A Reporter’s View From Beirut, and a New Film Plumbs the Depths of Netanyahu’s Corruption
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I don't think we've had a single day off since the pagers. I don't think any of us expected that it was just going to keep going and going. A reporter based in Beirut describes the day-to-day work of covering and living through a war in her own backyard. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also this week,

A new documentary about the corruption charges against Benjamin Netanyahu uses leaked footage of police interrogations to help lay out the case. It's not that he tried to kill evidence. He tried to kill the system.

It took all of us hostage in this trial. Plus, an intensification of book banning efforts, this time by state governments. You've got a teen who has their driver's license, they're 16, they can drive themselves to the public library, but they cannot borrow a book that might talk about trans people. It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday night, the country watched J.D. Vance and Tim Walz make their case to be second in command. War was on top of mind with the very first question. Earlier today, Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel, but that attack failed thanks to joint U.S. and Israeli defensive action. Iran is weakened.

But the U.S. still considers it the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Governor Walz, if you were the final voice in the Situation Room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes. The question slid past the civilian recipients of that preemptive strike or that such an action would mean a serious escalation to wider war.

But maybe we're already there. All across Lebanon today, pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded. Lebanon's health ministry says 2,700 people were injured and nine were killed, including a young girl. The Israeli military has eliminated its most powerful target yet.

Israel says longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in Beirut. The U.S. says around 200 Iranian ballistic missiles launched from Iran rained down across Israel this evening. Israel launching a ground operation in Lebanon. The military just announcing it's conducting raids against Hezbollah along Lebanon's southern border.

As the number of dead in Gaza, according to its Hamas-run health ministry, passes 41,000, Israeli shelling has now intensified in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Israel continued its bombardment of Lebanon overnight. One airstrike in central Beirut landed not far from the country's parliament building.

I don't think we've had a single day off since the pagers. I don't think any of us expected that it was just going to keep going and going. Nada Holmesi is a correspondent in the National's Beirut bureau. I spoke to her on Thursday. I would say that every single person in Lebanon right now is a journalist. They're all constantly consuming news.

They need to know what's getting bombarded, what areas they can go to, what areas they can't go to. Israel will sometimes tweet out where people need to leave because bombing is imminent. Yeah, he's an official Israeli army spokesperson that speaks fluent Arabic. His name is Avichai Adraieh. He tweets every single night. Sometimes he will let people know which areas are about to get bombed.

And he will tell people to leave those areas. He's telling people like three in the morning to get out of this area immediately. So I don't know how effective these orders telling people to flee are. Did anybody warn the people in that housing block where they got Nasrallah? No, definitely not the Israeli army. Those were huge strikes. I can't express to you how loud and violent they were. They were heard all over Beirut and beyond Beirut.

Just one after the other, something between 15 to 20 strikes that were absolutely terrifying for residents because this was before Beirut had begun to get struck regularly.

But we've been trying to figure out if people mostly had left by then because a few assassinations had been conducted in that area. I was told that a lot of people had just figured it out for themselves and started leaving. And in some instances, Hezbollah had given warnings to residents because it was no longer safe. What about censorship? Is that happening in Lebanon?

So this is a difficult question. Lebanon's media landscape is pretty free, if not the freest in the Middle East. But when it comes to covering a war zone, you are going to areas and you're trying to cover areas that are highly securitized.

both by the Lebanese army, if the Lebanese army is there, and by Hezbollah. Hezbollah is worried about security breaches because a lot of its command structure has been assassinated in recent weeks, and they're worried that people are leaking information to Israeli intelligence.

You've said that covering this conflict is different from covering Gaza, that in Lebanon things are more tightly controlled. Massacres and mass casualties don't necessarily get reported on the way they should. Yes.

