BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the U.S. Army issued orders to seize the only TV station in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The division commander said the aim was to block that station's continued broadcasts of Al Jazeera. According to the Journal, the officer charged with carrying out the order refused because she found it inconsistent with the Pentagon's stated aim of protecting such citizen rights as free speech, and she was relieved of duty. But the U.S. government is not the only critic of Al Jazeera and other Arab media. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is the editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper published in London. During the war, he wrote that overblown reports of Iraqi resistance would lead to a rude awakening, as in 1967, when Egyptians, misled by news reports, were shocked to learn that they had lost the war with Israel. Mr. Al-Rashed, welcome to the show.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Thank you for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now during the war you wrote a number of editorials criticizing the Arab media's coverage, especially Al Jazeera. What bothered you the most?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:From the beginning, they kept repeating the Iraqi information minister. They had, you know, Iraqi talking heads for days and nights about how patriotic the army is and how they're going to win the war. They let the people that to the last minute the Americans were not winning; they did not get Basra; they are so far from Baghdad it will take them days before they reach Baghdad -- stories after stories of amazing fighting in different towns -- at the time when the American force is already in Baghdad -- and of course it was a big shock to everybody because the media made them believe this is going to be a long war and the Iraqis were winning!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:There is a historical precedent for this kind of coverage. The 1967 war between Egypt and Israel and the 1991 Persian Gulf war when Saudi newspapers went several days before explaining to readers that Iraq had actually invaded Kuwait. What kind of impact long-term do you think that this kind of reporting has on the relationship between the Arab people and the Arab media?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:I think they had a shock for a few days and the media even confessed for misleading the public, but then they come back again and -trying to make issues - so people forget. The main issue they talk about today, for example, the Americans coming here to steal the Iraqi oil -- and nobody said the Americans been in the Gulf for 40 years they've been operating the oil - been in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Emirates - and nobody stole anybody's oil. It's a partnership - it's working very well. So-- with different issues you can keep them busy from one day to another day, but the message hasn't changed really which is the same old message of radicalism. I think it, it's getting from bad to worse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Specifically, how did Al Jazeera manifest that radicalism?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:They came up with different stories like the American used many nuclear bomb; the Americans deceived the Iraqis; the Americans did this, they did that -- when the Iraqi people found out they are free and they can talk about what happened to them in the past 20 years, Al Jazeera ignored this fact and they concentrated on the faults of the Americans in Iraq but no one bothered to say why these Iraqis are queuing to see what happened to their loves ones who disappeared -- 300,000 Iraqis - no one knows where they are - they disappeared in the past few years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You said that they accused the Americans of using nuclear bombs?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:Yes, the second day of the Baghdad fall they reported that someone told them in London, an Iraqi person, the American used many nuclear bombs, and they kept repeating the same news again and again, and the news bulletin - and any - that was the only TV station I would say showed something like that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:When you were criticizing the coverage of Al Jazeera and other Arab media during the war, you were criticized in turn for doing so, weren't you?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Before the collapse of Saddam' regime, the majority of writers were on the other side. I was with the minority. And--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you were accused of being brainwashed.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:Brainwashed - completely. Then -- after the collapse of the dictator, I received a lot of people supporting or apologizing, and then I think, yes! I mean I should be criticized; I mean I like to have an, an a -- you know a debate; my nightmare is what happened before. It was one kind of opinion and that was the dominant opinion in the television -- or newspapers -- or, or radio. And that was really the, the scariest part.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Well thank you very much.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is the editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Long before the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, the United States had waged a radio war in Iraq, covertly beaming signals from Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraqi Kurdistan. Nick Grace is managing editor of Clandestineradio.com, a web site dedicated to tracking clandestine radio stations around the world. He says that until recently Iraqis could tune in to a variety of CIA-backed stations on the radio dial.
NICK GRACE:When the Iraqi listeners turned on their radios, say, one month ago there were approximately 8 radio stations that were covertly pumping in propaganda - into Iraq. Five of these stations have been tied to U.S. intelligence and three have been tied to Iranian intelligence. Three of the stations that were supported covertly by the U.S. include a station called Al-Mustaqbal, called The Future, Radio of the Two Rivers as well as a station called Radio Tikrit. These three radio stations broadcast from a covert transmitter in Kuwait and had ties with an Iraqi exile group in London called the Iraqi National Accord. The message of these three stations were more or less directed towards the enlisted soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces, high level officers in the Republican Guard, as well as members of the Baath Party in Baghdad essentially encouraging them to defect, encouraging them to stand down orders, encouraging them to undermine the regime in Baghdad. Al-Mustaqbal broadcast programming which was very comic. They were known for its impersonators of Saddam Hussein. Radio of the Two Rivers broadcast a more upbeat program -lots of very-- high energy Middle Eastern popular music as well as almost New York FM-style radio promos. Radio Tikrit however, was much more timid during the beginning of its life cycle; in fact when it first went on the air it was very much anti-U.S.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even though it was being supported by U.S. intelligence? That's confusing!
NICK GRACE:It was a hook. The target of its listeners were of course the loyalists of the Baath Party, especially those from Tikrit. Within a week of its first being heard and noted by us and, as well as other monitoring organizations, the message shifted to a very much pro-Baath Party yet pro-democracy and anti-Saddam Hussein.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So you have these pro-western stations and they were urging people in the Iraqi military to, to give up, to surrender, to desert and so forth, and this is before there was Gulf War II how effective was this message?
NICK GRACE:We can see an effect of these stations, though it's anecdotal. There were a number of stories by embedded journalists who noted that many of the defectors and, and the surrenders of the Iraqi troops were in accordance, if you will with what the coalition had been telling them to do!-- to mobilize their tanks in such a way and such a pattern so that the coalition would know that those tanks were not hostile. Same thing with planes and so forth. So-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this was heard on their radio stations.
NICK GRACE: The radio stations were telling their listeners - those enlisted troops as well as officers - how to surrender properly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how has the message changed now that the war is pretty much over?
NICK GRACE:Many of these stations whose modus operandi was to broadcast during the war are now off the air, of course, and those stations that are still on the air have re-branded themselves, if you will. Radio Tikrit has now become Radio Sumer; it's not longer broadcasting specifically for one segment of the population but in fact the entire country. Sumer, of course, being the historic name of, of Iraq, and suggesting that the agenda or the interest of the station is to promote unity in Iraq! Radio Tikrit is also borrowing some of the content-- some of the comedians and the personnel from Al-Mustaqbal to produce their own brand of comedy, the most famous being the rap song which was broadcast the day after Baghdad fell.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Your web site was recommended to us by a couple of sources we find very reliable, but how do you know what you know? How do you know who's backing whom?
NICK GRACE:Everyone involved with the web site have been monitoring radio for 15, 20 years each. We're veterans in the radio-monitoring field. Our knowledge of the transmitter in Kuwait -something that we broke - came from sources within the Iraqi opposition. Radio transmitters leave -- they have a footprint; they have a particular sound, and when the United States has sponsored covert radio st-- broadcasts in the past, they have essentially used the same transmitters. So when we know, for example, that a station in the past has broadcast from, say, a transmitter in Kuwait, that station is no longer on the air and a new station comes on -this is the same frequency, the same schedule, the same signal quality -- everything lines up - all the ducks are in the row - it's - it has to be from that transmitter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And finally what do your sources tell you about the future of clandestine radio in Iraq? do you think that it's going to become less clandestine?
NICK GRACE:Absolutely. In fact both the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord are refusing support from the United States government to broadcast clandestinely from within Iraq. It's clear that Iraq as a nation is tired of this covert propaganda and wants to start fresh and start with legal broadcasting, and they want to be able to control their media outlets much more than they would be able to-- under the CIA.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much!
NICK GRACE: Oh, thank you, Brooke! It's been a pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Grace is managing editor of Clandestineradio.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As for that famous rap song he mentioned that was broadcast on Radio Tikrit, it was a takeoff of Coolio's Gangsta Paradise as sung by Saddam Hussein. [SONG-TAKEOFF OF GANGSTA PARADISE PLAYS]
MAN: I'M SADDAM. I DON'T HAVE A BOMB. I'M NOT A SOLDIER. I WORK AT A FARM.
BUSH WANT TO HIT ME. I DON'T KNOW WHY. AND IF I CALL HIM, HE TELLS ME GOODBYE.
SMOKING WEED AND GETTING HIGH I KNOW THE DEVIL IS BY MY SIDE.
MY DAYS ARE FINISHED, AND I WILL DIE ALL I NEED IS CHILI FRY. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can thank us for that later. Coming up, why the media find it hard to tackle the question of body counts, and what Iranian women make of Humbert Humbert. This is On the Media from NPR. [COOLIO SINGING GANGSTA PARADISE] BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the weeks leading up to war, President Bush repeatedly assured us that U.S. forces would do everything possible to limit civilian casualties, and while the military has for the most part seemed to carry through on this promise, we may never know for sure how many were killed. The Pentagon has said explicitly that it will not engage in body counts. But little by little a picture is beginning to emerge. Last week, Knight Ridder newspapers reported that according to hospital records, at least 1100 civilians and possibly twice that amount died in the battle for Baghdad alone. But that estimate was one of the very few to surface in the media so far, and some critics are asking why the story hasn't gotten more attention. Should the media be doing more? Military analyst and Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Arkin is in the process of compiling a long-term data base of civilian casualties in U.S. wars since 1991. And he says it's not the media's role to find a definitive number.
