May 25, 2025 • 27 mins
Former CNN Africa correspondent Robyn Curnow tries to explain America to the rest of the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So I'd like to welcome Robert Kerno. She's an award
winning journalist, broadcaster, author, and is a charity ambassador for dyslexia,
something that touches on a lot of families, including Robin's
and my own. Robin is now an American, but she's
also a global citizen who can say that she's from Australia,
South Africa, Britain and the US. So you were a
(00:53):
CNN journalist and anchor for over twenty years and had
a ring sight seated at almost every defining event over
the last twenty years, and you now have a great
podcast I want to plug Searching for America, where you
explain or try to explain America to the rest of
the world. So if you ever find America, please let
us know. I will.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I think it is one of those odyssees that where
the journey is more important than the destination.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
So it seems like everything with three letters these days
is viewed with distrust, right, you know, the focus of
popular conspiracy theories, the FBI, the CIA, and the MSM.
Mainstream media something that you were a representative of and
still are. And so it's one of me. If you
(01:38):
wonder if you could start to take us down the
rabbit hole of why there is now so much distrust
of mainstream media. And that's a plural, not a singular, right,
that's a wide spectrum.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I don't think there's an easy answer, and I think
if we had the answer, perhaps the media wouldn't be
in the pickle it is in right now. But certainly,
when I was ends Africa correspondent, which I was for
a long time, and I was traveling, more often than
not people would say to me, oh, so you're from
the CIA, and I'd go, no, it's CNN. I'm from CNN,
(02:11):
and then they go yeah. But sometimes it would be
interchangeable for some people, And I don't know you guys
obviously didn't announce yourself when you walked into places. But
I'm sure the sort of sense that the media and
spies or intelligence was sharing the same space wasn't a
big leap for people, And I think particularly in those days.
Now this is ten years ago, and this is outside America.
(02:35):
I think in those days it wasn't a big leap
because for a lot of particularly African nations, with public
broad broadcasters and the way societies were set up, that
actually there was an intersection between journalism and spying, and
that journalists sometimes had to report back to the government,
(02:56):
or sometimes journalism was used as a front for a
ficial a kind of spying operations. You know, that wasn't
a far leap. So I think I've always had to
deny that I was there for the wrong reasons, and
the way I dealt with it was just to be
pretty open about the way I was asking questions and everything,
(03:16):
and use humor, which I'm sure you guys would use
a lot as well. The way it is now that
the entire institution of sort of media is seen as
some sort of suspicious puppet of some dark, nefarious, sort
of secret organization, and that we are being being played
and all playing the public. It's terrifying and it is worrying,
(03:41):
and I don't know how it got so bad so quickly. Yes,
social media. Yes, leaders using the sort of the opportunity
to do this in order to get themselves credit. There's that,
And I think there've also been a few owned goals
by mainstream media that perhaps as the debate got more
(04:01):
and more fractured and fragmented, we did all pull into
different corners. And so what you see now, even from
ten years ago when I moved to America, you do
see more of a defined CNN is taking a position,
or Fox taking a position, or MSNBC taking another position.
And I think that sort of perhaps in trying to
(04:24):
protect ourselves, we might have just played into some stereotypes
and that hasn't been helpful and it'd been given some
of the critics an easy win.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
If you looked at a heat map, I think in
the United States of the media where it was on
the political spectrum of where people thought it was. The
term that's thrown at you mainstream media is mostly thrown
from the right because they believe the media is as
a leftist bias. But now when I see these sort
of heat maps of what people are watching, listening to,
and where they're getting their information. It is largely frankly
(04:53):
right wing stuff. I think the places that we consider
more left wing media seem much smaller and being able
to reach far fewer people, Like how did that happen?
Like if you had even asked me a few years ago,
I'd said, well, you know, on the spectrum media overall
maybe is a little bit more liberal than conservative. But
now that's actually not true. I don't think a right No, I.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Think you're right. And I used the words fractured and
fragmented for a very good reason. Somebody also talked about
broadcasting and the way I you know, I'm an old traditionalist.
I mean I started off in the analog world, and
I still believe in that sort of traditional, almost moral
imperative of the journalist. Whereas the broadcasting, which tended to
(05:34):
see a program or on CNN International what I used
to do, would tend to be quite of a wide
you'd be kind of throwing a few stories at the
dartboard in one thirty minute bulletin. Whereas I think what
you're talking about now is this fragmentation to this narrow
casting where you're seeing these tiny little it's not even
just echo chambers, it's echo chambers with an echo chambers
(05:55):
with an echo chambers. It's this network of honeycomb of
the these tiny, little fragmented pieces of media. And that's
where I think the ecosystem for the right, which is
the podcast which you talked about so much during the
run up to this sort of recent US election, particularly
the kind of bro podcasts which just seem to have
(06:16):
so much more clout. Why are those so much more
powerful now and why are they getting so much audience?
And I think that's also the question, you know, is
it a conspiracy? No, I think it's because people are
looking for something else. They don't trust the bias as
they see it, the liberal bias of the mainstream media.
But I don't think there's an easy answer to this,
(06:37):
and this is why I'm puffing and puffing when I'm
saying this, and I think it's probably also probably why
you're asking these questions. And I don't think the bosses
in New York have the answer, because if they did,
they also wouldn't be trying. They would have fixed the
viewership problem at CNN. They would have fixed the viewership
problem at MSNBC, at New York Times. I mean, look
(06:57):
at Washington Post. Nobody reads it really, I know I do.
