Nada Homsi: I don't think we've had a single day off since the pagers. I don't think any of us expected that it was just going to keep going and going.

Brooke Gladstone: A reporter based in Beirut describes the day-to-day work of covering and living through a war in her own backyard. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also this week, a new documentary about the corruption charges against Benjamin Netanyahu uses leaked footage of police interrogations to help lay out the case.

Benjamin Netanyahu: It's not that he tried to kill evidence. He tried to kill the system. It took all of us hostage in this trial.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus an intensification of book-banning efforts. This time by state governments.

Kelly Jensen: You've got a teen who has their driver's license. They're 16. They can drive themselves to the public library, but they cannot borrow a book that might talk about trans people.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday night, the country watched JD Vance and Tim Walz make their case to be second in command. War was on top of mind with the very first question.

Margaret Brennan: Earlier today, Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel, but that attack failed thanks to joint US and Israeli defensive action. Iran is weakened, but the US still considers it the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes.

Brooke Gladstone: The question slid past the civilian recipients of that preemptive strike or that such an action would mean a serious escalation to wider war, but maybe we're already there.

Amna Nawaz: All across Lebanon today, pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded. Lebanon's health ministry says 2,700 people were injured and nine were killed, including a young girl.

LUFS Reporter: The Israeli military has eliminated its most powerful target yet. Israel says longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in Beirut.

Reporter: The US says around 200 Iranian ballistic missiles launched from Iran rained down across Israel this evening.

Reporter: Israel launching a ground operation in Lebanon. The military just announcing it's conducting raids against Hezbollah along Lebanon's southern border.

Newscaster: As the number of dead in Gaza, according to its Hamas-run health ministry, passes 41,000, Israeli shelling has now intensified in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Reporter: Israel continued its bombardment of Lebanon overnight. One airstrike in central Beirut landed not far from the country's parliament building.

Nada Homsi: I don't think we've had a single day off since the pagers. I don't think any of us expected that it was just going to keep going and going.

Brooke Gladstone: Nada Homsi is a correspondent in The National’s Beirut bureau. I spoke to her on Thursday.

Nada Homsi: I would say that every single person in Lebanon right now is a journalist. They're all constantly consuming news. They need to know what's getting bombarded, what areas they can go to, what areas they can't go to.

Brooke Gladstone: Israel will sometimes tweet out where people need to leave because a bombing is imminent.

Nada Homsi: Yes. He's an official Israeli army spokesperson that speaks fluent Arabic. His name is Avichay Adraee. He tweets every single night. Sometimes he will let people know which areas are about to get bombed and he will tell people to leave those areas. He's telling people like three in the morning to get out of this area immediately, so I don't know how effective these orders telling people to flee are.

Brooke Gladstone: Did anybody warn the people in that housing block where they got Nasrallah?

Nada Homsi: No, definitely not the Israeli army. Those were huge strikes. I can't express to you how loud and violent they were. They were heard all over Beirut and beyond Beirut, just one after the other, something between 15 to 20 strikes that were absolutely terrifying for residents because this was before Beirut had begun to get struck regularly. We've been trying to figure out if people mostly had left by then because a few assassinations had been conducted in that area. I was told that a lot of people had just figured it out for themselves and started leaving, and in some instances, Hezbollah had given warnings to residents because it was no longer safe.

Brooke Gladstone: What about censorship? Is that happening in Lebanon?

Nada Homsi: This is a difficult question. Lebanon's media landscape is pretty free, if not the freest in the Middle East, but when it comes to covering a war zone, you're going to areas and you're trying to cover areas that are highly securitized, both by the Lebanese army, if the Lebanese army is there, and by Hezbollah. Hezbollah is worried about security breaches because a lot of its command structure has been assassinated in recent weeks, and they're worried that people are leaking information to Israeli intelligence.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said that covering this conflict is different from covering Gaza, that in Lebanon, things are more tightly controlled. Massacres and mass casualties don't necessarily get reported on the way they should.

Nada Homsi: Yes. Part of that is because of the security breaches that I've mentioned. Part of it is the potential that Hezbollah is storing weapons in certain areas, and they don't want journalists to see it. Aside from that, this bombardment that we're seeing has made these areas incredibly dangerous to go to. Gaza, it's a really closed environment, and international journalists can't go, but people in Gaza have nowhere to escape to, which means that journalists also have nowhere to escape to, which means that journalists are constantly putting their lives in danger to cover the news.