BILL ARKIN:The problem with the Knight Ridder survey of civilian casualties in Baghdad is that while this is great journalism it isn't sufficient -it isn't something that's going to stand up in history records; it would be the equivalent of the news media keeping score, literally, at sporting events and having the New York Times saying that the score of the football game was 20 to 17 while the Washington Post saying that the score of the football game was 21 to 15. The news media and journalism is the first cut of history, but it is not history.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Since you're a bit dubious of some of the attempts by the media to provide a number based on incomplete information, what do you think the role of the media should be in reporting all of this?
BILL ARKIN:There's definitely a role for the media. In Afghanistan the, the news media did a terrific job of trying to-- give a survey of what the deaths were in the country - the Los Angeles Times - the Associated Press - the Chicago Tribune - all did great surveys of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and they expended an enormous amount of time building their own databases and using computer assisted reporting in order to do this. But the fact of the matter is that probably no one remembers what it is that they said in the end, and there's no consensus as to what the level of casualties are. The truth of the matter is that without good records at the local level and without intelligence information provided by the U.S. government, it's virtually impossible to make these kinds of calculations and estimates, and I think we're going to have that same level of difficulty in Iraq, because the United States government and the U.S. military wants to put the issue of civilian casualties behind them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And in the meantime, in the absence of any information from the Pentagon you have this enormous vacuum! And if the media don't fill it, and if the Pentagon doesn't fill it, you have these-- independent groups that will. If the task is left to the human rights community and fringe advocates, you know, what are we left with?
BILL ARKIN:Well I think we're left with a very bad picture, and I'm not sure that any of the non-governmental organizations or any of the news media organizations are going to resolve this issue. The Knight Ridder study is a good example. This is a great survey of the casualties and the number should be surprising to people. That study should have been front page news --not because of some war crimes issue that's lurking in the background, but because we are engaged right now in the reconstruction and reconciliation of Iraqi society! And if 1200 families lost members of their family, then those are all people that we have to deal with in the days, weeks and months ahead!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me about your project and how that fits into all of this.
BILL ARKIN:Well I think one of the things that we have tried to do is to put an academic, scientific basis for thinking about why civilians die in modern warfare, and I say modern warfare basically from Desert Storm in 1991 to the present. Because if in fact the U.S. military and the U.S. government is going to claim that it does everything that it can to minimize civilian harm, then one of the things that we need to do I studying civilian harm is trying to understand what are the major reasons that civilians die and are injured so that those practices be changed, because those practices are shown to have the greatest impact on civilian life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:As you say, you have to take these incidents and study them individually. Do you think you're going to get enough information from the Pentagon or on the ground to be able to make reliable assessments?
BILL ARKIN:Well I think we are. I, I have been working on this now off and on for more than a decade. The Gulf War in 1991 is fairly well known. Yugoslavia is fairly well known. Afghanistan is a much more difficult case because of the lack of records at the local level, but this war probably will be one in which we'll be able to reconstruct what happened and reconstructing what happened is key in order to make these kinds of estimates.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Exactly why do you think that number is going to be more achievable this time around.
BILL ARKIN:Well one of the reasons, Brooke, is because so many precision-guided weapons were used. With a fairly small number of tank rounds and artillery rounds and rockets being fired, we are able to look more meticulously at each of those individual weapons. We should be able to come to a fairly precise answer as to how much civilian harm and civilian death was caused.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Numbers are rarely neutral and they're often applied in a game of blame. What sorts of applications do you see for your database?
BILL ARKIN:Well I guess our objective is to try to have a consensus document that will let people understand what the civilian cost of these various conflicts has been and give them a gauge to determine whether or not the efforts to minimize civilian harm in the future are successful or not. I don't think most people could tell you whether 1200 civilians dying in the Battle of Baghdad in accordance with the Knight Ridder study is a good number or a bad number. Did it show care on the part of the American military or was it wanton destruction? And so I would like to have the basis by which journalism and public understanding of this important issue will be improved in the future.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay! Bill, thank you very much.
BILL ARKIN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bill Arkin is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times; military analyst for NBC News and senior military advisor to Human Rights Watch. He joined us from studios in his home state of Vermont. [MUSIC] BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even under a totalitarian regime that seeks to control both action and thought, people are not immune to books. Literature can work like a virus, effecting slow transformations. Literary critic and educator Azar Nafisi is a carrier, so to speak, of that virus, and she exposed her students to Henry James and Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov first in university classes and then in a tiny seminar of selected women after the Islamic Fundamentalist Revolution. Nafisi wrote about that experience and the books that made it possible in her new memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, and she joins me now. Welcome to On the Media.
AZAR NAFISI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now you call it a memoir, but it's also an eyewitness account of a revolution that reached into the most intimate parts of people's lives; it's also a collection of personal portraits - the people who you drew from and who drew from you - and of course it's a book of some of the most passionate and perceptive literary criticism that I have ever read!
AZAR NAFISI:Thank you so much. You know I wanted it to be a memoir in books because I didn't want it to be about me personally, but about my experiences and my life within the context of the Islamic Republic or a totalitarian regime and not just the Islamic Republic, and how these books helped us redefine and open spaces within that reality.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well it was a revelation to me. I thought I knew The Great Gatsby and Lolita, but now I see what you take from those books depends so much more than I thought on the context of your own life!
AZAR NAFISI: The way different realities redefine these books! That's the exciting thing about them, I think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about Lolita. The protagonist, Humbert Humbert is a child molester with complete control over his 12 year old ward--
AZAR NAFISI: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- Dolores who he has renamed Lolita.
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Humbert is appealing! He's a sharp wit. He hates our crass commercial culture as much as the most right-minded intellectual does, and Nabokov has us see the world through his eyes.
AZAR NAFISI: Mm-hm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What relevance did Lolita have for the seven young women in your seminar?
AZAR NAFISI:The point about Humbert Humbert is not just that he rapes and keeps Lolita in his prison for almost two years but the fact that he has fallen in love with a girl when he was very young, and she dies and the love is never consummated, and since then he wants to impose his own past upon a living reality -- the living entity that is Lolita -- and that is the greatest crime. And this is what they did to us! They came in the name of the past and told us that you have no right to be what you are; you have to be a figment of our imagination! So my girls really, really identified with the book as a whole.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And partly because Humbert is such an appealing character--
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- and there's so much about Islam that is so appealing and so important to those women at that same conflict that they have with the protagonist in Lolita, they, they have to work out through their own government and their own regime and their own faith!
AZAR NAFISI:Yes, you're very right because Humbert uses his sophistication and his love of culture--in condemning Lolita's quote/unquote "vulgarity" -- and he is, as you said, very appealing, and this is true of Ayatollah Khomeini and the regime that came to Iran in the name of Islam. They used Islam not as a religion but as an ideology in order to gain control over the lives of the individual citizens in that country! They confiscated our lives! So, as you say, the girls in that class very much understood the structure of Nabokov's novel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well while you were still teaching at Tehran University, you had a class full of male and female students and some were fundamentalist and some were Marxist and some were still lingeringly westernized-- [LAUGHTER] and one of the most striking parts of your book is when you recount the day your class put The Great Gatsby on trial! What was the point of that exercise?
AZAR NAFISI:One of my Islamist students who was the leader of the Islamist student associations at the University of Tehran, he objected to The Great Gatsby; he said that this is a decadent work -Fitzgerald was - pro the money - the capitalist, imperialists and we tried to kick these people out of our country, and so why are we reading them? I wasn't about to get rid of Great Gatsby because of this guy, and I felt that he didn't act as a reader but as a prosecutor. So I said okay - you're the prosecutor. Let's put this book on trial and see what happens!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If I recall, your political defense was that if anything Gatsby was not a, a celebrant of commercial culture but something very different.
AZAR NAFISI:The Great Gatsby, when you go into the novel you discover that no matter what Fitzgerald himself was, and Fitzgerald-- did court the wealthy, but his work transcends his own flaws, and the main villains in that novel, if you could call anybody a villain in novels, are Tom and Daisy Buchanan who are the wealthiest, and they're careless people! They create messes that other people have to clean up after them! So-- the greatest sin in The Great Gatsby as in so many great novels is being careless of others - not having empathy towards others - which I think our prosecutor actually was guilty of [LAUGHS] rather than the, The Great Gatsby.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And in almost all the books that you feature in your memoir, the central criminals, no matter how virtuous they were, were criminals because of that lack of empathy.
AZAR NAFISI:Yeah, and that is I think one of the greatest gifts of the novel -- villains are people's who do not see others - who are blind towards other people - whether you were talking about Jane Austen or Zora Neale Hurston! They don't just punish them. They know that because you're a villain, you cannot be simply eliminated. You can be revealed and exposed, but we live all side by side, the way we do in society!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And, and the only triumph that you can be guaranteed is the one that you take for yourself. Like the character in Washington Square who never really triumphed in any of the spheres that she tried in--
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- but she triumphed in defying the others who would push her into boxes she didn't want to go.
AZAR NAFISI:Oh, I'm so glad you brought her up, Catherine in Washington Square. What matters, what is - specially at the center of James's novels - is individual integrity. And it's usually a woman who is at the center of this issue, and what becomes important is not whether we win or lose but how we lose. The attitude we take towards others and ourselves and the dignity that we preserve becomes the most central issue in the novel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet Catherine is left alone with her embroidery, facing a life of loneliness. It's a hard lesson! [LAUGHTER] It's a hard triumph, I would imagine, for your female students to swallow!