They're losing audience and they're not gaining new audience. And
if there was an answer to this question, then we
would have the solution. And I think we're in this
incredible space of transition technologically clearly, you know where you
can call it the Third Industrial Revolution. You can talk
about reformations or whatever. But the sort of media, the
(07:21):
ugliness and the messiness of where we are in the
media right now, it's like a stew It's a mess.
We're not quite sure where it's going to all land up.
So I'm sorry, I'm not even answering your question because
I don't have an answer. And there's a reason I'm
not working in the media anymore, because it did become
quite toxic.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
There are conspiracies in the mainstream media, and I'll name
you too, okay. One is Fox News got hit for
seven hundred and eighty million dollars for reporting things that
they knew not to be true, and we're basically feeding
their audience something that they knew not to be true.
(07:59):
And there's an other case coming with smart manic. And
the second one is miss you've mentioned sinister forces behind
one American news network is owned up to fifty percent,
it's not clear by the Altani family, the Royal family
and Cutter. So you've got a foreign influence. It's not
a democracy that has must have some influence on these.
(08:21):
And yet this is not the New York Times or
the Washington Post, which are fact based and yes they've
made mistakes, but they cop to those mistakes and they
say we got this wrong, and they'll retract things. And
so I my sense is that there are conspiracies within
the media, but it's not the places where that generally
(08:43):
are getting blamed for it. I don't think there's some
cunning plan behind the Washington Post, right or maybe Jeff
Bezos now, but yeah, no.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
But I think when I talk about self inflicted, because
I mean trying to figure out, how do you get
to this point where nobody trusts you, even if you've
been doing the same thing the same way, same fact
checking at CNN, even doubly so you know, in the
last ten years, same and even more passionate dedication to
(09:11):
actually saying to giving fact based news visually representing stuff
that's happening. This is what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
You see it, we all watch it.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
We saw it happen. So then how does it get
to the point that we are still not trusted, or
that my colleagues are not trusted. My husband still works there.
He runs all of CNN's operations in war zones, so
he was running CNN's operations in Israel and then Ukraine beforehand,
and sometimes people would come to me and say, well,
just tell us, really what's happening, And I'm like, turn
(09:43):
on the television. It's not like we my husband and
I know something that's not making it onto air. There's
not another story that we're hiding. And you can have
a few glasses of wine and we'll tell you the
real story when you come to our house. But what's
going on air is something different. And the word always
comes around, particularly if you grew up in a place
like South Africa, that's the word that you used to
(10:05):
describe sinister groups of whoever. And that surprises me still
as if to say, you know, really what's going on,
and it's got worse and worse, and the self inflicted
stuff is it because we took ourselves too seriously, that
we lost the sense of storytelling perhaps and joy and fun.
Sometimes news would be kind of a little bit more
(10:26):
less produced.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Might it be more simple that the most powerful man
in the world has been consistently, over and over saying
that you're the enemy of the people, and the person
who's the richest man in the world, who owns one
of the biggest Twitter and acts, the biggest places for media,
is saying the same thing. I mean, if you're pumping
out to people over and over that the media can't
be trusted, people are going to start to believe it.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
And that's absolutely that's an excellent point. That's the basis
from which we're starting.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That makes excellent points rarely, but when he does, and
I mean I saw that.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Even a squirrel finds a blind that's an excellent point.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Sorry, And that's and that's the basis. Yet, but then
why is this also being replicated in some parts of
the world where Trump is not president or is not
constantly on air. This sort of distrust of officialdom is
something I think that is, you know, whether it's the
whether it's intelligence or agencies, or whether it's government, or
whether it's bureaucracies, or whether it's media. There's something about
(11:24):
the distrust that we've seen, probably fueled maybe solely by
Donald Trump, but then while people still not believing in
sort of basic truths, and I don't have the answer
for that.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
It's the end of the interview. You're gone, you're done.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
You can't make up anything. You've spent a life telling stories,
and you're not going to give us some BS explanation.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, we have the we have the answer, but we'd
rather not put it out.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
When we've stopped recording. You can tell me why, the
real truth. You can tell me what you really think.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So let's take a break. We'll be back in a moment.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, let me ask. So your podcast is excellent, and
you're trying to explain America to the world, and you
obviously have a long career and international news, and you
have a background a lot of different places. As you
do that, and you get feedback from people, what are
the biggest questions or concerns or misunderstandings about what's happening
in America? What is it you're trying to address.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Coming I live in the South. I'm sitting here in
Atlanta talking to you. So we're in the Deep South.
And we're in a conservative neighborhood or liberal neighborhood, and
one of my children plays sport. So we've driven a
lot around Georgia into sort of those rural areas of
Georgia that are Marjorie Taylor Green Territory and even further in.
