Mark Danner discusses his piece ‘Be Ready to Fight’ with fellow journalist and journalism professor David Barstow. Danner describes his experiences at the Capitol on January 6 and the violence he witnessed that day, and he elaborates the difficulties of covering the Trump presidency as a journalist.
The New York Review of Books presents “Journalism in a
Mark Danner joins Professor Alan Ross’s Political Science 179 class at the University of California, Berkeley, to give a lecture on the events of January 6 at the U.S. Capitol, President Trump, and the future of American Politics, followed by a Q&A with students.
Mark Danner · Background briefing with Ian Masters, Mark Danner
Clamorous and overpowering, campaign images are vivid as dreams and vanish as quickly. Was it real, that huge white aircraft hangar in Columbus, Ohio, the night before the election? I’d raced there from downtown Columbus’s Nationwide Arena, where President Obama, introduced by Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z, his voice hoarse and his face worn, had addressed fifteen thousand or so enthusiastic, mostly young supporters.
Amid the clamorous controversies of this election campaign, what strikes one here on the West Bank of the Jordan is the silences. Though the issue of Palestine promises to have a much more vital part in the volatile, populist politics of the Middle East”s new democracies—whose vulnerable governments actually must take some account of what moves ordinary people—here in Ramallah we have heard virtually nothing substantive about it, apart, that is, from Mitt Romney”s repeated charge that President Obama, presumably in extracting from Israel a hard-fought ten-month freeze on settlement building early on in his administration, had “thrown Israel under the bus.”
Michael Krasny of KQED hosts a forum on the outcome
anning across the faces of the country”s leaders gathered in the Cabinet Room to confront the “financial crisis” in late September, the camera”s eye moves from the President—looking tired, shrunken, desiccated—to his Treasury secretary and other powerful advisers, and then slowly makes its way down and around the long Cabinet table, trailing over the familiar waxen features of the barons of the Senate and the House, lingering for a moment on the self-consciously resolute face of the white-haired Senator John McCain, and finally reaches the table”s end where it settles at last on the figure of a lean, solitary black man slumped in his seat.
The Consequences to Come from Mark Danner on Vimeo. A discussion of the 2008