Here, we put our lives in danger to cover the news, but to a reasonable extent, we try to stay safe. In Gaza, you get a very real sense of what's going on. Whereas in Lebanon, once people have been displaced from areas and it becomes very difficult for media to go in there, the bombardment is still ongoing, the war is still ongoing, but because there is so much displacement, people are no longer taking videos, photographing. We're no longer seeing things with our own eyes and we're completely dependent on reporting in small bouts of deployment when we're able to go, and then also, speaking with people on the phone what perhaps have remained in their areas to give us a sense of what's happening.

Brooke Gladstone: Are people afraid to speak to the media?

Nada Homsi: Yes, sometimes this happens. Hezbollah is very interested in controlling the media narrative, but keep in mind that Hezbollah has a significant amount of support in the population, especially in areas like South Lebanon, parts of the Bekaa valley, and Baalbek. It is very much embedded into the fabric of society, so a lot of civilians that are not in Hezbollah will themselves be wary of what to say because they don't want to put the party in jeopardy.

Brooke Gladstone: And the media's relationship with the government right now and its relationship with Hezbollah.

Nada Homsi: The media's relationship with Hezbollah is a lot of give and take. They have a very good media relations department. The Lebanese government is a little bit more chaotic, and its bureaucracy can often get in the way of getting what we need.

Brooke Gladstone: You're putting that very lightly. In 2021, your home was raided by Lebanon's General Security Directorate, and you were detained for "security reasons", so they never found anything to report, just maybe a small amount of cannabis. They violated all of their own rules in your case, they didn't allow you to contact your family or a lawyer for six days after your arrest, you were interrogated without the presence of a lawyer, and that was in violation of the code of criminal procedure. What happened?

Nada Homsi: The reason for my detention, we don't know if it was related to any of my coverage or not. At the time, I was freelancing for American radio outlet.

Brooke Gladstone: This was Public Radio, right?

Nada Homsi: It was, yes. We don't know why we were detained. This was me and my husband. We don't know for sure what caused them to find me to be a security threat. One of the reasons potentially was we were at the time covering Gaza in 2021 and I could have made some phone calls to people in Gaza. People in Gaza have the same area code as Israeli area code, and in Lebanon, it's illegal to communicate with people in Israel.

In addition to that, I have a Syrian citizenship. I'm Syrian-American. So when you are Syrian, it is also illegal to communicate with Israel or to even go there. I used to work for UNRWA, which is the UN refugee agency for Palestinians. I used to live in Ramallah and my job was in Jerusalem. When they raided my house, they found a passport and they saw that I had a work permit from that place. We call it here, that place because we don't like for our calls to be intercepted. Even though I've said it so many times already.

That was part of it that I had been there, even though it wasn't a secret, I was very open about it, but I was a foreign journalist in Lebanon and I was operating without a residency. I just want to make a quick note that American outlets employing freelance workers should absolutely make it a priority to ensure that their freelancers are covered and have residency and have work permits sponsor them because they will get arrested and disappear for 23 days.

Brooke Gladstone: How are you and your colleagues doing all of this? Do you get to sleep?

Nada Homsi: Every night I think I'll get some sleep. I end up not being able to because there are airstrikes on the southern suburb or closer. It's not necessarily the sounds, I can sleep through the sounds of the bombardment. It's just that it's never as straightforward as, oh, okay, this area of Dahi that's already been emptied of people getting struck, it's always something crazier happening, so, yes, every day is unpredictable. It's very hard to give you my routine coverage because there is no longer anything like a routine when it comes to war.

Brooke Gladstone: There was routine coverage, though, prior to the pager attack three weeks ago.

Nada Homsi: Yes. It's weird to say because it's not like there wasn't a war prior to three weeks ago. It was very much a conflict bordering on an all-out war, Israel and Hezbollah striking each other back and forth, but it was just lower pace. We were able to take our time a little bit more with stories while also keeping pace with the daily coverage. Over the span of almost a year, it slowly escalated, escalated, escalated, escalated until the pager attacks happened, and then it just let loose.

Brooke Gladstone: How are you dealing with it? Do you go home at night and just crack open a bottle of something, or can you not because you don't know if you're going to have to wake up?

Nada Homsi: No, I'm pregnant, so no drinking is happening, unfortunately.

Brooke Gladstone: Where are you in your pregnancy?