Part of that is because of the security breaches that I've mentioned. Part of it is the potential that Hezbollah is storing weapons in certain areas and they don't want journalists to see it. But aside from that, this bombardment that we're seeing has made these areas incredibly dangerous to go to. Gaza, it's a really closed environment and international journalists can't go. But people

people in Gaza have nowhere to escape to, which means that journalists also have nowhere to escape to, which means that journalists are constantly putting their lives in danger to cover the news. Here, we put our lives in danger to cover the news, but to a reasonable extent, we try to stay safe. So in Gaza, you get a very real sense of what's going on, whereas in Lebanon, once people have been displaced from areas and it becomes very difficult for media to go in there, the

The bombardment is still ongoing. The war is still ongoing. But because there is so much displacement, people are no longer taking videos, photographing. We're no longer seeing things with our own eyes, and we're completely dependent on reporting.

in small bouts of deployment when we're able to go, and then also speaking with people on the phone that perhaps have remained in their areas to give us a sense of what's happening. Are people afraid to speak to the media? Yeah, sometimes this happens. Hezbollah is very interested in controlling the media narrative. But keep in mind that Hezbollah has a significant amount of support in the population, especially in areas like South Lebanon, parts of the Bekaa Valley and Baalbek.

It is very much embedded into the fabric of society. So a lot of civilians that are not in Hezbollah will themselves be wary of what to say because they don't want to put the party in jeopardy. And the media's relationship with the government right now and its relationship with Hezbollah?

The media's relationship with Hezbollah is a lot of give and take. I mean, they have a very good media relations department. The Lebanese government is a little bit more chaotic and...

And its bureaucracy can often get in the way of getting what we need. You're putting that very lightly. In 2021, your home was raided by Lebanon's general security directorate. And you were detained for, quote, security reasons. So they never found anything to report, just maybe a small amount of cannabis.

They violated all of their own rules in your case. They didn't allow you to contact your family or a lawyer for six days after your arrest. You were interrogated without the presence of a lawyer, and that was in violation of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

What happened? The reason for my detention, we don't know if it was related to any of my coverage or not at the time. I was freelancing for American radio outlet. This was public radio, right? It was, yes. We don't know why we were detained. This was me and my husband. We don't know for sure what caused them to find me to be a security threat.

One of the reasons potentially was we were at the time covering Gaza in 2021, and I could have made some phone calls to people in Gaza. People in Gaza have the same area code, Israeli area code. And in Lebanon, it's illegal to communicate with people in Israel.

In addition to that, I have a Syrian citizenship. I'm Syrian-American, so when you are Syrian, it is also illegal to communicate with Israel or to even go there. And I used to work for UNRWA, which is the UN Refugee Agency for Palestinians, and I used to live in Ramallah, and my job was in Jerusalem.

So when they raided my house, they found a passport and they saw that I had a work permit from that place. We call it here that place because we don't like for our calls to be intercepted. And even though I've said it so many times already, but...

So that was part of it, that I had been there, even though it wasn't a secret. I was very open about it. But I was a foreign journalist in Lebanon and I was operating without a residency. And I just want to make a quick note that American outlets employing freelance workers should absolutely make it a priority to ensure that their freelancers are covered and have residency and have work permits, sponsor them because they will get arrested and disappeared for 23 days.

How are you and your colleagues doing all of this? Do you get to sleep? Every night I think I'll get some sleep. I end up not being able to because there are airstrikes on the southern suburb or closer.

And it's not necessarily the sounds. I can sleep through the sounds of the bombardment. It's just that it's never as straightforward as, oh, okay, this area of Dahya that's already been emptied of people getting struck. It's always something crazier happening. So yeah, every day is unpredictable. It's very hard to give you like my routine coverage because there is no longer anything like a routine when it comes to war.

There was routine coverage, though, prior to the pager attack three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. It's weird to say because it's not like there wasn't a war prior to three weeks ago. It was very much a conflict bordering on an all-out war.

Israel and Hezbollah striking each other back and forth. But it was just lower pace. We were able to take our time a little bit more with stories while also keeping pace with the daily coverage. Over the span of almost a year, it slowly escalated, escalated, escalated, escalated until the Patriot attacks happened. And then it just let loose. How are you dealing with it? I mean,

Do you go home at night and just crack open a bottle of something or can you not because you don't know if you're going to have to, you know, wake up? No, I'm pregnant. So I don't know. Drinking is happening, unfortunately. Where are you in your pregnancy? I'm in month six now. Oh, wow. I didn't even imagine I was going to get pregnant, but I also didn't imagine I was going to get pregnant in the middle of a war and have a baby in the middle of a war potentially. Yeah.