AZAR NAFISI: You're right. The reward you get is not necessarily happiness, but the reward you get is gaining your own self-respect.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How strange it seems that when the stakes were so high at that time in Iran -- when people were killed at random for a slight or imagined offenses - when they were raped and stoned and, and shot at random -- that literature, mostly by dead white guys from another place and time-- [LAUGHTER] should matter so much!
AZAR NAFISI:You know that is the great thing about literature. It transcends your sexuality or race or nationality. Literature becomes universal and property of everyone. Imagination genuinely liberates us from reality and it lets us re-tell our story! It's so important because you know - life is also tyrannical. It's all death in the end. And the only time we can-- triumph over time is when we tell the stories of our moments.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that literature has a different role in a closed society than it does in an open one?
AZAR NAFISI:You know we act towards literature in an open society the way we act towards our hands or eyes. They're there, and we take them for granted. But you know - we who come from those other countries would like to remind you about the preciousness of these values and they're fragility. These rights are not God-given, and they can be taken away from us anywhere we live.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much.
AZAR NAFISI: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Azar Nafisi is author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. [MUSIC]
copyright 2003 WNYC Radio
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Composer Aaron Copland did not testify in public before Joe McCarthy's infamous committee. We know that because just this week the transcripts of 161 of his closed-door sessions were released. These were dress rehearsals for an endless run of public hearings the Wisconsin Republican staged in the '50s to fan the flames of the Red Scare. It's been noted that only those who looked suspicious or confused or weak were called to testify. Copland, it seems, failed the audition. His testimony would not have been televised in any case. Broadcast gavel to gavel coverage was reserved for the senator's investigation of the Army over 36 days in the spring of '54. And though the 1951 Kefauver Crime Committee has prior claim as the first congressional reality TV show, and the Watergate and Iran-Contra hearings riveted the nation, the Army-McCarthy hearings beat them all for sheer theatricality. Senator Joe McCarthy as Sergeant Joe Friday playing Inspector Javert. [TAPE PLAYS]
SENATOR JOE McCARTHY: I want to tell the secretary of state this: if he wants to call me tonight at the Utah Hotel, I'll be glad to give him the names of those 57 card-carrying Communists. Now I, I don't claim to be any FBI or anything, so that when I have the names of 57, you can be right well sure there are a lot more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The irony, as any Hollywood agent could have seen with eyes cleared of fear was that McCarthy was a bad actor, a Johnny one-note with an expiration date. "The American people have had a look at you for six weeks," Senator Stuart Symington told him near the end, "You're not fooling anyone." No matter how much Vaseline you smear on the camera lens, eventually the folks at home will see through it, and you'll look ugly if that's what you are. [MUSIC]
MAN: [SINGING] I GOT THOSE SENATOR McCARTHY, CHAIRMAN MONT, MAGLELLAN POTTER SENATOR DIRKSEN BLUES!
BECAUSE MY GAL WON'T LEAVE HER TV SET, I THINK THAT SHE'S ABOUT TO BLOW HER FUSE!
I GOT THOSE OPEN-SESSION CLOSE A SESSION AND THE SESSION NO CONFESSION BLUES!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, a Hitler mini-series in hot water, and a history of the wildly successful and ever-lastingly annoying laugh track. This is On the Media from NPR. BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last year CBS killed a script it had commissioned on the early life of Adolf Hitler amid charges that it would humanize history's most notorious mass murderer. Now the network is being slammed again for another Hitler mini-series -- this one ostensibly equating the Third Reich with the Bush Administration. It's not at all clear whether either of those claims were or are true. What is clear is that Ed Gernon, executive producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, was fired by the Canadian production company Alliance Atlantis three days after the New York Post picked up on remarks he made to TV Guide. Gernon is quoted as saying of the mini-series, which follows Hitler's rise to power that quote "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear who ultimately choose to give up their civil rights and plunge the whole world into war." And he added, "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now." Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote about the controversy in his column in the New York Observer. Ron, welcome back to the show.
RON ROSENBAUM: Thanks a lot, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now John Podhoretz of the New York Post calls the mini-series -- and I don't know if he's seen it or not -- an act of slander against the president of the United States and by extension toward the United States itself. You've seen the series. Is it an act of slander?
RON ROSENBAUM:I don't know if slander is the word I'd use, but I think that there is a very crucial moment in the mini-series in which an episode in the rise of Hitler is altered, fiddled with, however you want to call it, in order to create what I believe is a false analogy with the Bush administration -- specifically at the Reichstag fire, the famous episode of the burning of the German legislative chamber. In the history that the mini-series was initially based on, Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, the standard version of what Hitler says is that this is an attack by Communists and we must respond -- essentially, I'm boiling it down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.
RON ROSENBAUM:In the mini-series, they change it to: this is an attack by terrorists; there are several subsequent instances in which Hitler uses terrorism, in which Hitler says constitutional rights must be suspended for the administration -- in other words it's a tendentious translation of what Hitler would have said to make the analogy between the rise of Hitler and the Age of Bush.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, not to get too much into minutia here, though, it, it's fair to say that those were Communist terrorists who were burning the Reichstag, and in the case of 9/11 those were Islamic fundamentalist terrorists -- they were still terrorists since they were striking a civilian site.
RON ROSENBAUM:Why the change? Why alter history? And the reason it seems to me is to make what I regard as an analogy which is staggeringly inappropriate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And do you think that Gernon then is appropriately fired for having drawn that parallel or spoken about it?
RON ROSENBAUM:Absolutely not! I mean I feel this is a scandal! Because this Canadian company makes a mini-series in which they accuse Americans of being so fearful they're afraid to speak up, and then one of their own guys -- Ed Gernon -- speaks up and says you know, something unpopular, and the Canadian company fires him! To me it's incredibly hypocritical!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think there's something a little disingenuous in CBS being allowed to distance themself from this guy while-- leaving is views pretty much intact in the mini-series?
RON ROSENBAUM:It's puzzling to me and contradictory for CBS to claim that none of the tone or content of the mini-series reflects Ed Gernon's views when in fact it fairly clearly at a crucial moment changes history in order to reflect Edgar Gernon's views! So-- either they're deceiving themselves or they fell asleep and missed that part-- [LAUGHTER] I don't know how to explain it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what you're basically saying is you may not support what Gernon says but you defend his right to say it.
RON ROSENBAUM: I don't think he should have been fired for telling the truth about his own political views.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How closely do you think a mini-series has to track with real history?
RON ROSENBAUM:You know that's a really difficult problem that I think I and a number of people feel real conflict about. My problem in this mini-series is just putting words into Hitler's mouth-- the many scenes in which -- well several scenes anyway, in which Hitler is smooching up a storm -- it's the soap-opera-ification of the Hitler story, and they're so sensitive to criticism they, they need to include a scene in which Hitler beats his dog, I guess to signal to us that Hitler is a really bad guy. But I don't think this is going to come as news to a lot of people at this point, so one has to wonder, you know, what this adds to our understanding of Hitler, and I'm not sure it does, except for the tendentious allegory that they altered history to hammer home.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Ron, thank you very much!
RON ROSENBAUM: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ron Rosenbaum writes a column for the New York Observer. He's also the author of Explaining Hitler: A Search for the Origins of His Evil. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Speaking of which, I few years ago I interviewed Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's Daily Show on his book of comic writing, Naked Pictures of Famous People. The funniest bit in there, in my opinion, was the sketch called Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview. In it, the worst human in history goes in for rehabilitation by TV confession. I convinced Stewart to play Hitler and Mike O'Meara of the Don and Mike radio show played King. [JON STEWART'S SKIT - ADOLF HITLER: THE LARRY KING INTERVIEW]
MIKE O'MEARA:Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight we bring you perhaps the most controversial show in the history of Larry King Live. He began his career as president of the fledgling National Socialist Party, the Nazi Party in Germany. After a failed coup, some prison time and a best-selling book he re-established himself in the German hierarchy first as chancellor and then as Fuhrer. The next ten years under his watch saw Germany's return to power, shame at the Munich Olympics, a failed marriage and finally one hell of a world war, complete with what was thought to be a cowardly demise by his own hand. Tonight, risen from the proverbial dead, we welcome Adolf Hitler!
JOHN STEWART: First of all Larry I don't know what I was so afraid of! These bagels in the green room are delicious!
MIKE O'MEARA: Heh! Well, Chancellor Hitler, I have really...
JOHN STEWART: Please, please -- call me Adolf.
MIKE O'MEARA: Adolf. Yes, well first of all I have to say quite frankly we were very reluctant to have you on!
JOHN STEWART: Well I can't say I blame you for that. I mean you hear the name Hitler -- it's--
MIKE O'MEARA: Well in the end we decided this show is about newsmakers, that's been my motto through 40 years of broadcasting, and critics be damned! I'm not about to stop now!
JOHN STEWART: I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.
MIKE O'MEARA: What do you say to all those people out there - the people who view you as a demon -the perpetrator of the most vicious and incredible-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JOHN STEWART: Guilty as-- guilty as charged. Larry, look --I was a bad guy! No question! I hate that Hitler!
MIKE O'MEARA: And this new Hitler?
JOHN STEWART: I get up at 7, have half a melon, do the jumble in the morning paper and then let the day take me where it will. The other day I spent 7 hours in the park watching ants cart off part of a sandwich. Me! The inventor of the Blitzkreig! You know when you stop having to control everything, it's very freeing!