Nada Homsi: I'm in month six now.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, wow.

Nada Homsi: I didn't even imagine I was going to get pregnant, but I also didn't imagine I was going to get pregnant in the middle of a war and have a baby in the middle of a war, potentially. I'm a pretty tough person. I'm not really super in my feelings. The weird thing about war is that you don't have too much time to think. You're just constantly reacting, so it's fine. That's all I can say, really. It's fine. It is what it is, right?

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think the Western press, to the extent you get to see it, is missing? What's something the rest of the world really needs to understand?

Nada Homsi: So many things, but to be honest with you, the way that the Middle East is covered is rarely in a nuanced way. I think we're really lucky because we work for an Arab outlet, but we write in English, so we have this opportunity to give people coverage that wouldn't normally be in normal Western coverage. From the Middle Eastern viewpoint, let's just talk about Gaza. Often the death count for Gaza would be way down low, or the state demand prison debacle where the Israeli soldiers sexually attacked a prisoner and paralyzed him.

I was reading a New York Times article that didn't mention the sexual torture until way down low. It's always focused on the Western foreign policy or the American foreign policy, very rarely from the perspective of the people on the ground that are suffering the war that they're suffering through. Or if it is, often it's the Israeli side, because Israel and the US and Israel and the western world are allied, but rarely from the Arab side.

I think that more balance needs to come in. Even though, for example, from the Arab side, you have more quotes from Hezbollah officials or from people that are supportive of Hezbollah, there's also plenty of people that are not supportive of Hezbollah and lots of government officials in the Arab world that are not Hezbollah and so on, but you have to provide all of these viewpoints.

You have to make sure that people are able to see what the reality is like, and it's rarely as simple and incomplex as Western media would present it. It's not like a cardboard thing of terrorists and we're eradicating terrorists. There's always a plethora of context that surrounds why these conflicts emerge and why they progress as they do.

Brooke Gladstone: Nada, thank you very much.

Nada Homsi: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Nada Hong reports from The National’s Beirut bureau. Coming up, a deeper take through leaked tapes and eyewitnesses on the corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone Beneath the frantic stream of news stories turning around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a devastating one for him has been on the boil since May of 2020.

Speaker: He's on trial for bribery, fraud, and for breach of trust in Jerusalem district court before three judges, four years in running now. He's due to testify in that trial in December.

Brooke Gladstone: The trial was sprawling. Judges called 333 witnesses to the stand. For years, tapes of police interrogations have been kept under wraps, but for a new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom uses hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage Of Bibi, his wife Sara, his son Yair, his staff and inner circle to trace the story of the brass-bound link between the corruption charges and Israel's widening war.

Raviv Drucker: The engine is the corruption cases. It all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law. Anyone that dare to touch Mr. Netanyahu is doomed.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the main guides through the Bibi files. Since we're speaking to him, we won't be airing any interrogation tapes because On the Media can be accessed in Israel, where airing the leaked tapes is prohibited without prior approval. Drucker already is under investigation by the Israeli government, so playing that tape in our conversation would put him into further legal jeopardy.

Alexis Bloom: Do the Netanyahus know who you are?

Brooke Gladstone: Director Alexis Bloom in the film's opening minutes.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu, yes, they know.

Brooke Gladstone: Drucker, currently a political analyst at Israel's Channel 13, has spent decades reporting on Israeli prime ministers from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Barak to Netanyahu.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu personally sued me three times in the past for libel. In all of those cases, none of them reached real testimonies in court. He never got a penny from me. Not an apology. Nothing.

Brooke Gladstone: Aha. Let's zero in a little on Netanyahu's early life. His erstwhile childhood friend Uzi Beller described how Bibi worshipped his older brother Yoni, the family's golden child. As the lead commando of that legendary 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, Yoni was also the sole member of the team to die. Here's Uzi.

Uzi Beller: Yoni's death was definitely the making of Bibi. There's no question about it. It opened the door for something new to start. The first time that we hear about Benjamin Netanyahu is because of his brother. It was the kicking off of his career with this tragedy. Since then, he has a lot of credit by being a very talented and gifted ambassador to the UN.

Brooke Gladstone: As Israeli's ambassador to the UN in the eighties, he enthralled listeners with his vow to protect Israel against all enemies.

Benjamin Netanyahu: In the question of terrorism, there's no neutrality. You have to choose. You're either with the terrorists or you're against them.

