YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Sopel

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63
first
2021-03-05
most recent
2021-03-05
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Let me come to that in a second. There's a point I want to make about the journalism, which relates to your previous question, which I should have made. Look, I've loved my job and I have loved my career. I've loved working for the BBC. I've loved reporting. I honestly have never thought it. I've always thought it important. I have never thought it more important. I think the ability to give news that will give a variety of opinions. It's not my job to tell people whether to write vote for Trump or Biden or be pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit or conservative or Labour. I want people to be able to make judgments on facts and good reporting. And that is, I think, Manvere what our job is. So I kind of feel that the past two, three, four years have made me feel that journalism and my chosen”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And he does all sorts of bad things, but he's got their back. He's their guy, and they love him for it. There was no humor on January the 6th. There was a very edgy atmosphere that it just, it felt like, frankly, from years ago, being at a football match where you know it's going to end up in a fight. And it felt like that. It felt like these people were there for a fight because they were so convinced that the election had been stolen. And every time I tried to reason and say, but look, look at all the judges, that Donald Trump appointed. Well, they're the deep state. But look, you know, look at this. Well, you're just fake news. Well, any evidence you gave would just be dismissed out of hand. And that is a real challenge, I think, to not just the United States of America, but to all democratic societies where people are living in echo chambers and they're only hearing what they hear, want to hear coming back to them. And I think that is a real challenge for us.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There were odd moments where it felt under threat, but every time, I mean the interesting thing about the US is the First Amendment, which is very powerful and gives journalism and journalists an awful lot of leeway. And so I think that the times when I thought this is getting that the bits that were worrying were when so many believe that we are fake news. That's the worrying thing. And it reachs its apogee on January the 6th with the riot and the storming of Congress. And I was at the ellipse where Donald Trump made that speech, that in century speech in the morning about we've got to fight, we've got to fight like hell, otherwise we won't have a country left. And the mood of the crowd had changed. Donald Trump supporting audiences have normally been a lot of fun. They adore him, but they know that he fiddles his taxes and that he cheats on his”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Look, it's you know I was at Trump rallies where I was being called a liar and these are the look at those people over there look at them on that rostrum. That's the journalists they are the most dishonest people on earth They are fake news etc I tried to take it lightly because I don't think my job is not to get into a fight with Donald Trump and I think a lot of American journalists decided they wanted to get into a fight which I think was a mistake I think we're there to report we're there to hold power to account. We are there to say that was a great achievement if something great happens or that is a mighty gamble that might yield big results and that seemed to me the case when suddenly you know it seemed like North Korea and the United States were on the edge of war and suddenly Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump are wandering around a garden in Singapore together and you think well that's progress and you report that and you report it fairly and equally when something”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “that the election was stolen, threatening American democracy, and what was astonishing was the extent to which a large part of the Republican political establishment did not want to say to the president You're wrong, and this isn't me saying it. A lot of people seem to take the view there's no smoke without fire. There were 62 court cases. America is a country of laws and laws are adjudicated by judges, and the judges are judiciated, many of them appointed by Donald Trump, that the election was fair, there was nothing to see. The attorney general, the man in charge of election security, the election officers in each of the states certified the result. There has been no evidence provided that there was fraud, and yet this lie perpetuated, and even still the minority whip in the House of Representatives, guy called Steve Scalise, at the weekend was refusing.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “for he had predicted that Brexit would happen when he held a news conference at his golf course in Tanbury, and it was the day before Brexit, and all these journalists were there listening to him on the ninth tea, and he said Brexit would happen and how the journalists were amazed the next day when it happened. Well, I was there. He didn't predict anything. He arrived in Scotland the day after Brexit. So I pointed out untrue, and a White House person official took me on Twitter saying he was there. And I said, he was not. Here is the flight manifest of his plane arriving in Prestwick on the twenty fourth of june the day after Brexit. Here is his tweet saying I have just arrived in Scotland and the country's going mad. And I thought it was interesting. I mean, not these are small lies. But I thought it was interesting for the first time I'd seen the White House backing it up officially on