MIKE O'MEARA: Hmmm! Why did you do it?
JOHN STEWART:Oh! Boy. The 64,000 dollar question, huh? I wasn't a happy kid. I mean I'm not trying to make excuses, but you go through high school with one testicle and the nickname "Shitler"--I'm, I'm sorry - they can bleep that, right?
MIKE O'MEARA: Did you ever see the despicable nature of your actions? Was there any remorse?
JOHN STEWART:Ah, sure but denial is a powerful thing. I, I always thought I could stop any time I wanted. If I could just get Czechoslovakia, that'll be the end of it! I'll be happy then. And I'd get it and think -- well, geez, Poland's just up the road apiece-- and-- you know the rest. I-- I think admitting to myself that there was a problem was the toughest part.
MIKE O'MEARA: Yeah, tell us about those final days in the Berlin bunker where until now we had assumed you had killed yourself.
JOHN STEWART: Hm! Ah! Yes, yeah, right well - a funny story. Everyone thought I went into the bunker to escape--
MIKE O'MEARA: Not the case?
JOHN STEWART:N--No. Actually, as the allied forces are closing in, I was still in denial! I really thought we were going to rally - you know make an end run around Switzerland and flank'em. So I'm planning furiously and snapping at people - you know, as my therapist says, "playing the dictator."
MIKE O'MEARA: Uh-huh.
JOHN STEWART:So Eva calls me down to the bunker for some--emergency with the generators. So anyway I go down and there's Eva and Himmler, and two of my other closest friends, and I'll never forget. I walk in and say "Was is los?"
MIKE O'MEARA: Mm-hm.
JOHN STEWART:And Eva takes my face in her hands, looks me in the eyes and says, "Adolf, we all love you very much, but if you don't stop with this [SHOUTING] conquer and purify thing, no one in this room [RANTING] will ever talk to you again!"
MIKE O'MEARA: Well what happened?!
JOHN STEWART:Ah-- I shot them. I mean back then we didn't know from interventions -- I just figured they were betraying me! Anyway I threw on Eva's clothes and snuck out into the night. I lived like an animal for weeks, doing what I had to do to get by. One day a group of boys were making fun of the lady with the moustache, and I got a look at myself in the reflection of a window and realized they were talking about me. It was then that I knew I had to get my life together.
MIKE O'MEARA:Interesting! Now after all these years, why resurface and open yourself up to the incredible tumult that your return has created?
JOHN STEWART: Stay off the radar. No, that's a good question! See-- I had been talking a good game for many years now, what a changed man I was, how I'd found real peace-- but I was still playing the blame game! My therapist challenged me to put up or shut up -- to prove to myself that I could take responsibility for my life. So-- here I am.
MIKE O'MEARA: We've been talking with Adolf Hitler, the book is--
JOHN STEWART: Da--ah-- is, is it over already?!
MIKE O'MEARA: I'm afraid so.
JOHN STEWART: That, that was fast!! I thought I was the one who had ways of making you talk! [LAUGHTER] Ah, but seriously, the book is called Mein Comfortable Shoes. You get it?
MIKE O'MEARA: I do!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yes, yes. It's about an angry man who learns to appreciate the little things in life. It's about acceptance.
MIKE O'MEARA: And what's next for Adolf Hitler?
JOHN STEWART:Well I'll be doing Politically Incorrect next Thursday and as always you can see my old work on the A&E network, and in two weeks I will be appearing on Court TV as I stand trial for crimes against humanity.
MIKE O'MEARA: What kind of defense will you be offering?
JOHN STEWART:Not much. I fully expect that by this time next year, I'll have been convicted, possibly put to death. But I'm going to represent myself, though, because from now on the blame goes here. The only one to blame for Hitler is Hitler. Yeah, besides, who wants to get involved with a bunch of phony-baloney defense lawyers? [LAUGHS] I mean, talk about evil! [LAUGHTER]
MIKE O'MEARA: Well, Adolf, thanks so much for coming by.
JOHN STEWART: Ah, danke schoen. [MUSIC] BROOKE GLADSTONE: For half a century, TV sitcoms have been seasoned with artificial bursts of laughter and applause. It all goes back to 1953 when the Laff Box was invented to beef up anemic reactions from live audiences or when a show was taped without a live audience. The inventor of the Laff Box, Charles Douglass, recently passed away at the age of 93. Claes Andreasson, a freelance reporter for Swedish National Public Radio, offers this evaluation of the legacy of the Laff Box. [CASCADING EXCERPTS OF SITCOMS WITH LAUGHS] [SEINFELD THEME MUSIC] [LAUGHTER]
GEORGE: Had a dude?!
JERRY: Yeah! When I went to pick her up there was this dude! [LAUGHTER]
GEORGE: How do you know it was her dude?
JERRY: Well you think it could have been just some dude?
GERRY: Sure, dudes in this town are a dime a dozen! [LAUGHTER] [WILL AND GRACE THEME MUSIC]
WILL: Woody had enough? Jack, Karen, seconds? Grace? Fourths? [LAUGHTER] [FRIEND'S THEME MUSIC]
JOEY: A couple - like two people - like one, two people. [LAUGHTER]
MAN: I hate Los Angeles.
WOMAN: Why? Bad experiences?
MAN: No, I've never been there. [LAUGHTER] [CHEERS THEME MUSIC]
MAN: The Internet?! That thing still around?! [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON: Laff Box may sound like some sort of poetic shorthand, but Charles Douglass's original invention met that description. Leo Chaloukian used to own Ryder Sound Services and is now treasurer of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. [THEME MUSIC FROM M*A*S*H UP & UNDER]
LEO CHALOUKIAN: Physically it was a box he came in with! It was about -- probably this big or so. And he had a lot of - in those days these cartridges in there, and as he required some sort of a laugh or applause or whatever the case may be, he would hit those buttons and the thing would -- he would hold down that button, and he'd go for a period of time and let it go - it would stop. And then he'd go into another laugh track. And-- that's how it worked! It was a, it was a peculiar-looking thing, but it worked.
CLAES ANDREASSON:Douglass would travel with his Laff Box from studio to studio because everyone wanted Charlie, Chaloukian says, although there were those who tried to imitate his peculiar machine.
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You didn't do that to Charlie. It was his thing, and people left him alone. I think there were some tried it, and they just couldn't get the work cause everybody wanted Charlie! It's like Hollywood is the type of place where once you get involved with an individual, and he's known overall in the business, everybody sticks with him!
CLAES ANDREASSON: Did Charlie make a good living on this?
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You bet your life he did. I know he did well! [LAUGHS] Cause he was paying his people pretty good! [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON:According to legend, much of the laughter in Charlie's Box came from the Red Skelton Show. Since Red Skelton also did pantomimes, it was easy for Charlie to get nice, clean recordings of laughter and applause without disturbing dialogue. The Laff Box may be retired now, [GLASS BREAKING] but to this day, sitcoms are still adding sound effects. Sound designer Steve Lee.
STEVE LEE: A lot of these shows will tape the one episode twice, with an audience and without an audience, [AUDIENCE OOOING AND AHING] and editorially they'll determine which is the best performance. Sometimes the comedic timing of a gag in an episode is better without an audience, because they are able to get through it quicker. But maybe with an audience there's a lot more laughter, and actors tend to hold for their laughter.
CLAES ANDREASSON:You mainly supervise movies, the sound design for movies and motion pictures here. How come we don't need it when we go to the movie theater?
STEVE LEE: Probably because when you're seeing a movie in a theater, you're sharing this experience with-- with dozens, maybe even hundreds more people than you would in your own living room. [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON:Laugh tracks have appeared in movies, but mostly for ironic effect, like in this scene from Robocop. The owners of a convenience store are watching a game show on television [LAUGHTER] just as an armed robber enters the front door.
WOMAN: Will there be anything else, sir?
MAN: Yeah, empty the register and put the money in the bag.
WOMAN: Excuse me? [BACKGROUND LAUGHTER]
MAN: I said give me your money and all of it and don't [BLEEP] with me!
STEVE LEE: When the, the bad guys comes in with the gun--the crowd starts reacting to what's going on in the actual scene in the movie and in the grocery store-- [RUMBLE] and so the bad guy is waving his gun around and threatening the people -- you know he points the gun to the mom's head and says I'm going to blow her brains out!--
MAN: Come on, come on! I'm gonna blow her brains out. [LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE]
STEVE LEE: And all of a sudden you hear a swell of laughter on the, on the TV!
CLAES ANDREASSON: Robocop's gag was meant as a comment on the shallowness of television, but even TV veteran Leo Chaloukian finds all that canned hilarity grates on the nerves.
LEO CHALOUKIAN: I, I don't like laugh tracks. [LAUGHS] I mean I'm sorry - I don't like 'em at all. It's very annoying-- to me, when a certain laughter comes up and I, I've heard it - I watched it - I don't think it's funny and they're laughing! For what?! I don't know!