Raviv Drucker: He's working tirelessly on how to perform in front of the TV, what to do with your hands, where to look, sound bites. He became masterful in the art of TV.

Brooke Gladstone: You think it was partly those rhetorical skills that propelled his career from ambassador to chair of the right-wing Likud party to prime minister at the unprecedented age of 47 back in 1996?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, he's brilliant. He has this iron will. It doesn't matter how much he is getting hurt politically from this story or this action. It's no coincidence that he is the long-serving prime minister of Israel, ever.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You reported on several Israeli prime ministers, but at some point, you started to realize that the corruption of Netanyahu was different.

Raviv Drucker: Because his obsession with the media, it's something that we never experienced.

Brooke Gladstone: The extent of the corruption, the value of the gifts he received was pretty notable. One of the big cases covered in the documentary explores his involvement with an Israeli Hollywood mogul named Arnon Milchan, who became a billionaire producing massive Hollywood hits like Fight Club and Pretty Woman, 12 Years a Slave, he has two Oscars, but throughout Milchan's years in America, he kept strong ties to Israel. As you say in the film, everybody knows that if you want to speak with the prime minister, go to Arnon. So, what is important for us to know about that relationship?

Raviv Drucker: For Arnon Milchan, it's so important to be close to the prime minister, any prime minister. He was close to Ehud Barak, to Ehud Olmert, to Shimon Peres. It's very important for him to be someone who is whispering in their ears. He's a Hollywood mogul, but he wants to be also involved in the Iranian-Israeli conflict or the government affairs in Israel. This is like entertainment to him. When it was Netanyahu, the price for him to pay was to become like his sugar daddy.

Brooke Gladstone: A prime witness in the interrogations is Hadas Klein, who was Milchan's former assistant. She exposed the gifts to Bibi and his wife Sara. Cigars and champagne worth thousands of dollars a case, a bracelet encrusted with scores of diamonds worth $42,000. She also testified that these gifts were solicited by the Netanyahus and more or less mandatory. The prime minister, he has a famous memory, but it seems to fail him again and again in response to the police interrogation. He can't recall the cases of champagne in the car, in the house, and those beloved cigars or even that blindingly blingy bracelet. He's stonewalling, right?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, absolutely. The number of questions that he really answers through this very, very long interrogation are very few. Most of the time he's saying, anything that I received is from a friend. It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm the prime minister. He usually said I don't remember, I can't recall. You know that I'm busy with Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned Sara Netanyahu. She's Bibi's third and current wife, recipient of a lot of Milchan's gifts, especially the champagne and the bling. The clips of her police interrogation are kind of terrifying. They're even more thunderingly outraged than her husband's. You observed that they're almost like a couple that runs the country. I mean, are we talking about like Juan and Eva Peron in Argentina? What's her role in the government?

Raviv Drucker: She has a lot of influence over Mr. Netanyahu's decision. People in Israel already know that. Only now, when Netanyahu joined a new minister to his coalition, all the headlines in Israel were, the new minister will join only if Sara Netanyahu will not object. Those were the headlines.

Brooke Gladstone: Now to 2015, when Netanyahu wins his bid for reelection by a landslide, despite polls that predicted a dead heat. In the film, Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's former media advisor said that--

Nir Hefetz: This night was not only his biggest win, it was also the day that he started to deteriorate.

Raviv Drucker: 2015 is a landmark because until then, he always wanted to save some eye contact with the other camp, to be against them, against the elites, against the left wing, but not too much against them. In 2015, he said, "Even though I was soft on them, they were all against me. And even though they were all against me, I won." It makes him very vain, very right-wing. Then the interrogation came up in 2016. Since then, we have a different Benjamin Netanyahu.

Brooke Gladstone: The next big investigation, after Milchan, centers around Netanyahu and an Israeli media tycoon, Shaul Elovitch, who made a fortune importing Nokia cell phones but found himself suffocating under a mountain of debt after taking out millions in bank loans, and in 2016, he panicked, reached out to Netanyahu. You referred to this earlier, Bibi's obsession with the media. He seized the opportunity to take over a news outlet called Walla. This was not exactly an important news outlet for the tycoon, but it mattered a lot to Netanyahu.

Raviv Drucker: When you look at this period, he did a couple of things to at least four or five media outlets, trying to control them or soften the coverage or to get his people to be inside those media outlets. From all of those activities, two media outlets became a criminal case. One is called Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest newspaper in Israel. The second one is this website.