(13:00):
And I've sat on the sports fields next to very
vociferous Maga Trump supporters, people who are very Christian and
fulfill that stereotype of red neck ignorant and as Hillary
Clinton would have said, deplorable. You know who are the
(13:21):
people that voted for Trump? Well, it's these rednecks out
here in Georgia. And you can kind of if you're
not careful. And I think this was one of the mistakes,
when I say South self inflected. One of the mistakes
a lot of the media made, particularly with the run
up to the first Trump election, was not listening to
the anxieties coming from that chunk of America, the middle
America or the lower middle class America, the white men,
(13:46):
the non college educated people. It was sort of dismissed
as sort of red neck deplorables who were being taken out,
who were being fooled by this rich gold tapped a
multi billionaire who was really just a really just bankruptost
the time. But when I sat next to them on
the sports field and you're in the middle of nowhere,
and they're good people, their sons, their dads, their wives,
(14:09):
their sons and daughters. They're the first people in a
pouring rainstorm that would pull over and help you change
a car tire. And so that's the disconnect that I'm
trying to find, because I think if I do what
I was doing when I was at CNN, which was
trying to have this sort of high brow analysis with
Washington folks or whatever. And yes, I have a master's
(14:31):
degree from Cambridge and international relations. I can talk foreign
policy for hours, But does that really help me to
understand the instincts and the patterns and the anxieties and
the hopes that American voters are really feeling. And that's
what I'm trying to do, And I think being an
outsider helps. So I kind of try to listen to
(14:51):
them with compassion, and I've found that fascinating, where you
walk into a place and you're like, I'm not going
to try and judge them. I might not vote for them.
I maybe don't believe in the same things, but I'm
not going to other them, and particularly coming politically is
a white South African. I understand that very clear political,
very easy way of othering somebody and maybe you fearful
(15:13):
of somebody else. And I think a lot of American
leaders Trump in particular, but then towards the end also
a lot of very left progressive Americans have made the
same mistake and have othered, do you know what I mean?
So I think that the sort of So that's the
very long version of what I'm trying to do, so
to try and look past why don't they believe in vaccines?
(15:36):
I sat next to the field and I'm like, what's
with the anti vaxin shit going on here?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (15:42):
But I that's when I realized, oh, RFK has got
a real chance, do you know what I mean? It's interesting,
I'm curious, and so I think a lot of people
and as you know, a lot of conspiracy theories are
bred from a fear of the unknown, and if you
play into that, whether on the left or the right,
you can create fear and anxiety which then gets amplified
(16:04):
unfortunately by news because it's good for ratings, and it
creates this as I remember, John, I think you called
it this angertainment industry, and that's unfortunately where maybe again
one of these self inflicted aspects of mainstream media, which
is really I hate the term, but is that the
more we catered towards ratings, the more we amplified our
(16:27):
own part in the division. And people have just got
sick and tired of it, or they just like, I
don't want to be scared and angry, or you're making
me too scared. You're making me too angry today and
there's a weird little calibration that goes on in people's brains,
and yeah, that's where I am.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So Robin is a South African, Australian, brit Americans.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Exactly with Southern Children.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Southern Children is America. Are Americans uniquely vulnerable to a
conspiratorial mindset. And let me set this by saying, we've
all lived in other parts of the world, and I've
lived in Southern Africa. It's still one of my favorite
places in the whole world. But aside from the Middle East,
Southern Africa was completely full of wild conspiracy theories. And
(17:16):
I remember foolishly thinking in the US, we don't at
least have that we don't believe in, like secret military
bases or witchcraft, or you know, because we have modern
medicine we believe in. So you've lived around the world
as well, and are we any different than anybody else
now or were we?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You know what an interests me. I actually stole one
of your guests, Drew McCoy, because I'm fascinated by the
American religiosity, and I think a lot of the conspiratorial
stuff is amplified by the way Americans view the spiritual
or the supernatural, and there's I don't know if it
(17:56):
goes back to the Pilgrims. I don't know if it's
in your DNA. I don't know what it is about Americans.
But the Jesus stuff, the personification of Jesus as somebody
who is walking with you, goes fishing with you, drinks
a beer with you. Jesus is right there. That kind
of personification of Jesus is very American. And it's not
(18:18):
just evangelical, and it's not just Trumpian either. There's something
baked in and obviously I'm in the South here, so
I see it within my daily life, and so it's
not just a Catholicism. I'm a very lapsed Catholic, but
that sort of high Church stuff that I grew up with,
where you talk about God as some sort of supernatural
being and Heaven is something that is esoteric here in America.
(18:41):
People believe you will go to Hell, and that plays
into the politics in a way that I've not seen
in any other nation. I think that if you talk
about conspiracy theories, a lot of conspiracy theories here talk
about the devil or the demon or Satan or you know,
even with you know, even when Trump was shot, there
was this meme going around and with the sort of
a Jesus who looked like a white bearded Jesus sort
(19:05):
of saving him as if he was his own personal,
you know, secret service agent, sort of deflecting the bullet.
And I found that interesting because I think if you
believe that Hell and Heaven exists literally, and that Adam
and Eve is a literal story, then I think it's
a quicker leap to saying there's child trafficking and a
(19:25):
pizza parlor in Washington, or all these CIA agents want babies,
And so I think the American conspiracy stuff is somehow
wrapped up in a very particular version of America's Americans
idea of Hell and Earth and Jesus and the devil.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's take a break.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
A friend of mine when I was in Africa, and
I don't want to be sued by the wrong African country,
but I think it was Equatorial Guinea. In World War Two,
an aircraft crashed in Equatorial Guinea and it had all
these British soldiers on this, like thirty British dead. And
Britain doesn't have an embassy in Equatorial Guinea, in Malabo
and whatever the capital is, and so the American said, well,
(20:22):
we will tend the war graves. So every couple of
months the American embassy would send out and the ambassador
and the deputy ambassador, the DCM would go out and
they would tend to the war graves. And the number
two in the embassy was kicked out of the country
and accused of political witchcraft. It was like he got PNG,
(20:45):
And I thought that could never happen in the United States.