I'm a pretty tough person. I'm not really super in my feelings. The weird thing about war is that you don't have too much time to think. You're just constantly reacting. So it's fine. That's all I can say, really. It's fine. It is what it is, right? What do you think the Western press, to the extent you get to see it, is missing? What's something the rest of the world really needs to understand?

so many things. But to be honest with you, the way that the Middle East is covered is rarely in a nuanced way. I think we're really lucky because we work for an Arab outlet, but we write in English. So we have this opportunity to give people coverage that wouldn't normally be in normal Western coverage from the Middle Eastern viewpoint. Let's just talk about Gaza.

Often the death count for Gaza would be way down low or the State of Man prison debacle where the Israeli soldiers sexually attacked a prisoner and paralyzed him. And I was reading a New York Times article that didn't mention the sexual torture until way down low. It's always focused on the Western foreign policy or the American foreign policy.

very rarely from the perspective of the people on the ground that are suffering the war that they're suffering through. Or if it is, often it's the Israeli side, because Israel and the U.S. and Israel and the Western world are allied, but rarely from the Arab side. And I think that more balance needs to come in. So I'm

Even though, for example, from the Arab side, you have more quotes from Hezbollah officials or from people that are supportive of Hezbollah. There's also plenty of people that are not supportive of Hezbollah and lots of government officials in the Arab world that are not Hezbollah and so on. But you have to provide all of these viewpoints. You have to make sure that people are able to

see what the reality is like. And it's rarely as simple and incomplex as Western media would present it. It's not like a cardboard thing of terrorists and we're eradicating terrorists. There's always a plethora of context that surrounds why these conflicts emerge and why they progress as they do. Nada, thank you very much. Thank you. Nada Homsi reports from the National's Beirut Bureau.

Coming up, a deeper take through leaked tapes and eyewitnesses on the corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one. I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson, the first ever Black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Beneath the frantic stream of news stories churning around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a devastating one for him has been on the boil since May of 2020.

He's on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in Jerusalem District Court before three judges, four years in running now. He's due to testify in that trial in December. The trial was sprawling. Judges called 333 witnesses to the stand.

For years, tapes of police interrogations have been kept under wraps. But for a new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom uses hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage of Bibi, his wife Sarah, his son Yair, his staff, and Inner Circle to trace the story of the brass-bound link between the corruption charges and Israel's widening war. ♪

The engine is the corruption cases. It all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law. Anyone that dares to touch Mr. Netanyahu is doomed.

That's Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the main guides through the BB files. Since we're speaking to him, we won't be airing any interrogation tapes because Omnimedia can be accessed in Israel, where airing the leaked tapes is prohibited without prior approval. And Drucker already is under investigation by the Israeli government, so playing that tape in our conversation would put him into further legal jeopardy.

Do the Netanyahu's know who you are? Director Alexis Bloom in the film's opening minutes. Netanyahu's.

Yes, they know. Drucker, currently a political analyst at Israel's Channel 13, has spent decades reporting on Israeli prime ministers, from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Barak to Netanyahu. Netanyahu personally sued me three times in the past for libel. And all of those cases, none of them reached real testimonies in court.

He never got a penny for me, not an apology, nothing. Let's zero in a little on Netanyahu's early life.

His erstwhile childhood friend, Uzi Beller, described how Bibi worshipped his older brother Yoni, the family's golden child. And as the lead commando of that legendary 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, Yoni was also the sole member of the team to die. Here's Uzi. Yoni's death was definitely the making of Bibi. There's no question about it.

It opened the door for something new to start. The first time that we hear about Benjamin Netanyahu is because of his brother.

It was the kicking off of his career, this tragedy. Since then, he has a lot of credit by being a very talented and gifted ambassador to the U.N. As Israeli's ambassador to the U.N. in the 80s, he enthralled listeners with his vow to protect Israel against all enemies. In the question of terrorism, there's no neutrality.