Twitter. And then you get to november twenty twenty and the rather serious untruth is being told”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And if I could just take a couple of minutes at the start of the presidency, he talked about that the inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's. Not true. On day one of his presidency, I'm having editorial discussions with the bosses in London which were roughly do we say on the one hand Donald Trump claims this on the other hand Baracko, you know, this is what the photos show, only time will tell John Soapal BBC News Washington or do we say it's not true? And we decided we went with the latter and the BBC bosses bless them were bold and said no no if something is demonstrably untrue there are no alternative facts on this there are some things where facts are very stubborn Then there was an incident when Theresa May hosted Donald Trump at Chequers and there was a news conference and Trump started talking about how he and they were talking about Brexit and how”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “has learnt to do WTF at times when Donald Trump has said something because you just think, you know, almost lost for words. On a more serious level, I think that you have to do things seriously and you have to, you can't treat the president of the United States as a joke. I often got feedback saying, why are you covering this? Why do you cover his tweets? Well, he is the president of the United States and what he says matters. And if we start saying, well, what he says doesn't matter, then we are trivializing the most powerful person in the world. I don't take everything literally, which is something else I had to do, because you have to know that with Donald Trump there is a degree of braggadocious, it's made up some of the stuff, and some of the stuff is untrue. But when things are untrue, I think it's really important that we say to the audience that isn't true.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “My job is to write Well, we have got a new peach scented bleach that will be available in supermarkets from next week. That's as exciting as his job gets, and that night he wrote Whatever you do, do not listen to a word the president of the United States has said Do not ingest bleach in any way because that could be absolutely deadly, and I thought my God, what that company must have thought that night when the president had talked about injecting bleach. And that is what I mean about just you cannot quite believe what is happening and how noisy, how raucous, how unpredictable, how jaw dropping, so much of what your covering is.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Room, the briefing room became this pared down place where only a dozen journalists were in the room. On busy days, you could have 80, 90 people in the briefing room. But for social distancing reasons, the White House correspondence association, which runs that bit of space in the White House, said, right, we're going to take this very seriously. There's going to be social distancing, maximum of 12 people. And so it was like you were having a personal, almost it was like a seminar where you are there with your tutor. We had Donald Trump, 12 of us in the room and I was there when he talked about injecting bleach into the body. And you just thought, has he really just said that? I think he has just said that. And I had this vision that, well, later that night I got the press release from the guy who is the Director of Communications for the biggest bleach company in the US, Clorox. And I would imagine his normal.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's a great question. I think that it was in April, I think, not at the start of the pandemic where Donald Trump seemed to be joined at the hip with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Burke's the kind of people who were advising him in the White House. But then you could see that this time a year ago he started talking about wouldn't it be great if the churches were full of Easter and the congregations, everyone was packed in next to each other. And then you had a few protests against lockdown, against wearing masks, against Donald Trump knew that was his base and he thought he made the calculation I can never ever separate myself from my base, and I think that was a huge miscalculation. So I don't think it was coronavirus that did for Donald Trump in November. It was his handling of it. And just to give one brief example, I was in the briefing.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And everything about Trump is larger than life, it is technicolour, it is vibrant, it is noisy, it is irrascible, and it is just the most fantastic canvas on which to paint if you are a journalist. Now I'm not making any comments whether it's great or not great for humanity or any of those things, which maybe we'll go on to discuss. But honestly, I feel like I've had four years of a daily fix of crack cocaine and I'm now moving over to half a shandy and there is a degree of cold turkey in the transition from the kind of quiet stillness of the Biden presidency to what we've had.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Honestly, Mamvin, I could barely write my name when I went to America, and I've now written three books, which I had no intention of doing. And it all started a literary agent heard me telling some story about something to do with Trump on Radio 2, I think. And he contacted me and said, you seem to be able to tell a story. Why don't you see if you can write a book? And I thought, oh, okay. And I kind of came up with an idea about how different the US is from the UK and so many and trying to anatomize that.”

    2021-03-05 · Intelligence Squared · Jon Sopel on Fear and Loathing on the US Campaign Trail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source