And now I hear Marjorie Taylor Green talking about demonic
forces are behind the Democrats and Jesus is protecting one
particular thing, and I think, note, we're not actually too
much equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
We got to start using Jesus as a weapon, like
we ought to just pretend that we're like that. No, no, no, no,
you're wrong. I thought to Jesus and he said.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I think Jesus was Cia Sours. Yeah, I have a
specific question for you, so something I'm fascinated about it,
and I'm not sure you can talk about it. But
Anderson Cooper on CNN loved the guy.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
He was at the farm, yes, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
I wasn't going there. But he actually interviewed and talked
to someone who believed in the Q ANDN theory who
told him that he was going to go like they
were going to send him to prison. And I'm not
quite sure what there was this q Andon conspiracy theory.
And do you have anything more on this? What when
you confront a wacky conspiracy theory like head on like that?
(21:46):
How did that go?
Speaker 1 (21:47):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
I'm assuming he did the interview very well and probably
didn't believe a word that he said. But what is
interesting about Q and on and I was going to
and it refers to the South African stuff, is that
I think many people believe that Q is South African
right got a guy, and they got a guy who's
apparently a guy and who's whatever. But that doesn't surprise
(22:08):
me because South Africans, as you know, whether white or black,
have this extraordinary ability to believe all sorts of things
that still kind of amazes me and infuriates me on
many levels. So yes, being in America, I sometimes hear
some of the stuff and I'm like, you can't make
this stuff up. But then I think back to some
(22:30):
of the stories I had to cover when I was
in Africa, and You're like, yeah, no, there's been it's
been crazier. That's why I can never quite put my
finger on what it is that makes somebody, often highly
intelligent people, sometimes in your own family, believe stuff that
you think, yeah, no nah. But also the presidents, and
(22:51):
I think the use of conspiracy theories in Africa by
African leaders can be quite Trumpian or I think that
sense of referencing forces out to get you, nefarious secret
people who are trying to bring you down and stop
(23:12):
you is a very African leader kind of way of
dealing with power and keeping it and making sure that
you are you keep people around you in check as well.
Adam about you. Jerry used to all this over and
over again, probably and mcgarbi was pretty good at it.
Jacob Zumer constantly was bringing up threats. Even the current
(23:35):
set of leaders in South Africa are constantly saying they're
about to be poisoned or they were nearly poisoned. And
I think that sort of sense of a leader constantly
under attack is a very easy way out and it's
very effective.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Zuma said he took a shower so he couldn't get AIDS, right, Yes.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
And that's another one that I When stuff is happening
in a country that you can't control, particularly as a leader,
you then have to also blame some nefarious force. And
with when I was there, Tarbon Berkey the president, there
was the ade epidemic in those sort of early two
thousands of people were dying a day, and Tarboon Berkey
(24:16):
as a sort of intellectual. He thought of himself as
an intellectual. He had a university education, so in many
ways it wasn't coming from a place of sort of ignorance.
And he did his own research and he came up
with the concept that HIV did not cause AIDS, and
then his cabinet around him started also being kind of
(24:36):
fueling into that, and it became a yes man cabinet,
Yes women, there were quite a few of them too,
and so it became this sort of AIDS denialism. But
right from the top that was sort of had a
veneer of intellectualism around it, and you know, it was like,
we have to question, we have to question everything. We
also don't want the imperilous American Western pharmaceutic companies to
(25:00):
take advantage of US Africans. Therefore, this is also an
exercise in US standing up for our rights. So it
was shrouded this whole conversation about what caused HIV AIDS,
and hundreds of thousands died because of the denihalism around
HIV and the slow roll out of antiretroviral drugs, but
that played down. So the sort of the questioning of
(25:23):
basic facts in order to support the leader's inability to
control this massive death rate then played into all sorts
of other conspiracy theories, which one of them was if
you have sex with a virgin, you'll be cured of AIDS.
And so South Africa has this incredibly high child rape
(25:44):
rate and at first nobody could understand what was going
on until it became evident that there was this rumor
that HIV you could be cleaned you could be cleansed
by somebody who was fresh. I suppose thirty forty percent
of people believe that. But you know, how do you
fight that and how do you then try and convince
people that this isn't the truth when from the top
(26:07):
it's been said, you've got a question that that you've
got to look at alternative therapies was the line from
from the top for many people who were ignorant about
basic medical facts that then became justified. But what was
so interesting about the sort of sleep with a virgin
is that that trope actually started in sixteenth century England
(26:28):
and it's a you know, it's an old Victorian trope
about when people got syphilis, and it probably goes back
also to sort these ideas of these Christian martyrs who
would be would would be cleansing to a society because
they would they would remove a society's access to the
demons or devil or Satan or whatever. So the whole
(26:49):
concept of that, you know, rape of virginary to be
cleared of it goes back to some sort of Western idea.