You have to choose. You're either with the terrorists or you're against them. He's working tirelessly on how to perform in front of the TV, what to do with your hands,

You think it was partly those rhetorical skills that propelled his career from ambassador to chair of the right-wing Likud party to prime minister at the unprecedented age of 47 back in 1996? Yes.

Yeah, he's brilliant. And he has this iron will. It doesn't matter how much he is getting hurt politically from this story or this action. It's no coincidence that he is the long-serving prime minister of Israel, ever. Yeah. You reported on several Israeli prime ministers. But at some point you started to realize that the corruption of Netanyahu was different now.

because his obsession with the media, it's something that we never experienced. The extent of the corruption, the value of the gifts he received was pretty notable. One of the big cases covered in the documentary explores

his involvement with an Israeli Hollywood mogul named Arnon Milchan, who became a billionaire producing massive Hollywood hits like Fight Club and Pretty Woman, 12 Years a Slave, he has two Oscars. But throughout Milchan's years in America, he kept strong ties to Israel. And as you say in the film,

Everybody knows that if you want to speak with the prime minister, go to Arnon. So what is important for us to know about that relationship? For Arnon Mnuchin, it's so important to be close to the prime minister, any prime minister. He was close to Erdogan, to Erdogan, to Shimon Peres. It's very important for him to be someone who is whispering in their ears.

He's a Hollywood mogul, but he wants to be also involved in the Iranian-Israeli conflict or the government affairs in Israel. This is like entertainment to him. And when it was Netanyahu, the price for him to pay was to become like his sugar daddy.

A prime witness in the interrogations is Hadass Klein, who was Milchan's former assistant. She exposed the gifts to Bibi and his wife, Sarah, cigars and champagne worth thousands of dollars a case.

a bracelet encrusted with scores of diamonds worth $42,000. She also testified that these gifts were solicited by the Netanyahus and more or less mandatory. The prime minister, he has a famous memory, but it seems to fail him again and again in response to the police interrogation. He can't recall the cases of champagne in the car, in the house, and those beloved cigars, or even that

blindingly blingy bracelet. So he's stonewalling, right? Yeah, absolutely. The number of questions that he really answers through this very, very long interrogation are very few. Most of the time he's saying anything that I received is from a friend. It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm the prime minister.

He usually said, I don't remember. I can't recall. You know that I'm busy with Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and the United States. You mentioned Sarah Netanyahu. She's Bibi's third and current wife.

recipient of a lot of Milchan's gifts, especially the champagne and the bling, the clips of her police interrogation are kind of terrifying. They're even more thunderingly outraged than her husband's. You observed that they're almost like a couple that runs the country. I mean, are we talking about like Juan and Eva Peron in Argentina? What's her role in the government?

She has a lot of influence over Mr. Netanyahu's decision. People in Israel already know that. Only now, when Netanyahu joined a new minister to his coalition, all the headlines in Israel were the new minister will join only if Sarah Netanyahu will not object. Those were the headlines.

Now to 2015, when Netanyahu wins his bid for re-election by a landslide, despite polls that predicted a dead heat.

In the film, Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's former media advisor, said that... This night was not only his biggest win, it was also the day that he started to deteriorate. 2015 is a landmark because until then, he always wanted to save some eye contact with the other camp. To be against them, against the elites, against the left wing, but...

not too much against them. And in 2015, he said, even though I was soft on them, they were all against me. And even though they were all against me, I won. And it makes him very vain, very...

very right-wing. And then the interrogation came up, 2016. And since then, we have a different Benjamin Netanyahu. So the next big investigation after Milchan centers around Netanyahu and an Israeli media tycoon, Shaul Elevitz, who made a fortune importing Nokia cell phones, but found himself suffocating under a mountain of debt after taking out millions in bank loans.

And in 2016, he panicked, reached out to Netanyahu. You referred to this earlier, Bibi's obsession with the media. He seized the opportunity to take over a news outlet called Wallah. This was not exactly an important news outlet for the tycoon, but it mattered a lot to Netanyahu. When you look at this period, it's...

He did a couple of things to at least four or five media outlets, trying to control them or soften the coverage or to get his people to be inside those media outlets. From all of those activities, two media outlets became a criminal case. One,

It's called Idiota Honod, the largest newspaper in Israel. The second one is this website. Voila. The thesis of this indictment is saying, look, this is a quipocuo deal. Netanyahu is giving this tycoon all kinds of regulations that the government can give that will help him to finance his debt. And in return, this website will actually surrender his control...