CLAES ANDREASSON:Well, exactly, I mean to me it says either you're too stupid to understand the joke or the script is too bad and we have to tell you that business was actually meant--
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You don't want me to comment on that one, do you? [LAUGHS] You don't - I mean that's not fair! You know? You want me to say that the script was stupid?! [LAUGHS] Well that's what it -- it just wasn't funny, that's all. [LAUGHS]
CLAES ANDREASSON: For On the Media, I'm Claes Andreasson. [SITCOM CLIP]
WOMAN: Oh -- my -- God!!! [LAUGHTER] [THEME MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and George Edwards, and edited by me. We had help from Andy Lanset. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Thank you for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now during the war you wrote a number of editorials criticizing the Arab media's coverage, especially Al Jazeera. What bothered you the most?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:From the beginning, they kept repeating the Iraqi information minister. They had, you know, Iraqi talking heads for days and nights about how patriotic the army is and how they're going to win the war. They let the people that to the last minute the Americans were not winning; they did not get Basra; they are so far from Baghdad it will take them days before they reach Baghdad -- stories after stories of amazing fighting in different towns -- at the time when the American force is already in Baghdad -- and of course it was a big shock to everybody because the media made them believe this is going to be a long war and the Iraqis were winning!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:There is a historical precedent for this kind of coverage. The 1967 war between Egypt and Israel and the 1991 Persian Gulf war when Saudi newspapers went several days before explaining to readers that Iraq had actually invaded Kuwait. What kind of impact long-term do you think that this kind of reporting has on the relationship between the Arab people and the Arab media?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:I think they had a shock for a few days and the media even confessed for misleading the public, but then they come back again and -trying to make issues - so people forget. The main issue they talk about today, for example, the Americans coming here to steal the Iraqi oil -- and nobody said the Americans been in the Gulf for 40 years they've been operating the oil - been in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Emirates - and nobody stole anybody's oil. It's a partnership - it's working very well. So-- with different issues you can keep them busy from one day to another day, but the message hasn't changed really which is the same old message of radicalism. I think it, it's getting from bad to worse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Specifically, how did Al Jazeera manifest that radicalism?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:They came up with different stories like the American used many nuclear bomb; the Americans deceived the Iraqis; the Americans did this, they did that -- when the Iraqi people found out they are free and they can talk about what happened to them in the past 20 years, Al Jazeera ignored this fact and they concentrated on the faults of the Americans in Iraq but no one bothered to say why these Iraqis are queuing to see what happened to their loves ones who disappeared -- 300,000 Iraqis - no one knows where they are - they disappeared in the past few years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You said that they accused the Americans of using nuclear bombs?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:Yes, the second day of the Baghdad fall they reported that someone told them in London, an Iraqi person, the American used many nuclear bombs, and they kept repeating the same news again and again, and the news bulletin - and any - that was the only TV station I would say showed something like that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:When you were criticizing the coverage of Al Jazeera and other Arab media during the war, you were criticized in turn for doing so, weren't you?
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Before the collapse of Saddam' regime, the majority of writers were on the other side. I was with the minority. And--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you were accused of being brainwashed.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED:Brainwashed - completely. Then -- after the collapse of the dictator, I received a lot of people supporting or apologizing, and then I think, yes! I mean I should be criticized; I mean I like to have an, an a -- you know a debate; my nightmare is what happened before. It was one kind of opinion and that was the dominant opinion in the television -- or newspapers -- or, or radio. And that was really the, the scariest part.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Well thank you very much.
ABDUL RAHMAN AL-RASHED: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is the editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Long before the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, the United States had waged a radio war in Iraq, covertly beaming signals from Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraqi Kurdistan. Nick Grace is managing editor of Clandestineradio.com, a web site dedicated to tracking clandestine radio stations around the world. He says that until recently Iraqis could tune in to a variety of CIA-backed stations on the radio dial.
NICK GRACE:When the Iraqi listeners turned on their radios, say, one month ago there were approximately 8 radio stations that were covertly pumping in propaganda - into Iraq. Five of these stations have been tied to U.S. intelligence and three have been tied to Iranian intelligence. Three of the stations that were supported covertly by the U.S. include a station called Al-Mustaqbal, called The Future, Radio of the Two Rivers as well as a station called Radio Tikrit. These three radio stations broadcast from a covert transmitter in Kuwait and had ties with an Iraqi exile group in London called the Iraqi National Accord. The message of these three stations were more or less directed towards the enlisted soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces, high level officers in the Republican Guard, as well as members of the Baath Party in Baghdad essentially encouraging them to defect, encouraging them to stand down orders, encouraging them to undermine the regime in Baghdad. Al-Mustaqbal broadcast programming which was very comic. They were known for its impersonators of Saddam Hussein. Radio of the Two Rivers broadcast a more upbeat program -lots of very-- high energy Middle Eastern popular music as well as almost New York FM-style radio promos. Radio Tikrit however, was much more timid during the beginning of its life cycle; in fact when it first went on the air it was very much anti-U.S.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even though it was being supported by U.S. intelligence? That's confusing!
NICK GRACE:It was a hook. The target of its listeners were of course the loyalists of the Baath Party, especially those from Tikrit. Within a week of its first being heard and noted by us and, as well as other monitoring organizations, the message shifted to a very much pro-Baath Party yet pro-democracy and anti-Saddam Hussein.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So you have these pro-western stations and they were urging people in the Iraqi military to, to give up, to surrender, to desert and so forth, and this is before there was Gulf War II how effective was this message?
NICK GRACE:We can see an effect of these stations, though it's anecdotal. There were a number of stories by embedded journalists who noted that many of the defectors and, and the surrenders of the Iraqi troops were in accordance, if you will with what the coalition had been telling them to do!-- to mobilize their tanks in such a way and such a pattern so that the coalition would know that those tanks were not hostile. Same thing with planes and so forth. So-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this was heard on their radio stations.
NICK GRACE: The radio stations were telling their listeners - those enlisted troops as well as officers - how to surrender properly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how has the message changed now that the war is pretty much over?
NICK GRACE:Many of these stations whose modus operandi was to broadcast during the war are now off the air, of course, and those stations that are still on the air have re-branded themselves, if you will. Radio Tikrit has now become Radio Sumer; it's not longer broadcasting specifically for one segment of the population but in fact the entire country. Sumer, of course, being the historic name of, of Iraq, and suggesting that the agenda or the interest of the station is to promote unity in Iraq! Radio Tikrit is also borrowing some of the content-- some of the comedians and the personnel from Al-Mustaqbal to produce their own brand of comedy, the most famous being the rap song which was broadcast the day after Baghdad fell.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Your web site was recommended to us by a couple of sources we find very reliable, but how do you know what you know? How do you know who's backing whom?
NICK GRACE:Everyone involved with the web site have been monitoring radio for 15, 20 years each. We're veterans in the radio-monitoring field. Our knowledge of the transmitter in Kuwait -something that we broke - came from sources within the Iraqi opposition. Radio transmitters leave -- they have a footprint; they have a particular sound, and when the United States has sponsored covert radio st-- broadcasts in the past, they have essentially used the same transmitters. So when we know, for example, that a station in the past has broadcast from, say, a transmitter in Kuwait, that station is no longer on the air and a new station comes on -this is the same frequency, the same schedule, the same signal quality -- everything lines up - all the ducks are in the row - it's - it has to be from that transmitter.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And finally what do your sources tell you about the future of clandestine radio in Iraq? do you think that it's going to become less clandestine?
NICK GRACE:Absolutely. In fact both the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord are refusing support from the United States government to broadcast clandestinely from within Iraq. It's clear that Iraq as a nation is tired of this covert propaganda and wants to start fresh and start with legal broadcasting, and they want to be able to control their media outlets much more than they would be able to-- under the CIA.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much!
NICK GRACE: Oh, thank you, Brooke! It's been a pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Grace is managing editor of Clandestineradio.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As for that famous rap song he mentioned that was broadcast on Radio Tikrit, it was a takeoff of Coolio's Gangsta Paradise as sung by Saddam Hussein. [SONG-TAKEOFF OF GANGSTA PARADISE PLAYS]
MAN: I'M SADDAM. I DON'T HAVE A BOMB. I'M NOT A SOLDIER. I WORK AT A FARM.
BUSH WANT TO HIT ME. I DON'T KNOW WHY. AND IF I CALL HIM, HE TELLS ME GOODBYE.
SMOKING WEED AND GETTING HIGH I KNOW THE DEVIL IS BY MY SIDE.
MY DAYS ARE FINISHED, AND I WILL DIE ALL I NEED IS CHILI FRY. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can thank us for that later. Coming up, why the media find it hard to tackle the question of body counts, and what Iranian women make of Humbert Humbert. This is On the Media from NPR. [COOLIO SINGING GANGSTA PARADISE] BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the weeks leading up to war, President Bush repeatedly assured us that U.S. forces would do everything possible to limit civilian casualties, and while the military has for the most part seemed to carry through on this promise, we may never know for sure how many were killed. The Pentagon has said explicitly that it will not engage in body counts. But little by little a picture is beginning to emerge. Last week, Knight Ridder newspapers reported that according to hospital records, at least 1100 civilians and possibly twice that amount died in the battle for Baghdad alone. But that estimate was one of the very few to surface in the media so far, and some critics are asking why the story hasn't gotten more attention. Should the media be doing more? Military analyst and Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Arkin is in the process of compiling a long-term data base of civilian casualties in U.S. wars since 1991. And he says it's not the media's role to find a definitive number.
BILL ARKIN:The problem with the Knight Ridder survey of civilian casualties in Baghdad is that while this is great journalism it isn't sufficient -it isn't something that's going to stand up in history records; it would be the equivalent of the news media keeping score, literally, at sporting events and having the New York Times saying that the score of the football game was 20 to 17 while the Washington Post saying that the score of the football game was 21 to 15. The news media and journalism is the first cut of history, but it is not history.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Since you're a bit dubious of some of the attempts by the media to provide a number based on incomplete information, what do you think the role of the media should be in reporting all of this?