So I think a lot of these conspiracy theories, these
tropes of power or of explanation that are behind the
conspiration theories often quite similar in overlapping. You know, if
it's not the aliens who are controlling us, maybe it's
the Jews. You know, that's an old one, And so
I think there's often an overlap and often culturally surprisingly
(27:12):
close in ways that you wouldn't think.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
We'll be back next week with more of our conversation
with Robin Kerno. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson,
Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer
is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible it's a production of honorable
mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So I'd like to welcome Robert Kerno. She's an award
winning journalist, broadcaster, author, and is a charity ambassador for dyslexia,
something that touches on a lot of families, including Robin's
and my own. Robin is now an American, but she's
also a global citizen who can say that she's from Australia,
South Africa, Britain and the US. So you were a
(00:53):
CNN journalist and anchor for over twenty years and had
a ring sight seated at almost every defining event over
the last twenty years, and you now have a great
podcast I want to plug Searching for America, where you
explain or try to explain America to the rest of
the world. So if you ever find America, please let
us know. I will.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I think it is one of those odyssees that where
the journey is more important than the destination.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
So it seems like everything with three letters these days
is viewed with distrust, right, you know, the focus of
popular conspiracy theories, the FBI, the CIA, and the MSM.
Mainstream media something that you were a representative of and
still are. And so it's one of me. If you
(01:38):
wonder if you could start to take us down the
rabbit hole of why there is now so much distrust
of mainstream media. And that's a plural, not a singular, right,
that's a wide spectrum.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I don't think there's an easy answer, and I think
if we had the answer, perhaps the media wouldn't be
in the pickle it is in right now. But certainly,
when I was ends Africa correspondent, which I was for
a long time, and I was traveling, more often than
not people would say to me, oh, so you're from
the CIA, and I'd go, no, it's CNN. I'm from CNN,
(02:11):
and then they go yeah. But sometimes it would be
interchangeable for some people, And I don't know you guys
obviously didn't announce yourself when you walked into places. But
I'm sure the sort of sense that the media and
spies or intelligence was sharing the same space wasn't a
big leap for people, And I think particularly in those days.
Now this is ten years ago, and this is outside America.
(02:35):
I think in those days it wasn't a big leap
because for a lot of particularly African nations, with public
broad broadcasters and the way societies were set up, that
actually there was an intersection between journalism and spying, and
that journalists sometimes had to report back to the government,
(02:56):
or sometimes journalism was used as a front for a
ficial a kind of spying operations. You know, that wasn't
a far leap. So I think I've always had to
deny that I was there for the wrong reasons, and
the way I dealt with it was just to be
pretty open about the way I was asking questions and everything,
(03:16):
and use humor, which I'm sure you guys would use
a lot as well. The way it is now that
the entire institution of sort of media is seen as
some sort of suspicious puppet of some dark, nefarious, sort
of secret organization, and that we are being being played
and all playing the public. It's terrifying and it is worrying,
(03:41):
and I don't know how it got so bad so quickly. Yes,
social media. Yes, leaders using the sort of the opportunity
to do this in order to get themselves credit. There's that,
And I think there've also been a few owned goals
by mainstream media that perhaps as the debate got more
(04:01):
and more fractured and fragmented, we did all pull into
different corners. And so what you see now, even from
ten years ago when I moved to America, you do
see more of a defined CNN is taking a position,
or Fox taking a position, or MSNBC taking another position.
And I think that sort of perhaps in trying to
(04:24):
protect ourselves, we might have just played into some stereotypes
and that hasn't been helpful and it'd been given some
of the critics an easy win.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
If you looked at a heat map, I think in
the United States of the media where it was on
the political spectrum of where people thought it was. The
term that's thrown at you mainstream media is mostly thrown
from the right because they believe the media is as
a leftist bias. But now when I see these sort
of heat maps of what people are watching, listening to,
and where they're getting their information. It is largely frankly
(04:53):
right wing stuff. I think the places that we consider
more left wing media seem much smaller and being able
to reach far fewer people, Like how did that happen?
Like if you had even asked me a few years ago,
I'd said, well, you know, on the spectrum media overall
maybe is a little bit more liberal than conservative. But
now that's actually not true. I don't think a right No, I.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Think you're right. And I used the words fractured and
fragmented for a very good reason. Somebody also talked about
broadcasting and the way I you know, I'm an old traditionalist.
I mean I started off in the analog world, and
I still believe in that sort of traditional, almost moral
imperative of the journalist. Whereas the broadcasting, which tended to
(05:34):
see a program or on CNN International what I used
to do, would tend to be quite of a wide
you'd be kind of throwing a few stories at the
dartboard in one thirty minute bulletin. Whereas I think what
you're talking about now is this fragmentation to this narrow
casting where you're seeing these tiny little it's not even
just echo chambers, it's echo chambers with an echo chambers
(05:55):
with an echo chambers. It's this network of honeycomb of
the these tiny, little fragmented pieces of media. And that's
where I think the ecosystem for the right, which is
the podcast which you talked about so much during the
run up to this sort of recent US election, particularly
the kind of bro podcasts which just seem to have
(06:16):
so much more clout. Why are those so much more
powerful now and why are they getting so much audience?
And I think that's also the question, you know, is
it a conspiracy? No, I think it's because people are
looking for something else. They don't trust the bias as
they see it, the liberal bias of the mainstream media.
But I don't think there's an easy answer to this,
(06:37):
and this is why I'm puffing and puffing when I'm
saying this, and I think it's probably also probably why
you're asking these questions. And I don't think the bosses
in New York have the answer, because if they did,
they also wouldn't be trying. They would have fixed the
viewership problem at CNN. They would have fixed the viewership
problem at MSNBC, at New York Times. I mean, look
(06:57):
at Washington Post. Nobody reads it really, I know I do.