Brooke Gladstone: Walla.

Raviv Drucker: The thesis of this indictment is saying, look, this is a quid pro quo deal. Netanyahu is giving this tycoon all kinds of regulation that the government can give that will help him to finance his debt. In return, this website will actually surrender its control. They will not appoint an editor or political reporter without consulting with the Netanyahus and getting their approval. They will put the stories in or take stories out because of Netanyahu's demands.

Brooke Gladstone: In November 2019, Netanyahu was officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting brides, and fraud. We know that since 2016, he didn't have any friends on the left or the center, but in 2019, he was regarded as more or less illegitimate in the view of the center and the left parties in Israel. At that point, it seems he either had to resign or he had to turn to the far right to create a coalition, which is where Itamar Ben Gvir, now minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister now enter the story. These are two people so marginalized, you said, he wouldn't dare to appear in a photo op with them a few years ago, but now they're part of his cabinet. Give us a brief overview of these two men.

Raviv Drucker: Well, they are ultra, ultra right wing.

Brooke Gladstone: And what does that mean?

Raviv Drucker: It means, for example, that both of them now want to resettle in Gaza Strip, which means to bring Jews to the Gaza Strip, inhabited by 2.5 million Palestinians. They want to have settlements in South Lebanon or at least a military presence. They want to have all the West Bank, the Judea, and Samaria as part of Israel. Both of them regard Arabs as somewhat inferior to Jews. Those politicians never had enough votes to reach the parliament, and now he is such an important minister because of those corruption cases that led Netanyahu to join him. Now, when you speak about the cabinet meeting, thinking about how to retaliate to the Iran attack that might inflame a regional war in all the Middle East, maybe in all the world, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich sitting in such a crucial cabinet meeting, I cannot over dramatize the influence that those corruption cases and the trial had on Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a lot of argument in the American left over whether the Israeli government is actually attempting genocide. If you go to the rhetoric of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, you see genocidal statements in there all the time.

Raviv Drucker: When you hear this public statement saying things like wiping out Gaza or transfer all these people to some other countries, of course, I can understand the listeners that says, oh, well, this is a genocide intention by those two.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so zoom out for a moment. You conclude, and you are by no means alone here, that Netanyahu is so desperate to stay out of prison that he's willing to escalate violence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Iran, all to appease the extremist wing of his governing coalition. Is that how we should understand the wider war around Israel?

Raviv Drucker: I don't want to put it all on his desire to stay out of prison. I want to put it on his desire to stay in power. Some of his crucial decision in this war is being influenced only by political reasons. Otherwise, he would have done a deal to free the hostages a few months ago, and part of this deal is a ceasefire, at least in Gaza. He is doing everything in his power just to stay in office, even though it has such an enormous cost.

Brooke Gladstone: You've talked about Bibi's interference in journalism or his effort to shake it to his liking. What do you think about the overall health of the Israeli media at this moment?

Raviv Drucker: I would say that most of the mainstream media, 90% of it, it's very, very critical of the prime ministers. At the same time, he was able with relentless efforts to have some islands in the Israeli media functioning as his soldiers. The most important one is TV Channel 14, which is Netanyahu's channel. They reach a lot of viewers. He has one radio station, and in other news outlet, he has this guy and this guy and this guy. If you watch only those channels, you will experience a totally different world that I'm experiencing. It's a little bit like MSNBC and Fox.

Brooke Gladstone: There are so many polls. Do you know what the public feels about Netanyahu these days?

Raviv Drucker: I'm sure 100% that he's not popular at all, and he knows it as well. This is why he's doing everything in his power to stay in office right now because he knows that if there will be an election, he will be out.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you worried about your future as a reporter in Israel?

Raviv Drucker: It's 13 years that I'm worried, and after a while, it becomes part of your life so you're less worried. Not because the threat is smaller, because you're getting used to anything.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you want to be part of The Bibi Files even while knowing it was going to bring you under greater scrutiny by the Israeli government?

Raviv Drucker: The scrutiny by the Israeli government doesn't worry me at all. I think it's a very important movie, so the international audience also will know more about Mr. Netanyahu, about Israel, and about the 7th of October war.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Raviv Drucker: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Raviv Drucker is an investigative journalist and political analyst for Channel 13 in Israel. The Bibi Files is directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney's Jigsaw Productions. You'll be able to see it starting later this fall. Coming up, the banning of books in schools and libraries has moved from communities to state capitals, and it's getting louder. This is On the Media.

