The Daily: Interviewing Bernie Sanders

2019年12月6日星期五

The Daily: Interviewing Bernie Sanders

December 6, 2019

By Michael Barbaro

Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times

For part two of our series on Democratic presidential candidates, we told the story of how Bernie Sanders learned to wield political power — not in the Senate or on the national stage, but in the town of Burlington, Vermont, all the way back in 1981.

He was a candidate for mayor, and, until then, had been a political failure in every race he’d run. But this time, he struck upon a winning strategy: finding people who had written off politics, talking to them in new ways and inspiring them to create a movement.

It’s the same strategy he has used ever since, with remarkable success.

To tell the story, we turned to our colleague Alex Burns, a “Daily” regular, who spent months investigating Sanders’s mayoral run. As with all our candidate profiles — including the one you heard last week with Pete Buttigieg and the episodes to come — the process began in our studio with a reporter interview that created the journalistic scaffolding for the episode.

At that point, we had no idea whether Sanders would agree to let us interview him, so we made sure Alex told us the entire story from start to finish.

As it happened, about a month later, Sanders did agree to let us speak with him — for about 30 minutes at his hotel in Atlanta the morning after the last Democratic presidential debate. In the episode, you can hear him walk into the room along with his wife, Jane; introduce himself to me and producer Jessica Cheung; recount his 1981 campaign; and become unexpectedly frustrated when I asked him about traveling to Nicaragua as mayor. (We genuinely feared he was about to end the interview. He did not.)

Back in New York, Jessica and producer Alexandra Leigh Young, along with editors Paige Cowett and Lisa Tobin, set about weaving together what Sanders had told us with what Alex had told us, punctuating both with archival audio from the 1980s of Sanders at work as mayor (including a memorable moment from the local, man-in-the-street-style TV show Sanders created, aptly called “Bernie Speaks With the Community”).

The result is what you heard this morning.

Our profiles on Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are up next. Look out for them on Fridays.

Talk to Michael on Twitter: @mikiebarb.

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Have you heard about the prince in the forest?

Ellen Barry/The New York Times

“Every morning, when I dropped my kids off at school, I drove past a narrow road that led into a forest. It was said that deep in that forest, in a palace cut off from the world, lived a prince and a princess — the last surviving members of a Muslim royal family.”

In a special three-part series, reporter Ellen Barry tells us the story of what happened when, while on assignment in India, she got a phone call inviting her into that forest to meet Prince Cyrus and Princess Sakina.

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Here are photos Ellen sent us of her time with Cyrus at his home, a 14th-century hunting lodge called Malcha Mahal in the woods of New Delhi. And if you haven’t heard “The Jungle Prince of Delhi” yet, listen here.

Ellen Barry/The New York Times

On ‘The Daily’ this week

Monday: Why are so many hospitals suing their patients? Sarah Kliff spoke with a woman in Virginia who, after falling behind on medical bills for her daughter’s surgery, got a knock on the door from the sheriff.

Tuesday: Iran is experiencing its deadliest political unrest in decades. Farnaz Fassihi explains why the United States not only wanted that unrest, but also has helped fuel it.

Wednesday: Julie Davis on the new phase of the impeachment inquiry: Among Democrats, “there is some degree of worry that now is the part where things get really messy.”

Thursday: New data shows that 20 percent of American 15-year-olds don’t read as well as they should have at age 10. Dana Goldstein looks at the causes and consequences.

Friday: In the second episode of “The Candidates,” we talk to Bernie Sanders about his political roots.