I’ve got a new Reason Interview, this time with CNN host and Race Against Terror author Jake Tapper. I’ve known Jake for a long time—back in the late 1990s, when he was working for Salon and we contributed to long-lamented and defunct satire site Suck.com, dubbed ‘the first great website’ in this wonderful article that is now available only as a pdf (worth reading, I swear!). He also went to the same high school as my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum (who gave him his first journalism gig), a strange coincidence that we discussed in a previous interview).
Despite knowing Tapper for years, I don’t have a strong read on his personal politics, though I assume him to be a centrist liberal. That I don’t really know his politics is a testament to the type of journalism he practices—he’s a throwback, in the best possible way, to old-school news anchors who didn’t simply operate as proxies for either the Democrats or Republicans. He’s tough but fair on whoever he’s talking with and he doesn’t put up with bullshit (watch this 2018 interview where he cuts off Trump adviser Stephen Miller for “wasting” the viewer’s time and this back-and-forth from just this week with Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico).
The early part of our interview is about his excellent new book Race Against Terror, which details the successful attempt to try an al Qaeda terrorist in criminal court rather a military one. Jake notes that this practice was controversial at the time when President Obama authorized it. Yet Trump is currently following suit, a commentary on how things have changed in what used to be called the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). I highly recommend the book, which is both a page turner and a quiet meditation on how America finally came to reject torture and kidnappings and embrace due process and evidentiary rules at no cost to national security. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the larger GWOT—recede, we are finally starting to process the excesses and manias of the period. If you haven’t yet, check out my interview with Bodyguard of Lies director Dan Krauss for more on this theme—and watch for an upcoming interview with Jon Shenk, codirector of the new doc Of Waves and War, out on Netflix on November 3.
We can be grateful, I guess, that our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq at least have had the effect of making a majority of Americans skeptical of regime change and open-ended occupations of foreign countries. It’s a damn shame that so many lives and so much money was spent to learn a simple truth—and it’s disturbing to see many MAGA types embracing the Trump administration’s unconstitutional blasting of boats near Venezuela and calls for regime change there. If there was one thing Trump seemed good on, it was his suspicion of his predecessors’ foreign policy.
Jake and I also talk about the brazen ways in which Trump is trying to bully the media into something like submission. Tapper is no fainting lily when it comes to how presidents exercise power—he talks about the ways in which Obama and Biden (and all the people around them) threatened, cajoled, and worked the press. But I think he’s right that, at least in the 21st century, Trump is taking things to a whole new level by not just jawboning the media publicly but siccing regulatory agencies like the FCC and FTC on noncompliant actors.
We also cover the sins of legacy media (Tapper’s previous book was Original Sin, about how the media was late to exposing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline) and the ways in which lumbering news orgs like CNN and cable and broadcast channels need to change their ways. We discuss whether
of the will fix what ails CBS News and how older forms of media might win back trust, confidence, and audience.Here’s the Reason writeup of the interview, followed by embeds of the YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and SoundCloud versions. There’s a full transcript at Reason, too.
The Reason Interview goes deep with the artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least more interesting—place by challenging worn-out orthodoxies and ideas.
Today’s guest is Jake Tapper, the host of The Lead on CNN and author of the new book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War.
He tells Nick Gillespie why it matters that Donald Trump is following Barack Obama’s lead in trying terrorists in criminal courts rather than military tribunals, why he believes the Trump administration is unleashing an all-out offensive against journalists critical of the president, and what the legacy media got way wrong with Joe Biden and COVID.
They also discuss the future of journalism in an age of media consolidation, where Free Press upstart Bari Weiss is heading up CBS News—and possibly CNN, too.
Previous appearance:
Jake Tapper on The Hellfire Club, Donald Trump’s Big Lies, and D.C.’s ‘Bullshit Waterfall’, May 11, 20180:00–Introduction
1:34–Race Against Terror
5:25–The Bush administration and the war on terror
8:39–The legality and effectiveness of torture
17:06–President Trump’s approach to foreign policy
22:19–Media censorship and the FCC
29:43–CBS News, CNN, and the challenges facing legacy media
40:14–The rise of independent media
52:07–Joe Biden’s decline and its impact on the Democratic Party
58:37–What is being underreported in the second Trump administration?
1:06:05–Generational shifts in political views
If you like what I’m posting here, please subscribe, follow, share, and leave a comment. And check out the wide world of Reason, the planet’s magazine of libertarian politics, culture, and ideas since 1968.