They will not appoint an editor or political reporter without consulting with the Netanyahu's and getting their approval. They will put the stories in or take stories out because of Netanyahu's demands.

In November 2019, Netanyahu was officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting brides, and fraud. We know that since 2016, he didn't have any friends on the left or the center. But in 2019, he was regarded as more or less illegitimate in the view of the center and the left parties in Israel. So at that point, it seems...

He either had to resign or he had to turn to the far right to create a coalition, which is where Itamar Ben-Gavir, now Minister of National Security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister now, enter the story. These are two people so marginalized, you said he wouldn't dare to appear in a photo op with them a few years ago, but now they're part of his cabinet. Give us a brief overview of these two men.

where there are ultra, ultra right-wing. And what does that mean? It means, for example, that both of them now want to resettle in Gaza Strip, which means to bring Jews to the Gaza Strip, inhabited by 2.5 million Palestinians. They want to have settlements in South Lebanon, okay, or at least military presence. They want to have all the West Bank, the Judean, Sumerian,

as part of Israel, both of them regards Arabs as somewhat inferior to Jews. Those politicians never had enough votes to reach the parliament. And now he's such an important minister because of those corruption cases that led Netanyahu to join him. Now, when you speak about the cabinet meeting, thinking about how to retaliate to the Iran attack,

that might inflame a regional war in all the Middle East, maybe in all the world.

Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bechal Smotrich sitting in such a crucial cabinet meeting. I cannot over-dramatize the influence that those corruption cases and the trial had on Israel. There's a lot of argument in the American left over whether the Israeli government is actually attempting genocide. If you go to the rhetoric of Ben-Gavir and Smotrich,

you see genocidal statements in there all the time. When you hear this public statement saying things like wiping out Gaza or transfer all these people to some other countries, of course, I can understand the listeners that says, oh, well, this is a genocide intention by those two. Okay, so zoom out for a moment. You conclude, and

and you're by no means alone here, that Netanyahu is so desperate to stay out of prison that he's willing to escalate violence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Iran, all to appease the extremist wing of his governing coalition.

Is that how we should understand the wider war around Israel? I don't want to put it all on his desire to stay out of prison. I want to put it on his desire to stay in power. Some of his crucial decision in this war is being influenced only by political reasons. Otherwise, he would have done a deal to free the hostages

A few months ago, and part of this deal is a ceasefire, at least in Gaza. It is doing everything in its power just to stay in office, even though it has such an enormous cost.

You've talked about Bibi's interference in journalism or his effort to shake it to his liking. What do you think about the overall health of the Israeli media at this moment? I would say that most of the mainstream media, 90% of it,

It's very, very critical on the prime minister's. But at the same time, he was able, through relentless efforts, to have some islands in the Israeli media functioning as his soldiers. The most important one is TV channel 14, which is Netanyahu's channel. They reach a lot of viewers. And he has one radio station in

And in other news outlets, he has this guy and this guy and this guy. If you watch only those channels, you will experience a totally different world that I'm experiencing. It's a little bit like MSNBC and Fox. There are so many polls. Do you know what the public feels about Netanyahu these days?

I'm sure 100% that he's not popular at all. And he knows it as well. This is why he's doing everything in his power to stay in office right now, because he knows that if there will be an election, he will be out. Are you worried about your future as a reporter in Israel?

it's a 13 years that I'm worried. And after a while, you know, it's becomes part of your life. So you're less worried, not because the threat is smaller because you're getting used to anything.

Why did you want to be part of the BB files, even while knowing it was going to bring you under greater scrutiny by the Israeli government? The scrutiny by the Israeli government doesn't fall with me at all. I think it's a very important movie. So the international audience also will know more about Mr. Netanyahu, about Israel and about the 7th of October war. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me. Raviv Drucker is an investigative journalist and political analyst for Channel 13 in Israel. The BB Files is directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney's Jigsaw Productions. You'll be able to see it starting later this fall. Coming up, the banning of books in schools and libraries has moved from communities to state capitals, and it's getting louder. This is On the Media. On the Media.

Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, how Kamala Harris became a contender. People, I gather, were asking her, do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions? And her answer was, I'm happy to join a process like that, but I'm not going to wait around. I'm not going to wait around. Evan Osnos on the rise of Kamala Harris. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the past year, Pan America reports that over 10,000 books were at least temporarily removed from public schools. And actions aren't just coming from local school boards. This year, it's state governments pulling the books from the shelves. More than 1,100 books have been banned from Tennessee school library shelves after a wave of state laws passed dictating what materials are inappropriate.

Rules are in effect this morning for South Carolina teachers and libraries. The changes ban certain books and set new guidelines for what materials are age appropriate. Several major American publishers are suing Florida over a law that bans books with sexual content from schools. The Utah Board of Education announced today 13 book titles will be removed from public schools all around the state.

Utah passed a bill this year where if three public schools have banned a book, it will go onto this list and all public schools in Utah will have to remove books that end up on this list. Kelly Jensen is an editor at the online publication Book Riot. And if you go up to Idaho, parents can now lodge complaints and the public library has to review the book and

move it or give the parent who's complained reasons for why they haven't moved it. They have a tight deadline on when this happens. And if they don't meet that deadline, parents can then sue the public library for not taking action quick enough. We've seen some public libraries go adults only because their space is so small. They can't move books.

Wow. Not letting kids into libraries? Yes, you heard that right. These laws differ a little from state to state. Like in South Carolina, Greenville County schools will be, quote, pausing book fairs under a new state law.

Yeah. The state of South Carolina prohibited books with sex-related content from schools. So they canceled their book fairs because they aren't sure if these regulations will then apply to book fairs.

But you take a walk over to the Greenville County Public Library. They just moved all books with trans themes or characters to a parenting section in the library. And anyone 12 and under needs permission to get those.

They then went for the trans books in the YA sections or the teen sections of the library. Now, all of those books are being pulled and put into the adult collection. Teens now need a permission slip to borrow a book that has any trans themes or content in the public library system.

organizations like the American Library Association and PEN America have helped keep the issue in the news by tracking the total number of books that have been made inaccessible and also which books. But you say censorship takes many forms, some of which don't get in the news.

So censorship, when it comes to libraries, takes four forms. I use this acronym from Dr. Emily Knox. It's the four R's. Removal, which is when a book is banned completely. Redaction, which is the intentional editing or removing of material from a work.

Relocation, which is where they move the book from where it's supposed to be to a different place in the library. And then the last one is Restriction. That is where books are...

hard to access by people who might want them. A relocation would just be moving all of the trans books from the teen section into the adult section. That's the end of it. Restriction would be then you need that permission slip to access those books.

So let's talk about another form that censorship takes, which is the threatening of librarians. Mm-hmm. In the summer of 2023 and through the early fall, we saw a huge number of bomb threats. Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado saw many.

And then there's all the rhetoric about how librarians are groomers or that they're trying to indoctrinate children because they're standing up for the right to read and the right to have books in collections that represent every type of person in a community. Have libraries closed due to this kind of pressure? Is anybody tracking that?

So there have been several attempts to close libraries. There was an attempt to close a public library in Virginia, Samuels Public Library, because of a small group of parishioners at a Catholic church in the community who were unhappy with LGBTQ books in the collection. They really wielded their power to try to get the county to stop funding this public library. Of course, people showed up when they learned what was happening and

It did not happen. And in fact, this year, they won, I think, Virginia's Library of the Year Award for everything that was going on. But that's not the only case. It was particularly fierce in Alpena, Michigan, the name-calling, the accusations going on in this public library. But the reality is when people showed up to the polls, they voted to keep their libraries.

That brings me to the question of how are libraries being protected and the access to books? A number of states have introduced bills to do this. Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington State, and now California. Yeah. So Illinois passed the first anti-book ban bill last year. I think Vermont's is maybe the most robust and most interesting one.