This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the past year, PEN America reports that over 10,000 books were at least temporarily removed from public schools, and actions aren't just coming from local school boards. This year, it's state governments pulling the books from the shelves.

Kendall Ashman: More than 1,100 books have been banned from Tennessee school library shelves after a wave of state laws passed dictating what materials are inappropriate.

Sarah French: Rules are in effect this morning for South Carolina teachers and libraries. The changes ban certain books and set new guidelines for what materials are age-appropriate.

Jack Aylmer: Several major American publishers are suing Florida over a law that bans books with sexual content from schools.

Reporter: The Utah Board of Education announced today 13 book titles will be removed from public schools all around the state.

Kelly Jensen: Utah passed a bill this year where if three public schools have banned a book, it will go onto this list and all public schools in Utah will have to remove books that end up on this list.

Brooke Gladstone: Kelly Jensen is an editor at the online publication Book Riot.

Kelly Jensen: And if you go up to Idaho, parents can now lodge complaints and the public library has to review the book and move it, or give the parent, who's complained, reasons for why they haven't moved it. They have a tight deadline on when this happens, and if they don't meet that deadline, parents can then sue the public library for not taking action quick enough. We've seen some public libraries for adults only because their space is so small, they can't move books.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. Not letting kids into libraries.

Kelly Jensen: Yes, you heard that right.

Brooke Gladstone: These laws differ a little from state to state. Like in South Carolina, Greenville County schools will be "pausing book fairs" under a new state law.

Kelly Jensen: Yes. The state of South Carolina prohibited books with sex related content from schools. They canceled their book fairs because they aren't sure if these regulations will then apply to book fairs. You take a walk over to the Greenville County Public Library, they just moved all books with trans themes or characters to a parenting section in the library, and anyone twelve and under needs permission to get those. They then went for the trans books in the YA sections or the teen sections of the library. Now, all of those books are being pulled and put into the adult collection. Teens now need a permission slip to borrow a book that has any trans themes or content in the public library system.

Brooke Gladstone: Organizations like the American Library Association and PEN America have helped keep the issue in the news by tracking the total number of books that have been made inaccessible, and also which books, but you say censorship takes many forms, some of which don't get in the news.

Kelly Jensen: Censorship, when it comes to libraries, takes four forms. I use this acronym from Dr. Emily Knox. It's the 4 Rs. Removal, which is when a book is banned completely. Redaction, which is the intentional editing or removing of material from a work. Relocation, which is where they move the book from where it's supposed to be to a different place in the library. Then the last one is Restriction, that is where books are hard to access by people who might want them. A relocation would just be moving all of the trans books from the teen section into the adult section. That's the end of it. Restriction would be then you need that permission slip to access those books.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about another form that censorship takes, which is the threatening of librarians.

Kelly Jensen: Yes. In the summer of 2023 and through the early fall, we saw a huge number of bomb threats. Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado saw many. Then there's all the rhetoric about how librarians are groomers or that they're trying to indoctrinate children because they're standing up for the right to read and the right to have books in collections that represent every type of person in a community.

Brooke Gladstone: Have libraries closed due to this kind of pressure? Is anybody tracking that?

Kelly Jensen: There have been several attempts to close libraries. There was an attempt to close a public library in Virginia, Samuels Public Library, because of a small group of parishioners at a Catholic church in the community who were unhappy with LGBTQ books in the collection. They really wielded their power to try to get the county to stop funding this public library. Of course, people showed up when they learned what was happening, and it did not happen. In fact, this year, they won, I think, Virginia's library of the year award for everything that was going on. But that's not the only case. It is particularly fierce in Alpena, Michigan, the name calling, the accusations going on in this public library. The reality is when people showed up to the polls, they voted to keep their libraries.

Brooke Gladstone: That brings me to the question of how are libraries being protected and the access to books. A number of states have introduced bills to do this. Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington state, and now, California.

Kelly Jensen: Yes. Illinois passed the first anti-book ban bill last year. I think Vermont's is maybe the most robust and most interesting. It was built on work that the Vermont librarians did, surveying libraries across the state to see what their concerns were, and took that to help build this bill. It was a really, really smart way to not just highlight the importance of anti-book ban bills, but the importance of libraries in general. There's this idea that librarians are quiet and meek and bookish, and it's like, that's not necessarily true.