They're losing audience and they're not gaining new audience. And
if there was an answer to this question, then we
would have the solution. And I think we're in this
incredible space of transition technologically clearly, you know where you
can call it the Third Industrial Revolution. You can talk
about reformations or whatever. But the sort of media, the
(07:21):
ugliness and the messiness of where we are in the
media right now, it's like a stew It's a mess.
We're not quite sure where it's going to all land up.
So I'm sorry, I'm not even answering your question because
I don't have an answer. And there's a reason I'm
not working in the media anymore, because it did become
quite toxic.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
There are conspiracies in the mainstream media, and I'll name
you too, okay. One is Fox News got hit for
seven hundred and eighty million dollars for reporting things that
they knew not to be true, and we're basically feeding
their audience something that they knew not to be true.
(07:59):
And there's an other case coming with smart manic. And
the second one is miss you've mentioned sinister forces behind
one American news network is owned up to fifty percent,
it's not clear by the Altani family, the Royal family
and Cutter. So you've got a foreign influence. It's not
a democracy that has must have some influence on these.
(08:21):
And yet this is not the New York Times or
the Washington Post, which are fact based and yes they've
made mistakes, but they cop to those mistakes and they
say we got this wrong, and they'll retract things. And
so I my sense is that there are conspiracies within
the media, but it's not the places where that generally
(08:43):
are getting blamed for it. I don't think there's some
cunning plan behind the Washington Post, right or maybe Jeff
Bezos now, but yeah, no.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
But I think when I talk about self inflicted, because
I mean trying to figure out, how do you get
to this point where nobody trusts you, even if you've
been doing the same thing the same way, same fact
checking at CNN, even doubly so you know, in the
last ten years, same and even more passionate dedication to
(09:11):
actually saying to giving fact based news visually representing stuff
that's happening. This is what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
You see it, we all watch it.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
We saw it happen. So then how does it get
to the point that we are still not trusted, or
that my colleagues are not trusted. My husband still works there.
He runs all of CNN's operations in war zones, so
he was running CNN's operations in Israel and then Ukraine beforehand,
and sometimes people would come to me and say, well,
just tell us, really what's happening, And I'm like, turn
(09:43):
on the television. It's not like we my husband and
I know something that's not making it onto air. There's
not another story that we're hiding. And you can have
a few glasses of wine and we'll tell you the
real story when you come to our house. But what's
going on air is something different. And the word always
comes around, particularly if you grew up in a place
like South Africa, that's the word that you used to
(10:05):
describe sinister groups of whoever. And that surprises me still
as if to say, you know, really what's going on,
and it's got worse and worse, and the self inflicted
stuff is it because we took ourselves too seriously, that
we lost the sense of storytelling perhaps and joy and fun.
Sometimes news would be kind of a little bit more
(10:26):
less produced.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Might it be more simple that the most powerful man
in the world has been consistently, over and over saying
that you're the enemy of the people, and the person
who's the richest man in the world, who owns one
of the biggest Twitter and acts, the biggest places for media,
is saying the same thing. I mean, if you're pumping
out to people over and over that the media can't
be trusted, people are going to start to believe it.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
And that's absolutely that's an excellent point. That's the basis
from which we're starting.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That makes excellent points rarely, but when he does, and
I mean I saw that.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Even a squirrel finds a blind that's an excellent point.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Sorry, And that's and that's the basis. Yet, but then
why is this also being replicated in some parts of
the world where Trump is not president or is not
constantly on air. This sort of distrust of officialdom is
something I think that is, you know, whether it's the
whether it's intelligence or agencies, or whether it's government, or
whether it's bureaucracies, or whether it's media. There's something about
(11:24):
the distrust that we've seen, probably fueled maybe solely by
Donald Trump, but then while people still not believing in
sort of basic truths, and I don't have the answer
for that.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
It's the end of the interview. You're gone, you're done.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
You can't make up anything. You've spent a life telling stories,
and you're not going to give us some BS explanation.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, we have the we have the answer, but we'd
rather not put it out.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
When we've stopped recording. You can tell me why, the
real truth. You can tell me what you really think.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So let's take a break. We'll be back in a moment.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, let me ask. So your podcast is excellent, and
you're trying to explain America to the world, and you
obviously have a long career and international news, and you
have a background a lot of different places. As you
do that, and you get feedback from people, what are
the biggest questions or concerns or misunderstandings about what's happening
in America? What is it you're trying to address.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Coming I live in the South. I'm sitting here in
Atlanta talking to you. So we're in the Deep South.
And we're in a conservative neighborhood or liberal neighborhood, and
one of my children plays sport. So we've driven a
lot around Georgia into sort of those rural areas of
Georgia that are Marjorie Taylor Green Territory and even further in.