BILL ARKIN:There's definitely a role for the media. In Afghanistan the, the news media did a terrific job of trying to-- give a survey of what the deaths were in the country - the Los Angeles Times - the Associated Press - the Chicago Tribune - all did great surveys of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and they expended an enormous amount of time building their own databases and using computer assisted reporting in order to do this. But the fact of the matter is that probably no one remembers what it is that they said in the end, and there's no consensus as to what the level of casualties are. The truth of the matter is that without good records at the local level and without intelligence information provided by the U.S. government, it's virtually impossible to make these kinds of calculations and estimates, and I think we're going to have that same level of difficulty in Iraq, because the United States government and the U.S. military wants to put the issue of civilian casualties behind them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And in the meantime, in the absence of any information from the Pentagon you have this enormous vacuum! And if the media don't fill it, and if the Pentagon doesn't fill it, you have these-- independent groups that will. If the task is left to the human rights community and fringe advocates, you know, what are we left with?
BILL ARKIN:Well I think we're left with a very bad picture, and I'm not sure that any of the non-governmental organizations or any of the news media organizations are going to resolve this issue. The Knight Ridder study is a good example. This is a great survey of the casualties and the number should be surprising to people. That study should have been front page news --not because of some war crimes issue that's lurking in the background, but because we are engaged right now in the reconstruction and reconciliation of Iraqi society! And if 1200 families lost members of their family, then those are all people that we have to deal with in the days, weeks and months ahead!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me about your project and how that fits into all of this.
BILL ARKIN:Well I think one of the things that we have tried to do is to put an academic, scientific basis for thinking about why civilians die in modern warfare, and I say modern warfare basically from Desert Storm in 1991 to the present. Because if in fact the U.S. military and the U.S. government is going to claim that it does everything that it can to minimize civilian harm, then one of the things that we need to do I studying civilian harm is trying to understand what are the major reasons that civilians die and are injured so that those practices be changed, because those practices are shown to have the greatest impact on civilian life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:As you say, you have to take these incidents and study them individually. Do you think you're going to get enough information from the Pentagon or on the ground to be able to make reliable assessments?
BILL ARKIN:Well I think we are. I, I have been working on this now off and on for more than a decade. The Gulf War in 1991 is fairly well known. Yugoslavia is fairly well known. Afghanistan is a much more difficult case because of the lack of records at the local level, but this war probably will be one in which we'll be able to reconstruct what happened and reconstructing what happened is key in order to make these kinds of estimates.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Exactly why do you think that number is going to be more achievable this time around.
BILL ARKIN:Well one of the reasons, Brooke, is because so many precision-guided weapons were used. With a fairly small number of tank rounds and artillery rounds and rockets being fired, we are able to look more meticulously at each of those individual weapons. We should be able to come to a fairly precise answer as to how much civilian harm and civilian death was caused.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Numbers are rarely neutral and they're often applied in a game of blame. What sorts of applications do you see for your database?
BILL ARKIN:Well I guess our objective is to try to have a consensus document that will let people understand what the civilian cost of these various conflicts has been and give them a gauge to determine whether or not the efforts to minimize civilian harm in the future are successful or not. I don't think most people could tell you whether 1200 civilians dying in the Battle of Baghdad in accordance with the Knight Ridder study is a good number or a bad number. Did it show care on the part of the American military or was it wanton destruction? And so I would like to have the basis by which journalism and public understanding of this important issue will be improved in the future.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay! Bill, thank you very much.
BILL ARKIN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Bill Arkin is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times; military analyst for NBC News and senior military advisor to Human Rights Watch. He joined us from studios in his home state of Vermont. [MUSIC] BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even under a totalitarian regime that seeks to control both action and thought, people are not immune to books. Literature can work like a virus, effecting slow transformations. Literary critic and educator Azar Nafisi is a carrier, so to speak, of that virus, and she exposed her students to Henry James and Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov first in university classes and then in a tiny seminar of selected women after the Islamic Fundamentalist Revolution. Nafisi wrote about that experience and the books that made it possible in her new memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, and she joins me now. Welcome to On the Media.
AZAR NAFISI: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now you call it a memoir, but it's also an eyewitness account of a revolution that reached into the most intimate parts of people's lives; it's also a collection of personal portraits - the people who you drew from and who drew from you - and of course it's a book of some of the most passionate and perceptive literary criticism that I have ever read!
AZAR NAFISI:Thank you so much. You know I wanted it to be a memoir in books because I didn't want it to be about me personally, but about my experiences and my life within the context of the Islamic Republic or a totalitarian regime and not just the Islamic Republic, and how these books helped us redefine and open spaces within that reality.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well it was a revelation to me. I thought I knew The Great Gatsby and Lolita, but now I see what you take from those books depends so much more than I thought on the context of your own life!
AZAR NAFISI: The way different realities redefine these books! That's the exciting thing about them, I think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about Lolita. The protagonist, Humbert Humbert is a child molester with complete control over his 12 year old ward--
AZAR NAFISI: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- Dolores who he has renamed Lolita.
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Humbert is appealing! He's a sharp wit. He hates our crass commercial culture as much as the most right-minded intellectual does, and Nabokov has us see the world through his eyes.
AZAR NAFISI: Mm-hm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What relevance did Lolita have for the seven young women in your seminar?
AZAR NAFISI:The point about Humbert Humbert is not just that he rapes and keeps Lolita in his prison for almost two years but the fact that he has fallen in love with a girl when he was very young, and she dies and the love is never consummated, and since then he wants to impose his own past upon a living reality -- the living entity that is Lolita -- and that is the greatest crime. And this is what they did to us! They came in the name of the past and told us that you have no right to be what you are; you have to be a figment of our imagination! So my girls really, really identified with the book as a whole.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And partly because Humbert is such an appealing character--
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- and there's so much about Islam that is so appealing and so important to those women at that same conflict that they have with the protagonist in Lolita, they, they have to work out through their own government and their own regime and their own faith!
AZAR NAFISI:Yes, you're very right because Humbert uses his sophistication and his love of culture--in condemning Lolita's quote/unquote "vulgarity" -- and he is, as you said, very appealing, and this is true of Ayatollah Khomeini and the regime that came to Iran in the name of Islam. They used Islam not as a religion but as an ideology in order to gain control over the lives of the individual citizens in that country! They confiscated our lives! So, as you say, the girls in that class very much understood the structure of Nabokov's novel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well while you were still teaching at Tehran University, you had a class full of male and female students and some were fundamentalist and some were Marxist and some were still lingeringly westernized-- [LAUGHTER] and one of the most striking parts of your book is when you recount the day your class put The Great Gatsby on trial! What was the point of that exercise?
AZAR NAFISI:One of my Islamist students who was the leader of the Islamist student associations at the University of Tehran, he objected to The Great Gatsby; he said that this is a decadent work -Fitzgerald was - pro the money - the capitalist, imperialists and we tried to kick these people out of our country, and so why are we reading them? I wasn't about to get rid of Great Gatsby because of this guy, and I felt that he didn't act as a reader but as a prosecutor. So I said okay - you're the prosecutor. Let's put this book on trial and see what happens!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If I recall, your political defense was that if anything Gatsby was not a, a celebrant of commercial culture but something very different.
AZAR NAFISI:The Great Gatsby, when you go into the novel you discover that no matter what Fitzgerald himself was, and Fitzgerald-- did court the wealthy, but his work transcends his own flaws, and the main villains in that novel, if you could call anybody a villain in novels, are Tom and Daisy Buchanan who are the wealthiest, and they're careless people! They create messes that other people have to clean up after them! So-- the greatest sin in The Great Gatsby as in so many great novels is being careless of others - not having empathy towards others - which I think our prosecutor actually was guilty of [LAUGHS] rather than the, The Great Gatsby.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And in almost all the books that you feature in your memoir, the central criminals, no matter how virtuous they were, were criminals because of that lack of empathy.
AZAR NAFISI:Yeah, and that is I think one of the greatest gifts of the novel -- villains are people's who do not see others - who are blind towards other people - whether you were talking about Jane Austen or Zora Neale Hurston! They don't just punish them. They know that because you're a villain, you cannot be simply eliminated. You can be revealed and exposed, but we live all side by side, the way we do in society!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And, and the only triumph that you can be guaranteed is the one that you take for yourself. Like the character in Washington Square who never really triumphed in any of the spheres that she tried in--
AZAR NAFISI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- but she triumphed in defying the others who would push her into boxes she didn't want to go.
AZAR NAFISI:Oh, I'm so glad you brought her up, Catherine in Washington Square. What matters, what is - specially at the center of James's novels - is individual integrity. And it's usually a woman who is at the center of this issue, and what becomes important is not whether we win or lose but how we lose. The attitude we take towards others and ourselves and the dignity that we preserve becomes the most central issue in the novel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet Catherine is left alone with her embroidery, facing a life of loneliness. It's a hard lesson! [LAUGHTER] It's a hard triumph, I would imagine, for your female students to swallow!
AZAR NAFISI: You're right. The reward you get is not necessarily happiness, but the reward you get is gaining your own self-respect.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How strange it seems that when the stakes were so high at that time in Iran -- when people were killed at random for a slight or imagined offenses - when they were raped and stoned and, and shot at random -- that literature, mostly by dead white guys from another place and time-- [LAUGHTER] should matter so much!
