John Dickerson: When the Media Helps Rewrite Reality

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have one Monday without Bill Kristol, because, well, I could not turn down this beautiful setting. For those of you on YouTube, we're at the Aspen Ideas Festival. So I searched for a suitable replacement among the global elite, the thought leaders, the Illuminati, we needed someone wise and dry.
And among all of the notables here, the only choice is, of course, the former host of CBS Daily News and the politics pod father himself, John Dickerson. And I hear you have a substack.

**John Dickerson** (0:40)
Oh, I do, I have a substack, like everyone. Like all humans now must have a substack. I think you're born with them. I have one.

**Tim Miller** (0:46)
That is nice. It's good to see you.

**John Dickerson** (0:47)
It's great to see you, Tim.

**Tim Miller** (0:49)
This is nice, doing this in Aspen.

**John Dickerson** (0:51)
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you were here last night, but what's gorgeous about the clear sky is that it's a clear sky because there are fires over in Utah that at the end of the day, everything looks, you know, is totally haze.

**Tim Miller** (1:03)
Yeah. When we got in yesterday morning, it was a little spooky. Yeah.

**John Dickerson** (1:07)
Blood red sun, it's a little ominous.

**Tim Miller** (1:09)
All right. We've got a bunch to get to. We'll do a little media talk at the end.
Is there any media news that you think you might be worth?

**John Dickerson** (1:15)
There is huge, mountainous media news. I am in the flatlands of my ability to weigh in on it. But I'll enjoy ducking your questions.

**Tim Miller** (1:24)
Well, I don't know about that. We'll see. My questions might be more fun than you think. We'll have to talk about Iran first.
I had to write this down because since Friday's podcast, here's what happened. Can I run you through the events? Iran launched a drone offensive on ships in the Strait. They were mad that Oman had opened an alternate lane for ships. They said that that other route violates the MOU. The US retaliated. We bombed Iran again.
Iran then hit back against eight US military targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Those were countries that you might remember on Marco's All is Well trip just last week. We retaliate again. Then Trump threatens Iran with annihilation again. Iran then says, now we're going to go ahead and get a nuke then. Then our friend at Axios, Brock Rivett, reports, well, we've actually now agreed to stop escalating right before the markets open and we plan to meet again this week. Talks Tuesday in Doha.
Pro the New York Times, Iran has not yet confirmed they're sending reps. So we'll see. So that's the state of affairs on our ceasefire.

**John Dickerson** (2:18)
Yeah, it feels like this is the state of affairs every Friday, weekend and Monday.

**Tim Miller** (2:22)
Because we get more.

**John Dickerson** (2:23)
One of the Substack things I do is a compilation of the week's news. And every Friday I end it and I think, oh, there's there's, you know, a breakthrough at the end of Friday. The president was often saying, like, we're ready to sign a deal. And I think, oh, you know, I haven't really accounted for that. But then it washes away by the time you get to Monday. So this feels like a similar thing. I mean, the fact is that all of the issues, the key issues are so up in the air, they can't even get to the other issues that are up in the air.
And that shipping lane, you know, if you look at the number of ships that are still able to get through, it's tiny compared to the 130 a day that we're going through. I think it's over a couple of days they had 78 And they've got to go through that narrow non-mined lane. Even in the best of terms, and we should talk about what that even looks like, this is just super slow going, half a foot forward, two steps back.

**Tim Miller** (3:12)
And the two things that just stand out on this, which you will note, are not, were not, neither of these things were part of the reason why we went into the war as particular holdups here as Lebanon. Item number one of the MOU mentioned Lebanon three times. So I think Iran was pretty clear about what was important to them. So that makes things challenging when that's out of our hands. And then when it comes to the straight, it seems that there is like maybe the intentional miscommunication. I don't know what a miscommunication is about like what an open straight is. Right. And I think that seems like Trump is at least pretending like or acting like an open straight means ships can just go through. And Iran means no, an open straight means that you get our approval, you send in a TPS report, like we let you know if you can come through and that's open.