Brooke Gladstone: That is so not true. I know librarians.

Kelly Jensen: Right. They are people people. Libraries are not neutral spaces. They cannot be. It would be impossible to be a neutral space because that would assume you have nothing in the library and nobody in the library. It'd just be a blank box, right? I think more and more librarians are understanding that they're non partisan, not non-political. I think most of the bills that have passed in this past year have said that it is part of a librarian's job to protect the collection, and so they can speak up to protect items that have been challenged, and they can speak up against bans that they may be seeing or experiencing in their library and not fear retaliation because we have seen that library workers who speak up have been fired.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about Annabelle Jenkins, who you interviewed this year.

Kelly Jensen: She, at graduation, handed her superintendent a copy of a Handmaid's Tale when he went to shake her hand.

Derek Bub: Annabelle is completing the visual arts major.

Reporter: Annabelle dropped the book at Superintendent Derek Bub's feet.

Kelly Jensen: What's going on? I wanted to know more. What unraveled was a year-long story of her and her classmates fighting to make sure books don't get banned in their school library and that their superintendent doesn't shut down the physical space and the physical collections in the library in exchange for, "a digital library". It was just such a reminder that even in today's world, where teens are doing so much more of their work and their life on screens, they still value the public library or the school library as a space to be in, a space where they can learn and discover new things.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, thank you very much, Kelly.

Kelly Jensen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Kelly Jensen is an editor at Book Riot. On the long list of banned titles across the country is a picture book for kids called And Tango Makes Three, first published in 2005. Its authors are Justin Richardson, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Peter Parnell, a playwright and TV writer.

Peter Parnell: Two penguins in the Penguin house were a little bit different.

Brooke Gladstone: Peter reads.

Peter Parnell: Roy and Silo were both boys, but they did everything together. They bowed to each other and walked together. They sang to each other and swam together.

Brooke Gladstone: The zookeeper gives them an abandoned penguin egg, which they hatch and care for. The baby's name is Tango.

Peter Parnell: Tango was the very first penguin at the zoo to have two daddies.

Brooke Gladstone: Justin says they were inspired to write their book by a real penguin family who they read about in the New York Times.

Justin Richardson: We read a story called The Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name in the Arts and Ideas section by Denisha Smith, which had a beautiful photo of Roy and Silo and Tango and told the story of these two penguins. We were having breakfast, and I started to read the story aloud to him. It just sounded like a children's picture book. We were also kind of primed to hear that story in part because we were trying to have a child, but also because I'm a psychiatrist and I had been consulting to a lot of schools about children's sexual development, and there were parents who wanted to talk to their kids about the fact that, you know, there's a kid in their kindergarten class who had two dads or two moms, but they didn't quite know what was the right way to talk about this. There really wasn't a book published by a mainstream press that I could recommend to them, so this story, it just seemed kind of obvious.

Brooke Gladstone: Whenever there are penguins, who's going to object?

Justin Richardson: Well, not only are they cute, they're also not sexually dimorphic. Boy penguins look like girl penguins.

Peter Parnell: It was very much also the year of the penguins beause shortly after that was it, Justin, the March of the Penguins movie came out, so everybody was loving penguins.

Brooke Gladstone: And your quest to find an illustrator was kind of a harbinger of what was to come.

Justin Richardson: There was somebody who we thought was just right because they had a kind of lightness of touch, and the word came back that, unfortunately, the illustrator was unwilling to work on the book because of religious disagreement with the content of the book. That was the first Tango hiccup.

Peter Parnell: Yes. Luckily, we, right after that, met with Henry Cole, who sent drawings of penguins that were so delightful, and we did have a wonderful collaboration with him.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, both of you say that what you confronted was what you call the old style of book censorship. What did that look like?

Justin Richardson: However bigoted it was, at least it seemed sincere. I think the first challenge, which happened in Rolling Hills, Missouri, was a classic example. A child found the book in the library, brought it home, asked their parent to read it. Their parent read it and felt like, "I don't want my kid to be reading this book," and went back and complained to the librarian. She decided, "Well, I'll hide the book in the nonfiction section so no parents will be blindsided."