It was built on work that the Vermont librarians did, surveying libraries across the state to see what their concerns were and took that to help build this bill. It was a really, really smart way to not just highlight the importance of anti-book ban bills, but the importance of libraries in general.

There's this idea that librarians are quiet and meek and bookish. And it's like, that's not necessarily true. That is so not true. Right. I know librarians. Right. They are people people. Libraries are not neutral spaces. They cannot be. It would be impossible to be a neutral space because that would assume you have nothing in the library and nobody in the library. It'd just be a blank box, right? Right.

I think more and more librarians are understanding that they're nonpartisan, not nonpolitical.

I think most of the bills that have passed in this past year have said that it is part of a librarian's job to protect the collection. And so they can speak up to protect items that have been challenged, and they can speak up against bans that they may be seeing or experiencing in their library and not fear retaliation. Because we have seen that library workers who speak up have been fired.

Tell me about Annabelle Jenkins, who you interviewed this year. She, at graduation, handed her superintendent a copy of A Handmaid's Tale when he went to shake her hand. Annabelle is completing the visual arts major. Annabelle dropped the book at Superintendent Derek Bubb's feet. What's going on? I wanted to know more. What unraveled was a year-long story of her and her classmates fighting to make sure books don't get banned in their school library and that they're

superintendent doesn't shut down the physical space and the physical collections in the library in exchange for quote unquote a digital library. It was just such a reminder that even in today's world where teens are doing so much more of their work and their life on screens, they still value the public library or the school library as a space to be and a space where they can learn and discover new things.

Okay. Thank you very much, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. Kelly Jensen is an editor at Book Riot.

On the long list of banned titles across the country is a picture book for kids called "Antango Makes Three." First published in 2005, its authors are Justin Richardson, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Peter Parnell, a playwright and TV writer. Two penguins in the penguin house were a little bit different. Peter reads: Roy and Silo were both boys, but they did everything together.

They bowed to each other and walked together.

They sang to each other and swam together. The zookeeper gives them an abandoned penguin egg, which they hatch and care for. The baby's name is Tango. Tango was the very first penguin at the zoo to have two daddies. Justin says they were inspired to write their book by a real penguin family who they read about in the New York Times. We read a story called The Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name in the Arts and Ideas section by Denisha Smith.

which had a beautiful photo of Roy and Silo and Tanko and told the story of these two penguins. And we were having breakfast and I started to read the story aloud to him. It just sounded like a children's picture book.

But we were also kind of primed to hear that story in part because we were trying to have a child, but also because I'm a psychiatrist and I had been consulting to a lot of schools about children's sexual development. And there were parents who wanted to talk to their kids about the fact that, you know, there's a kid in their kindergarten class who had two dads or two moms, and

But they didn't quite know, like, what was the right way to talk about this? There really wasn't a book published by a mainstream press that I could recommend to them. So this story, it just seemed kind of obvious. Yeah. Whenever there are penguins, who's going to object? Well, not only are they cute, they're also not sexually dimorphic. Boy penguins look like girl penguins.

It was very much also the year of the penguins, because shortly after that, was it, Justin? The March of the Penguins movie came out, so everybody was loving penguins. And your quest to find an illustrator was kind of a harbinger of what was to come. There was somebody who we thought was just right, because they had a kind of lightness of touch, and the word came back,

that unfortunately the illustrator was unwilling to work on the book because of religious disagreement with the content of the book. And that was the first tango hiccup. Yes, but luckily we right after that met with Henry Cole who

sent drawings of penguins that were so delightful. And we did have a wonderful collaboration with him. Now, both of you say that what you confronted was what you call the old style of book censorship. What did that look like?

However bigoted it was, at least it seemed sincere. And I think the first challenge which happened in Rolling Hills, Missouri was a classic example. A child found the book in the library, brought it home, asked their parent to read it. Their parent read it.

and felt like, I don't want my kid to be reading this book and went back and complained to the librarian. And she decided, well, I'll hide the book in the nonfiction section so no parents will be blindsided. Of course, that act...

got entered into a log in the library and there happened to be a local reporter whose job it was to review the library log, who found that, wrote a piece that got picked up by the Associated Press and within a couple of days, Stephen Colbert was holding the book up on the Colbert Report. And those challenges played out pretty much the same way each time. A school would convene a committee, listen to the challenge,

have a school board meeting. Parents would come. If it was in Loudoun County, Virginia, some families would come dressed up in penguin costumes to celebrate the book and protect it. And at some point, the ACLU would write a letter and they'd say, you know, actually, it's really against the First Amendment and the book would be put back.