AZAR NAFISI:You know that is the great thing about literature. It transcends your sexuality or race or nationality. Literature becomes universal and property of everyone. Imagination genuinely liberates us from reality and it lets us re-tell our story! It's so important because you know - life is also tyrannical. It's all death in the end. And the only time we can-- triumph over time is when we tell the stories of our moments.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that literature has a different role in a closed society than it does in an open one?
AZAR NAFISI:You know we act towards literature in an open society the way we act towards our hands or eyes. They're there, and we take them for granted. But you know - we who come from those other countries would like to remind you about the preciousness of these values and they're fragility. These rights are not God-given, and they can be taken away from us anywhere we live.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much.
AZAR NAFISI: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Azar Nafisi is author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. [MUSIC]
copyright 2003 WNYC Radio
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Composer Aaron Copland did not testify in public before Joe McCarthy's infamous committee. We know that because just this week the transcripts of 161 of his closed-door sessions were released. These were dress rehearsals for an endless run of public hearings the Wisconsin Republican staged in the '50s to fan the flames of the Red Scare. It's been noted that only those who looked suspicious or confused or weak were called to testify. Copland, it seems, failed the audition. His testimony would not have been televised in any case. Broadcast gavel to gavel coverage was reserved for the senator's investigation of the Army over 36 days in the spring of '54. And though the 1951 Kefauver Crime Committee has prior claim as the first congressional reality TV show, and the Watergate and Iran-Contra hearings riveted the nation, the Army-McCarthy hearings beat them all for sheer theatricality. Senator Joe McCarthy as Sergeant Joe Friday playing Inspector Javert. [TAPE PLAYS]
SENATOR JOE McCARTHY: I want to tell the secretary of state this: if he wants to call me tonight at the Utah Hotel, I'll be glad to give him the names of those 57 card-carrying Communists. Now I, I don't claim to be any FBI or anything, so that when I have the names of 57, you can be right well sure there are a lot more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The irony, as any Hollywood agent could have seen with eyes cleared of fear was that McCarthy was a bad actor, a Johnny one-note with an expiration date. "The American people have had a look at you for six weeks," Senator Stuart Symington told him near the end, "You're not fooling anyone." No matter how much Vaseline you smear on the camera lens, eventually the folks at home will see through it, and you'll look ugly if that's what you are. [MUSIC]
MAN: [SINGING] I GOT THOSE SENATOR McCARTHY, CHAIRMAN MONT, MAGLELLAN POTTER SENATOR DIRKSEN BLUES!
BECAUSE MY GAL WON'T LEAVE HER TV SET, I THINK THAT SHE'S ABOUT TO BLOW HER FUSE!
I GOT THOSE OPEN-SESSION CLOSE A SESSION AND THE SESSION NO CONFESSION BLUES!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, a Hitler mini-series in hot water, and a history of the wildly successful and ever-lastingly annoying laugh track. This is On the Media from NPR. BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last year CBS killed a script it had commissioned on the early life of Adolf Hitler amid charges that it would humanize history's most notorious mass murderer. Now the network is being slammed again for another Hitler mini-series -- this one ostensibly equating the Third Reich with the Bush Administration. It's not at all clear whether either of those claims were or are true. What is clear is that Ed Gernon, executive producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, was fired by the Canadian production company Alliance Atlantis three days after the New York Post picked up on remarks he made to TV Guide. Gernon is quoted as saying of the mini-series, which follows Hitler's rise to power that quote "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear who ultimately choose to give up their civil rights and plunge the whole world into war." And he added, "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now." Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote about the controversy in his column in the New York Observer. Ron, welcome back to the show.
RON ROSENBAUM: Thanks a lot, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now John Podhoretz of the New York Post calls the mini-series -- and I don't know if he's seen it or not -- an act of slander against the president of the United States and by extension toward the United States itself. You've seen the series. Is it an act of slander?
RON ROSENBAUM:I don't know if slander is the word I'd use, but I think that there is a very crucial moment in the mini-series in which an episode in the rise of Hitler is altered, fiddled with, however you want to call it, in order to create what I believe is a false analogy with the Bush administration -- specifically at the Reichstag fire, the famous episode of the burning of the German legislative chamber. In the history that the mini-series was initially based on, Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, the standard version of what Hitler says is that this is an attack by Communists and we must respond -- essentially, I'm boiling it down.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.
RON ROSENBAUM:In the mini-series, they change it to: this is an attack by terrorists; there are several subsequent instances in which Hitler uses terrorism, in which Hitler says constitutional rights must be suspended for the administration -- in other words it's a tendentious translation of what Hitler would have said to make the analogy between the rise of Hitler and the Age of Bush.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay, not to get too much into minutia here, though, it, it's fair to say that those were Communist terrorists who were burning the Reichstag, and in the case of 9/11 those were Islamic fundamentalist terrorists -- they were still terrorists since they were striking a civilian site.
RON ROSENBAUM:Why the change? Why alter history? And the reason it seems to me is to make what I regard as an analogy which is staggeringly inappropriate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And do you think that Gernon then is appropriately fired for having drawn that parallel or spoken about it?
RON ROSENBAUM:Absolutely not! I mean I feel this is a scandal! Because this Canadian company makes a mini-series in which they accuse Americans of being so fearful they're afraid to speak up, and then one of their own guys -- Ed Gernon -- speaks up and says you know, something unpopular, and the Canadian company fires him! To me it's incredibly hypocritical!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think there's something a little disingenuous in CBS being allowed to distance themself from this guy while-- leaving is views pretty much intact in the mini-series?
RON ROSENBAUM:It's puzzling to me and contradictory for CBS to claim that none of the tone or content of the mini-series reflects Ed Gernon's views when in fact it fairly clearly at a crucial moment changes history in order to reflect Edgar Gernon's views! So-- either they're deceiving themselves or they fell asleep and missed that part-- [LAUGHTER] I don't know how to explain it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what you're basically saying is you may not support what Gernon says but you defend his right to say it.
RON ROSENBAUM: I don't think he should have been fired for telling the truth about his own political views.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How closely do you think a mini-series has to track with real history?
RON ROSENBAUM:You know that's a really difficult problem that I think I and a number of people feel real conflict about. My problem in this mini-series is just putting words into Hitler's mouth-- the many scenes in which -- well several scenes anyway, in which Hitler is smooching up a storm -- it's the soap-opera-ification of the Hitler story, and they're so sensitive to criticism they, they need to include a scene in which Hitler beats his dog, I guess to signal to us that Hitler is a really bad guy. But I don't think this is going to come as news to a lot of people at this point, so one has to wonder, you know, what this adds to our understanding of Hitler, and I'm not sure it does, except for the tendentious allegory that they altered history to hammer home.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Ron, thank you very much!
RON ROSENBAUM: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Ron Rosenbaum writes a column for the New York Observer. He's also the author of Explaining Hitler: A Search for the Origins of His Evil. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Speaking of which, I few years ago I interviewed Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's Daily Show on his book of comic writing, Naked Pictures of Famous People. The funniest bit in there, in my opinion, was the sketch called Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview. In it, the worst human in history goes in for rehabilitation by TV confession. I convinced Stewart to play Hitler and Mike O'Meara of the Don and Mike radio show played King. [JON STEWART'S SKIT - ADOLF HITLER: THE LARRY KING INTERVIEW]
MIKE O'MEARA:Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight we bring you perhaps the most controversial show in the history of Larry King Live. He began his career as president of the fledgling National Socialist Party, the Nazi Party in Germany. After a failed coup, some prison time and a best-selling book he re-established himself in the German hierarchy first as chancellor and then as Fuhrer. The next ten years under his watch saw Germany's return to power, shame at the Munich Olympics, a failed marriage and finally one hell of a world war, complete with what was thought to be a cowardly demise by his own hand. Tonight, risen from the proverbial dead, we welcome Adolf Hitler!
JOHN STEWART: First of all Larry I don't know what I was so afraid of! These bagels in the green room are delicious!
MIKE O'MEARA: Heh! Well, Chancellor Hitler, I have really...
JOHN STEWART: Please, please -- call me Adolf.
MIKE O'MEARA: Adolf. Yes, well first of all I have to say quite frankly we were very reluctant to have you on!
JOHN STEWART: Well I can't say I blame you for that. I mean you hear the name Hitler -- it's--
MIKE O'MEARA: Well in the end we decided this show is about newsmakers, that's been my motto through 40 years of broadcasting, and critics be damned! I'm not about to stop now!
JOHN STEWART: I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.
MIKE O'MEARA: What do you say to all those people out there - the people who view you as a demon -the perpetrator of the most vicious and incredible-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JOHN STEWART: Guilty as-- guilty as charged. Larry, look --I was a bad guy! No question! I hate that Hitler!
MIKE O'MEARA: And this new Hitler?
JOHN STEWART: I get up at 7, have half a melon, do the jumble in the morning paper and then let the day take me where it will. The other day I spent 7 hours in the park watching ants cart off part of a sandwich. Me! The inventor of the Blitzkreig! You know when you stop having to control everything, it's very freeing!
MIKE O'MEARA: Hmmm! Why did you do it?
JOHN STEWART:Oh! Boy. The 64,000 dollar question, huh? I wasn't a happy kid. I mean I'm not trying to make excuses, but you go through high school with one testicle and the nickname "Shitler"--I'm, I'm sorry - they can bleep that, right?