Of course, that act got entered into a log in the library, and there happened to be a local reporter whose job it was to review the library log, who found that, wrote a piece that got picked up by the Associated Press, and within a couple of days, Stephen Colbert was holding the book up on the Colbert Report. Those challenges played out pretty much the same way each time. A school would convene a committee, listen to the challenge, have a school board meeting, parents would come. If it was in Loudoun County, Virginia, some families would come dressed up in penguin costumes to celebrate the book and protect it. At some point, the ACLU would write a letter, and they'd say, "You know, actually, it's really against the First Amendment," and the book would be put back.

Peter Parnell: Right. And there was case law that was cited for that because, in 1982, the Supreme Court had ruled in a case now known as the Pico case, that a book can't be removed on the basis of content or viewpoint, and so those letters would say, if you keep the book off the shelves, you may be legally liable. That usually did the trick.

Justin Richardson: It always did the trick, really, until 2023.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. Which brings us to the new style of book banning. In 2022, there was the passage of the Florida state legislation that had the Don't Say Gay sobriquet, I guess, attached to it. That's when things changed for And Tango Makes Three. It just basically got absorbed into the culture wars.

Justin Richardson: We can think of these in terms of culture wars and in terms of politics and in terms of the First Amendment. All that's an appropriate frame. Peter and I sort of have a joke. We've done so many interviews, and the interviewers often ask, how does it feel to have your book banned? We're not really concerned about our feelings. We're concerned about the feelings of these children. You have people challenging lists of books, 36 books, 100 books which they haven't read. I don't think that a politician who's speaking out against And Tango Makes Three really sincerely, in their heart, believes that it's dangerous for children to read. I do think that they have a sense that it's politically advantageous for them to do so.

Peter Parnell: Yes. The politicians are using fear and the idea, well, first off, the idea that if a child reads something, they will become the thing that they are reading. There is a prejudice out there, and it's built on a kind of fear that's not grounded in the communities, because, frankly, the majority of folks want books to be on the shelves, don't want books to be removed.

Brooke Gladstone: You've now begun to fight bans of your book with legal action. You filed suit in three counties, and you knew that your book could help unban other books.

Justin Richardson: We thought that it was a particularly powerful tool because, with many books, there is the possibility of saying yes, but on page 112, it says blank, and lift that out of context. You really can't do that with And Tango Makes Three.

Brooke Gladstone: There's no darn sex in that book.

Peter Parnell: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: They even adopt.

Justin Richardson: It seemed to us like this was a way to get the Pico case affirmed.

Brooke Gladstone: And you reached a settlement in Nassau County, Florida, which unbanned 36 books, including your own, and was enormously significant because, in the decision, the school board had to acknowledge that their decision to remove And Tango Makes Three had no basis, that the book had value and purpose, it was not obscene, and it was appropriate for all ages.

Peter Parnell: The settlement partly has come about because the reasons that the books were removed were never disclosed and were never given the public process that in Florida, even with their what's called the sunshine law must happen, school boards have to hear from the community and take the advice of the committees before voting on whether or not they will remove a book. In the case of Nassau County, none of that was done. They just disappeared, and they disappeared because a right-wing conservative group had a list of these 36 books and said, we want these books removed.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, what do you think of this other new children's book being written about your book getting pulled from the shelves? This is getting awfully meta.

Justin Richardson: We love this book. It's called Jacob's Missing Book. It's the most moving thing. There's a little girl who has two dads and is very upset about the book being removed, and it's Jacob's favorite book. So the children go out into the playground and enact the story, and they all try to hatch a little penguin of their own. They come back into class, and then Jacob goes home at night and asks, "Are the grown-ups going to put the book back?" And the grown-ups have to say, "You know, we really don't know." It's not resolved, but it's a beautiful and very true story.

Peter Parnell: I was born in 1963, I didn't have And Tango Makes Three, but I had Ferdinand the bull. I had a story about somebody like me, which was a bull who didn't want to play rough like the other boys, who just wanted to sit under the tree and smell the flowers quietly. I loved that book.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think it would have made a difference in your life if you'd never encountered Ferdinand the bull?

Peter Parnell: Oh, yes, that would have been harder. Fernand the bull saved my life when I was a kid. I had a third-grade teacher who loved the fact that I grew my hair down to my shoulders. That helped. Mrs. Sherry.

Brooke Gladstone: But Ferdinand was between two covers. You could spend time with him whenever you wanted.

Peter Parnell: He was there every night. Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, thank you both very much.

Justin Richardson: Thank you.

Peter Parnell: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell are the authors of the book And Tango Makes Three.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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