Right. And there was case law that was cited for that because in 1982, the Supreme Court had ruled in a case now known as the Pico case that a book can't be removed on the basis of content or viewpoint. And so those letters would say, if you keep the book off the shelves, you may be legally liable. And that usually did the trick. It always did the trick, really, till 2023. Wow. Which brings us to the new style of book banning.

In 2022, there was the passage of the Florida state legislation that had the don't say gay sobriquet, I guess, attached to it. And that's when things changed for Antango Makes Three. It just basically got absorbed into the culture wars.

We can think of these in terms of culture wars and in terms of politics and in terms of the First Amendment. All that's an appropriate frame. Peter and I sort of have a joke. We've done so many interviews and the interviewers often ask, how does it feel to have your book banned? We're not really concerned about our feelings. We're concerned about the feelings of these children. You have people challenging lists of books, you know, 36 books, 100 books, which they haven't read yet.

I don't think that a politician who's speaking out against "Sentango Makes Three" really sincerely in their heart believes that it's dangerous for children to read. But I do think that they have a sense that it's politically advantageous for them to do so. - Yeah, the politicians

are using fear and the idea, well, first off, the idea that if a child reads something, they will become the thing that they are reading. There is a prejudice out there, and it's built on a kind of fear that's not grounded in the communities because, frankly, the majority of folks want books to be on the shelves, don't want books to be removed. Mm-hmm.

You've now begun to fight bans of your book with legal action. So you filed suit in three counties and you knew that your book could help unban other books?

We thought that it was a particularly powerful tool because, you know, with many books, there is the possibility of saying, yes, but on page 112, it says blank and lift that out of context. You really can't do that with Antanko Makes Three. It's just no darn sex in that book. No.

That's right. They even adopt. So it seemed to us like this was a way to get the Pico case affirmed. And you reached a settlement in Nassau County, Florida, which unbanned 36 books, including your own, and was enormously significant because...

In the decision, the school board had to acknowledge that their decision to remove Entangle Makes Three had no basis, that the book had value and purpose, it was not obscene, and it was appropriate for all ages. The settlement partly has come about because the reasons that the books were removed were never disclosed and were never given the public process that entangled

in Florida even, with what's called the Sunshine Law, must happen. School boards have to hear from the community and take the advice of the committees before voting on whether or not they will remove a book. And in the case of Nassau County, none of that was done. They just disappeared. And they disappeared because a right-wing conservative group had a list of these 36 books and said, "We want these books removed."

Well, what do you think of this other new children's book being written about your book getting pulled from the shelves? This is getting awfully meta. We love this book. It's called Jacob's Missing Book.

It's the most moving thing. There's a little girl who has two dads and is very upset about the book being removed. And it's Jacob's favorite book. And so the children go out into the playground and enact the story. And they all try to hatch a little penguin of their own. And they come back in to class. And then Jacob goes home at night and, you know, sort of asks, are the grownups going to put the book back? And the grownups have to say, you know, we really don't know.

So it's not resolved, but it's a beautiful and very true story.

You know, I was born in 1963. I didn't have Antanko Makes Three, but I had Ferdinand the Bull. And so I had a story about somebody like me, which was a bull who didn't want to play rough like the other boys, which just wanted to sit under the tree and smell the flowers quietly. And I love that book. Do you think it would have made a difference in your life if you'd never encountered Ferdinand the Bull?

Oh, yeah, that would have been harder. Ferdinand the Bull saved my life when I was a kid. I mean, I had a third grade teacher who loved the fact that I grew my hair down to my shoulders. You know, that helped, Mrs. Sherry. But Ferdinand was between two covers. You could spend time with him whenever you wanted. He was there every night, yeah. Well, thank you both very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell are the authors of the book, And Tango Makes Three. ♪

And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barden. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. ♪

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