(13:00):
And I've sat on the sports fields next to very
vociferous Maga Trump supporters, people who are very Christian and
fulfill that stereotype of red neck ignorant and as Hillary
Clinton would have said, deplorable. You know who are the
(13:21):
people that voted for Trump? Well, it's these rednecks out
here in Georgia. And you can kind of if you're
not careful. And I think this was one of the mistakes,
when I say South self inflected. One of the mistakes
a lot of the media made, particularly with the run
up to the first Trump election, was not listening to
the anxieties coming from that chunk of America, the middle
America or the lower middle class America, the white men,
(13:46):
the non college educated people. It was sort of dismissed
as sort of red neck deplorables who were being taken out,
who were being fooled by this rich gold tapped a
multi billionaire who was really just a really just bankruptost
the time. But when I sat next to them on
the sports field and you're in the middle of nowhere,
and they're good people, their sons, their dads, their wives,
(14:09):
their sons and daughters. They're the first people in a
pouring rainstorm that would pull over and help you change
a car tire. And so that's the disconnect that I'm
trying to find, because I think if I do what
I was doing when I was at CNN, which was
trying to have this sort of high brow analysis with
Washington folks or whatever. And yes, I have a master's
(14:31):
degree from Cambridge and international relations. I can talk foreign
policy for hours, But does that really help me to
understand the instincts and the patterns and the anxieties and
the hopes that American voters are really feeling. And that's
what I'm trying to do, And I think being an
outsider helps. So I kind of try to listen to
(14:51):
them with compassion, and I've found that fascinating, where you
walk into a place and you're like, I'm not going
to try and judge them. I might not vote for them.
I maybe don't believe in the same things, but I'm
not going to other them, and particularly coming politically is
a white South African. I understand that very clear political,
very easy way of othering somebody and maybe you fearful
(15:13):
of somebody else. And I think a lot of American
leaders Trump in particular, but then towards the end also
a lot of very left progressive Americans have made the
same mistake and have othered, do you know what I mean?
So I think that the sort of So that's the
very long version of what I'm trying to do, so
to try and look past why don't they believe in vaccines?
(15:36):
I sat next to the field and I'm like, what's
with the anti vaxin shit going on here?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (15:42):
But I that's when I realized, oh, RFK has got
a real chance, do you know what I mean? It's interesting,
I'm curious, and so I think a lot of people
and as you know, a lot of conspiracy theories are
bred from a fear of the unknown, and if you
play into that, whether on the left or the right,
you can create fear and anxiety which then gets amplified
(16:04):
unfortunately by news because it's good for ratings, and it
creates this as I remember, John, I think you called
it this angertainment industry, and that's unfortunately where maybe again
one of these self inflicted aspects of mainstream media, which
is really I hate the term, but is that the
more we catered towards ratings, the more we amplified our
(16:27):
own part in the division. And people have just got
sick and tired of it, or they just like, I
don't want to be scared and angry, or you're making
me too scared. You're making me too angry today and
there's a weird little calibration that goes on in people's brains,
and yeah, that's where I am.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So Robin is a South African, Australian, brit Americans.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Exactly with Southern Children.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Southern Children is America. Are Americans uniquely vulnerable to a
conspiratorial mindset. And let me set this by saying, we've
all lived in other parts of the world, and I've
lived in Southern Africa. It's still one of my favorite
places in the whole world. But aside from the Middle East,
Southern Africa was completely full of wild conspiracy theories. And
(17:16):
I remember foolishly thinking in the US, we don't at
least have that we don't believe in, like secret military
bases or witchcraft, or you know, because we have modern
medicine we believe in. So you've lived around the world
as well, and are we any different than anybody else
now or were we?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You know what an interests me. I actually stole one
of your guests, Drew McCoy, because I'm fascinated by the
American religiosity, and I think a lot of the conspiratorial
stuff is amplified by the way Americans view the spiritual
or the supernatural, and there's I don't know if it
(17:56):
goes back to the Pilgrims. I don't know if it's
in your DNA. I don't know what it is about Americans.
But the Jesus stuff, the personification of Jesus as somebody
who is walking with you, goes fishing with you, drinks
a beer with you. Jesus is right there. That kind
of personification of Jesus is very American. And it's not
(18:18):
just evangelical, and it's not just Trumpian either. There's something
baked in and obviously I'm in the South here, so
I see it within my daily life, and so it's
not just a Catholicism. I'm a very lapsed Catholic, but
that sort of high Church stuff that I grew up with,
where you talk about God as some sort of supernatural
being and Heaven is something that is esoteric here in America.
(18:41):
People believe you will go to Hell, and that plays
into the politics in a way that I've not seen
in any other nation. I think that if you talk
about conspiracy theories, a lot of conspiracy theories here talk
about the devil or the demon or Satan or you know,
even with you know, even when Trump was shot, there
was this meme going around and with the sort of
a Jesus who looked like a white bearded Jesus sort
(19:05):
of saving him as if he was his own personal,
you know, secret service agent, sort of deflecting the bullet.
And I found that interesting because I think if you
believe that Hell and Heaven exists literally, and that Adam
and Eve is a literal story, then I think it's
a quicker leap to saying there's child trafficking and a
(19:25):
pizza parlor in Washington, or all these CIA agents want babies,
And so I think the American conspiracy stuff is somehow
wrapped up in a very particular version of America's Americans
idea of Hell and Earth and Jesus and the devil.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's take a break.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
A friend of mine when I was in Africa, and
I don't want to be sued by the wrong African country,
but I think it was Equatorial Guinea. In World War Two,
an aircraft crashed in Equatorial Guinea and it had all
these British soldiers on this, like thirty British dead. And
Britain doesn't have an embassy in Equatorial Guinea, in Malabo
and whatever the capital is, and so the American said, well,
(20:22):
we will tend the war graves. So every couple of
months the American embassy would send out and the ambassador
and the deputy ambassador, the DCM would go out and
they would tend to the war graves. And the number
two in the embassy was kicked out of the country
and accused of political witchcraft. It was like he got PNG,
(20:45):
And I thought that could never happen in the United States.
