Simon Marks is the president and chief correspondent of Feature Story News, which he set up almost 30 years ago.
FSN has 70 staff in 20 bureaux around the world and provides a lot of RNZ's international news coverage.
Marks joined Jesse Mulligan to discuss some of his favourite music, films and books.
He has been covering American politics from Washington since 1992, but since 2016, he says, life for a White House correspondent has changed dramatically.
Simon Marks Photo: Feature Story News
“I’ve lived in Washington DC since Bill Clinton was president, I moved here late in 1992 and the one thing that has been consistent, until Donald Trump came along ,was when the White House press corps was told by the White House the day is over they declare what’s known as a lid. That means it’s all over, the president has gone up to his family quarters and barring unforeseen news or developments we don’t think anything else is going to happen here.
“That’s not the way this presidency operates, because when this White House declares a lid, it just means the president has gone up to the family quarters and he’s going to watch cable television and he’s going to get angry, and he’s going to start tweeting.”
The news agenda, therefore, can change in an instant, Marks says.
"You leave the house and begin the commute to work thinking you had an idea of what story you were going to cover for the day and then halfway down Connecticut Avenue you glance at your phone and see the President has tweeted and completely thrown all the cards into the air, changed the entire nature of the day that lies ahead, and he’s probably going to do it again by the time you park the car and get to the office.”
In unprecedented times objectivity requires being honest with listeners about extraordinary events, he says.
“Objectivity requires you to look at a situation that you’re reporting, whether you’re reporting in Washington DC or Moscow or Baghdad or Caracas or any of the other parts of the world where I’ve worked as a reporter, and it requires you to be honest with the audience when strange, surprising unusual things are taking place.
"And what we’ve witnessed in this country since January of 2017, since Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office, is every single day precedent in Washington being broken. You have a president of the United States who actively seeks not to bring the country together in any meaningful sense but to keep it as divided as possible.
“A president of the United States who seeks to keep everyone constantly off guard, who is threatening to the fundamental checks and balances that lie at the very heart at America’s constitutional arrangements.
“He has waged war on the free and independent press, he has waged war on the judiciary, he has a completely scorched-earth policy when it comes to working with Democrats up on Capitol Hill, and some Republicans.”
Not pointing this out would be remiss, says Marks.
“If I go and quote the White House Press Secretary and simply call her the White House press secretary without pointing out that this latest, Kayleigh McEnany, her predecessor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, her predecessor Sean Spicer - unlike every one of their predecessors Republican and Democrat – regularly lie to the press from the White House podium.
“If I simply say Donald Trump’s press secretary says this that and the other, that’s implying there’s an equivalence with every single White House press secretary that has preceded them - there isn’t. These are cut from a completely different cloth.”
Marks says you would be mad to write of Trump’s chances in the November presidential election despite him lagging Joe Biden in the polls.
“Were the election held today I think it’s absolutely apparent that Joe Biden would waltz it. But the election isn’t being held today, and we all thought Hillary Clinton was going to waltz it three weeks before the 2016 election.
“This is a president of the United States who has torn up the rule books of American politics, he’s torn up the rule books of electoral politics, he’s torn up the rule book of the presidency. He seems to think he can turn things around.
“I’m not sure there are many Republicans in Washington who think he can turn things around, but you would be mad given the experience of 2016 ever to count him out.”
Music
Eartha Kitt - 'I’m Still Here'
“I got very into Eartha Kitt in the final days of her life.
“I think we probably saw her live 15 times in maybe the last four or five years of her life.
“This is her last live performance it was at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival just 8 months before she died at the age of 81 and the key thing to this song, which is a version of a Steven Sondheim classic, is that she slightly rewrote it, it absolutely reflects the crises and disasters that she experienced in her life right here in Washington at the hands particularly of President Lyndon Johnson.
Kitt offended Johnson’s wife Lady Bird at a White house luncheon in the late 1960s, Marks says
“She invited Eartha Kitt to a lunch at the White House and asked the various celebrities present what they thought of the Vietnam War and Eartha Kitt, in no uncertain terms, told her what she thought of the Vietnam war. And right after that Lyndon Johnson got her blacklisted from every club in this part of the United States.
“She headed off to Paris lived in exile for a while and carved out a new career there.”
Suzanne Vega – 'Gypsy'
She was such a huge star in the 1980's and she's still performing. She's currently working on an album that will be out in a few months’ time. I've been to see her perform more times than I can count.
Films
Big Night
One of the greatest food films ever made, says Marks.
"It's all about food - I'm a huge foodie. Two Italian brothers who moved to New York and brought their cuisine with them to the Jersey Shore but had to battle an American pizza spaghetti joint next door which was threatening to close them down. They plan a big feast to save it and it has the most incredible closing scene all shot on one camera. Just brilliant."
Good Night, and Good Luck
“It’s such an important film now because first of all it reminds you that there was a time in the United States when people like Edward R Murrow specialising in the primacy of serious down the line journalism had huge power because they had enormous audiences.”
SixtySix
“A biographical comedy drama about a young guy about to have his bar Mitzvah on a particularly significant night in the football calendar, the 1966 world cup final.”
Books
Washington Goes To War - David Brinkley
“This is the extraordinary story of what Washington went through in earlier times of insanity when American Fascists were holding rallies in Madison Square gardens in support of Hitler, men like Charles Lindbergh were backing America First insisting the US absolutely didn’t need to get involved in the Second World War.
“It reminds you that this place has come through madness before: the institutions held, some semblance of morality held, and normality eventually returned and the extremists didn’t get their way.”
The Apprentice - Greg Miller
“It is the jaw-dropping story of how the Russians trolled America throughout the 2016 presidential election with, I think it is fair to say, the active connivance of some of the largest social media platforms available to American voters.”
