless horror of seeing the twin towers fall on TV is Karl Rove. The bowed head, overcome by the emotion of remembering the dilemma over whether or not to shoot down United Flight 93, belongs to Dick Cheney.Are those moments still affecting, knowing that those men went on to wreak horrors of their own? Yes, but to its credit, Inside the President’s War Room makes sure that context is explicit. Being in the room doesn’t stop us looking beyond.TopicsTelevisionTV reviewUS politicsSeptember 11 2001George BushreviewsReuse this content More
