Dexter Filkins On DeSantis And Trump

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2022

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How to think about DeSantis? We decided to ask Dexter Filkins, who recently wrote this super-smart profile of the man for The New Yorker, which the Dish discussed here. Dexter is an award-winning journalist best known for covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the New York Times. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s the best in the business, a native of Florida, and a longtime friend of the Dish.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Hi there.
0:28.6	Welcome to another Discast.
0:31.6	It's a boiling August here, even up on Cape Cod where it's normally quite cool.
0:36.6	And I have a guest today that I've
0:38.2	had some correspondence with over the years and whose work is just so good. I, I, I, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
0:51.4	record of reporting and writing. Dexter now works at the New Yorker, but he's best known for covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
1:00.5	for the New York Times. He was a finalist for Pulitzer in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan,
1:07.2	and in 2009, won a Pulitzer as part of a team covering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
1:12.2	His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award.
1:18.1	He's currently writing at The New Yorker.
1:21.6	He wrote a really fantastic profile of Ron DeSantis, a rather difficult to understand and decipher a person, which is one
1:31.1	reason I asked him. But I also, I just, I've always wanted to have him on the podcast, and I,
1:36.8	I'm thrilled to say, welcome. Thanks for coming, Dexter. Thank you. Thank you. We were,
1:43.1	just before we started, we were talking about reporting.
1:47.7	What do you tell me, Dexter, when you, what, how would you define reporting?
1:54.1	Let's just start with that.
1:56.6	Well, you know, I was sort of trained in the old school, which is, I mean, I started, I started in the West Palm Beach Bureau of the Miami Herald, you know, 400 years ago.
2:08.3	And, you know, I was like a police reporter. That was my first job. And so you go and every morning and you go down to the sheriff's department and you get the police, the police blotter and you look at how many people have been arrested the night before. It's pretty straight. It's pretty simple.
2:21.4	And it really is who, what, where, when, and how just like that. And what's remarkable to me
2:28.5	is how that tradition, you know, fast forward 30 years later, it's practically gone.
2:35.0	And it's now it's, you know, less of that, far less reporting, if any reporting at all.
2:41.0	Nobody leaves their desk and there's like a lot of commentary thrown in.
	...

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