MIKE O'MEARA: Did you ever see the despicable nature of your actions? Was there any remorse?
JOHN STEWART:Ah, sure but denial is a powerful thing. I, I always thought I could stop any time I wanted. If I could just get Czechoslovakia, that'll be the end of it! I'll be happy then. And I'd get it and think -- well, geez, Poland's just up the road apiece-- and-- you know the rest. I-- I think admitting to myself that there was a problem was the toughest part.
MIKE O'MEARA: Yeah, tell us about those final days in the Berlin bunker where until now we had assumed you had killed yourself.
JOHN STEWART: Hm! Ah! Yes, yeah, right well - a funny story. Everyone thought I went into the bunker to escape--
MIKE O'MEARA: Not the case?
JOHN STEWART:N--No. Actually, as the allied forces are closing in, I was still in denial! I really thought we were going to rally - you know make an end run around Switzerland and flank'em. So I'm planning furiously and snapping at people - you know, as my therapist says, "playing the dictator."
MIKE O'MEARA: Uh-huh.
JOHN STEWART:So Eva calls me down to the bunker for some--emergency with the generators. So anyway I go down and there's Eva and Himmler, and two of my other closest friends, and I'll never forget. I walk in and say "Was is los?"
MIKE O'MEARA: Mm-hm.
JOHN STEWART:And Eva takes my face in her hands, looks me in the eyes and says, "Adolf, we all love you very much, but if you don't stop with this [SHOUTING] conquer and purify thing, no one in this room [RANTING] will ever talk to you again!"
MIKE O'MEARA: Well what happened?!
JOHN STEWART:Ah-- I shot them. I mean back then we didn't know from interventions -- I just figured they were betraying me! Anyway I threw on Eva's clothes and snuck out into the night. I lived like an animal for weeks, doing what I had to do to get by. One day a group of boys were making fun of the lady with the moustache, and I got a look at myself in the reflection of a window and realized they were talking about me. It was then that I knew I had to get my life together.
MIKE O'MEARA:Interesting! Now after all these years, why resurface and open yourself up to the incredible tumult that your return has created?
JOHN STEWART: Stay off the radar. No, that's a good question! See-- I had been talking a good game for many years now, what a changed man I was, how I'd found real peace-- but I was still playing the blame game! My therapist challenged me to put up or shut up -- to prove to myself that I could take responsibility for my life. So-- here I am.
MIKE O'MEARA: We've been talking with Adolf Hitler, the book is--
JOHN STEWART: Da--ah-- is, is it over already?!
MIKE O'MEARA: I'm afraid so.
JOHN STEWART: That, that was fast!! I thought I was the one who had ways of making you talk! [LAUGHTER] Ah, but seriously, the book is called Mein Comfortable Shoes. You get it?
MIKE O'MEARA: I do!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yes, yes. It's about an angry man who learns to appreciate the little things in life. It's about acceptance.
MIKE O'MEARA: And what's next for Adolf Hitler?
JOHN STEWART:Well I'll be doing Politically Incorrect next Thursday and as always you can see my old work on the A&E network, and in two weeks I will be appearing on Court TV as I stand trial for crimes against humanity.
MIKE O'MEARA: What kind of defense will you be offering?
JOHN STEWART:Not much. I fully expect that by this time next year, I'll have been convicted, possibly put to death. But I'm going to represent myself, though, because from now on the blame goes here. The only one to blame for Hitler is Hitler. Yeah, besides, who wants to get involved with a bunch of phony-baloney defense lawyers? [LAUGHS] I mean, talk about evil! [LAUGHTER]
MIKE O'MEARA: Well, Adolf, thanks so much for coming by.
JOHN STEWART: Ah, danke schoen. [MUSIC] BROOKE GLADSTONE: For half a century, TV sitcoms have been seasoned with artificial bursts of laughter and applause. It all goes back to 1953 when the Laff Box was invented to beef up anemic reactions from live audiences or when a show was taped without a live audience. The inventor of the Laff Box, Charles Douglass, recently passed away at the age of 93. Claes Andreasson, a freelance reporter for Swedish National Public Radio, offers this evaluation of the legacy of the Laff Box. [CASCADING EXCERPTS OF SITCOMS WITH LAUGHS] [SEINFELD THEME MUSIC] [LAUGHTER]
GEORGE: Had a dude?!
JERRY: Yeah! When I went to pick her up there was this dude! [LAUGHTER]
GEORGE: How do you know it was her dude?
JERRY: Well you think it could have been just some dude?
GERRY: Sure, dudes in this town are a dime a dozen! [LAUGHTER] [WILL AND GRACE THEME MUSIC]
WILL: Woody had enough? Jack, Karen, seconds? Grace? Fourths? [LAUGHTER] [FRIEND'S THEME MUSIC]
JOEY: A couple - like two people - like one, two people. [LAUGHTER]
MAN: I hate Los Angeles.
WOMAN: Why? Bad experiences?
MAN: No, I've never been there. [LAUGHTER] [CHEERS THEME MUSIC]
MAN: The Internet?! That thing still around?! [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON: Laff Box may sound like some sort of poetic shorthand, but Charles Douglass's original invention met that description. Leo Chaloukian used to own Ryder Sound Services and is now treasurer of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. [THEME MUSIC FROM M*A*S*H UP & UNDER]
LEO CHALOUKIAN: Physically it was a box he came in with! It was about -- probably this big or so. And he had a lot of - in those days these cartridges in there, and as he required some sort of a laugh or applause or whatever the case may be, he would hit those buttons and the thing would -- he would hold down that button, and he'd go for a period of time and let it go - it would stop. And then he'd go into another laugh track. And-- that's how it worked! It was a, it was a peculiar-looking thing, but it worked.
CLAES ANDREASSON:Douglass would travel with his Laff Box from studio to studio because everyone wanted Charlie, Chaloukian says, although there were those who tried to imitate his peculiar machine.
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You didn't do that to Charlie. It was his thing, and people left him alone. I think there were some tried it, and they just couldn't get the work cause everybody wanted Charlie! It's like Hollywood is the type of place where once you get involved with an individual, and he's known overall in the business, everybody sticks with him!
CLAES ANDREASSON: Did Charlie make a good living on this?
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You bet your life he did. I know he did well! [LAUGHS] Cause he was paying his people pretty good! [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON:According to legend, much of the laughter in Charlie's Box came from the Red Skelton Show. Since Red Skelton also did pantomimes, it was easy for Charlie to get nice, clean recordings of laughter and applause without disturbing dialogue. The Laff Box may be retired now, [GLASS BREAKING] but to this day, sitcoms are still adding sound effects. Sound designer Steve Lee.
STEVE LEE: A lot of these shows will tape the one episode twice, with an audience and without an audience, [AUDIENCE OOOING AND AHING] and editorially they'll determine which is the best performance. Sometimes the comedic timing of a gag in an episode is better without an audience, because they are able to get through it quicker. But maybe with an audience there's a lot more laughter, and actors tend to hold for their laughter.
CLAES ANDREASSON:You mainly supervise movies, the sound design for movies and motion pictures here. How come we don't need it when we go to the movie theater?
STEVE LEE: Probably because when you're seeing a movie in a theater, you're sharing this experience with-- with dozens, maybe even hundreds more people than you would in your own living room. [LAUGHTER]
CLAES ANDREASSON:Laugh tracks have appeared in movies, but mostly for ironic effect, like in this scene from Robocop. The owners of a convenience store are watching a game show on television [LAUGHTER] just as an armed robber enters the front door.
WOMAN: Will there be anything else, sir?
MAN: Yeah, empty the register and put the money in the bag.
WOMAN: Excuse me? [BACKGROUND LAUGHTER]
MAN: I said give me your money and all of it and don't [BLEEP] with me!
STEVE LEE: When the, the bad guys comes in with the gun--the crowd starts reacting to what's going on in the actual scene in the movie and in the grocery store-- [RUMBLE] and so the bad guy is waving his gun around and threatening the people -- you know he points the gun to the mom's head and says I'm going to blow her brains out!--
MAN: Come on, come on! I'm gonna blow her brains out. [LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE]
STEVE LEE: And all of a sudden you hear a swell of laughter on the, on the TV!
CLAES ANDREASSON: Robocop's gag was meant as a comment on the shallowness of television, but even TV veteran Leo Chaloukian finds all that canned hilarity grates on the nerves.
LEO CHALOUKIAN: I, I don't like laugh tracks. [LAUGHS] I mean I'm sorry - I don't like 'em at all. It's very annoying-- to me, when a certain laughter comes up and I, I've heard it - I watched it - I don't think it's funny and they're laughing! For what?! I don't know!
CLAES ANDREASSON:Well, exactly, I mean to me it says either you're too stupid to understand the joke or the script is too bad and we have to tell you that business was actually meant--
LEO CHALOUKIAN: You don't want me to comment on that one, do you? [LAUGHS] You don't - I mean that's not fair! You know? You want me to say that the script was stupid?! [LAUGHS] Well that's what it -- it just wasn't funny, that's all. [LAUGHS]
CLAES ANDREASSON: For On the Media, I'm Claes Andreasson. [SITCOM CLIP]
WOMAN: Oh -- my -- God!!! [LAUGHTER] [THEME MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and George Edwards, and edited by me. We had help from Andy Lanset. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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- May 9, 2003
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Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
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An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
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Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
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A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
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A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
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A Source for Sources
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Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
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With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated
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Web Only Audio Extra - TV Cord Cutters