And now I hear Marjorie Taylor Green talking about demonic
forces are behind the Democrats and Jesus is protecting one
particular thing, and I think, note, we're not actually too
much equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
We got to start using Jesus as a weapon, like
we ought to just pretend that we're like that. No, no, no, no,
you're wrong. I thought to Jesus and he said.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I think Jesus was Cia Sours. Yeah, I have a
specific question for you, so something I'm fascinated about it,
and I'm not sure you can talk about it. But
Anderson Cooper on CNN loved the guy.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
He was at the farm, yes, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
I wasn't going there. But he actually interviewed and talked
to someone who believed in the Q ANDN theory who
told him that he was going to go like they
were going to send him to prison. And I'm not
quite sure what there was this q Andon conspiracy theory.
And do you have anything more on this? What when
you confront a wacky conspiracy theory like head on like that?
(21:46):
How did that go?
Speaker 1 (21:47):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
I'm assuming he did the interview very well and probably
didn't believe a word that he said. But what is
interesting about Q and on and I was going to
and it refers to the South African stuff, is that
I think many people believe that Q is South African
right got a guy, and they got a guy who's
apparently a guy and who's whatever. But that doesn't surprise
(22:08):
me because South Africans, as you know, whether white or black,
have this extraordinary ability to believe all sorts of things
that still kind of amazes me and infuriates me on
many levels. So yes, being in America, I sometimes hear
some of the stuff and I'm like, you can't make
this stuff up. But then I think back to some
(22:30):
of the stories I had to cover when I was
in Africa, and You're like, yeah, no, there's been it's
been crazier. That's why I can never quite put my
finger on what it is that makes somebody, often highly
intelligent people, sometimes in your own family, believe stuff that
you think, yeah, no nah. But also the presidents, and
(22:51):
I think the use of conspiracy theories in Africa by
African leaders can be quite Trumpian or I think that
sense of referencing forces out to get you, nefarious secret
people who are trying to bring you down and stop
(23:12):
you is a very African leader kind of way of
dealing with power and keeping it and making sure that
you are you keep people around you in check as well.
Adam about you. Jerry used to all this over and
over again, probably and mcgarbi was pretty good at it.
Jacob Zumer constantly was bringing up threats. Even the current
(23:35):
set of leaders in South Africa are constantly saying they're
about to be poisoned or they were nearly poisoned. And
I think that sort of sense of a leader constantly
under attack is a very easy way out and it's
very effective.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Zuma said he took a shower so he couldn't get AIDS, right, Yes.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
And that's another one that I When stuff is happening
in a country that you can't control, particularly as a leader,
you then have to also blame some nefarious force. And
with when I was there, Tarbon Berkey the president, there
was the ade epidemic in those sort of early two
thousands of people were dying a day, and Tarboon Berkey
(24:16):
as a sort of intellectual. He thought of himself as
an intellectual. He had a university education, so in many
ways it wasn't coming from a place of sort of ignorance.
And he did his own research and he came up
with the concept that HIV did not cause AIDS, and
then his cabinet around him started also being kind of
(24:36):
fueling into that, and it became a yes man cabinet,
Yes women, there were quite a few of them too,
and so it became this sort of AIDS denialism. But
right from the top that was sort of had a
veneer of intellectualism around it, and you know, it was like,
we have to question, we have to question everything. We
also don't want the imperilous American Western pharmaceutic companies to
(25:00):
take advantage of US Africans. Therefore, this is also an
exercise in US standing up for our rights. So it
was shrouded this whole conversation about what caused HIV AIDS,
and hundreds of thousands died because of the denihalism around
HIV and the slow roll out of antiretroviral drugs, but
that played down. So the sort of the questioning of
(25:23):
basic facts in order to support the leader's inability to
control this massive death rate then played into all sorts
of other conspiracy theories, which one of them was if
you have sex with a virgin, you'll be cured of AIDS.
And so South Africa has this incredibly high child rape
(25:44):
rate and at first nobody could understand what was going
on until it became evident that there was this rumor
that HIV you could be cleaned you could be cleansed
by somebody who was fresh. I suppose thirty forty percent
of people believe that. But you know, how do you
fight that and how do you then try and convince
people that this isn't the truth when from the top
(26:07):
it's been said, you've got a question that that you've
got to look at alternative therapies was the line from
from the top for many people who were ignorant about
basic medical facts that then became justified. But what was
so interesting about the sort of sleep with a virgin
is that that trope actually started in sixteenth century England
(26:28):
and it's a you know, it's an old Victorian trope
about when people got syphilis, and it probably goes back
also to sort these ideas of these Christian martyrs who
would be would would be cleansing to a society because
they would they would remove a society's access to the
demons or devil or Satan or whatever. So the whole
(26:49):
concept of that, you know, rape of virginary to be
cleared of it goes back to some sort of Western idea.
So I think a lot of these conspiracy theories, these
tropes of power or of explanation that are behind the
conspiration theories often quite similar in overlapping. You know, if
it's not the aliens who are controlling us, maybe it's
the Jews. You know, that's an old one, And so
I think there's often an overlap and often culturally surprisingly
(27:12):
close in ways that you wouldn't think.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
We'll be back next week with more of our conversation
with Robin Kerno. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson,
Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer
is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible it's a production of honorable
mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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