captioning sponsored by wnet >> hill: on this edition for sunday, january 3: the 117th congress formallyhe pandemic continueso make its presence known. jeff greenfield on what to expect this week in politics. >> happy birthday! >> hill: and, a look back to some of the stories we covered in 2020. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: and edgar wachenheim iii. the anderson family fund. bernard and denise schwartz. mi the cheryl and philitein family. rbarbara hope zucg. the leonard and norma klorfine

foundation. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow can help you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and invements. >> for 25 years, consumer cellular has been offering no-contract wireless plans, designed to help people do more of what ey like. our u.s.-based customer service team can help find a plan that fits you. to learn more, visit w.wwnsumercellular.tv. additional support has been ed provy: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. iband by conions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> hill: good evening, and thank you for joining us. on the day that the 117th the "washington poblishednvened, audio excerpts of a call between president donald trump and the

georgia secretary of state brad ffensperger, in which mr. trump is heard asking raffensperger to "find" enoug votes to overturn his november 3 defeat. >> the people of georgia are e gry, the people in untry are angry. and there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you've recalculated. >> well, mr. president, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong. >> hill: according to the secretaryf state's recount, president-elect j biden won georgia by 11,779 vot. >> i just want to find 11,780 voteswhh is one more than we have. because we won the state. >> hill: several times during e call, the president repeated the false claim that he won. as of late this afternoon, the white house and the trump campan d not commented on the call. raffensperger's office declined to coe mment.

elease of the recording came as congress was in the midst of proceedings unlike any seen before-- and for the first time in history, on a sunday. >> the clerk will call the names of the next pair. >> mr. m >> hill: wearing masks and following covid-19 social distancing protocole president mike pence swore in newly elected and relected senators in pairs. >> the house will come to order. >> hill: in the house of >> late this afternoon the house elected democrat nancy pelosier the spe and republican kevin mccarthy as to discuss e congressional swearing-in, georgia's senate run-off and the upcoming electoral vote, i'm joined by newshour weekend special correspondent jeff greenfield from santa barbara, california. >> jeff, thank you for joining us, i want to begin withhis "washington post-"obtained recording of the president's call to the georgia secretary of

state. what do you make of this? of i really feel this left the gravitationaarth. this hour-long phone call of the president ultimately begd, cajoled and threatened the secretary of state to show come up with the 12,000 votes thatim would givehe state of georgia. he suggested maybe you could recalculate. you could be in serious political trouble or even iminal trouble. it is really, i think even to people who in the past have tended to brush off some of ump's more unconventional comebts, this one is realbi rre. and it really has an impact because on tuesday there are two senate races, runoffs that will decide whether the democrats or republicans take the senate and trump has been saying the election is invalid. he has been ranting more about his ection than the two republicans. he is supposed to be in georgia

monday in the rural area to try to chin up the vote and i think a lot of republicans worry that if he spends more time talking about the invalid election, may de press turnout. and i can't emphasize how critical this gegia election, we've never seen anything like this, with twoac senates will decide whether or not, for instance, mitch mcconnell stays at majority leader, will he essentially veto power over president-elect biden. so you know, we live in a kd of alternate universe forome months about this election. this is justhe latest chapter. >> jeff, this is an awkward moment for republicans. the party leader is criticizing the voting system while sayin trump is to return these incumbents to washington. >> sure aloofemocrats are having trump sayte-- if you are ing us the vote force trump were invalid, how did you get here, how shou we count your

votes. and that is part of what we are going to be seeing on wednesday. when the congress counts these can you believe what is goingto on. >> so what is the likely conseqnce of this challenge c the wednesday? >> well, traditionally this is a ceremonial event, you know. vice president opening theof the envelopes of each state and saying here are the electoral votes, in the past you have had a symbolic allenge or two. this time you have got dozens of republican house members and least 12 republican senators who mean to challenge the results from the six key states. senator cruz sayse wants-- it is not going to work. because unless both houses of congress reject the votes they are counted. and the democrs have the house and there are plenty of republicans who will go along. tbut what itls you the degree to which trump has succeeded in a, convincing his party that the

election was rigged, and b, persuading or perhaps intimidating huge numbers of elected republican officials to stand up and say we want to see about fraud even though there is absolutely no evidence of any fraud as the secretary of state kept trying to convince trump on in the phone call it isnother example of what i think is going to be a poisoned political atmosphere when joe biden takes office.'m >> jeff,urious, what does this por tend, if the president has this kind of influence on senators and representatives and he's also calling protestors to d.c. to overturn election results on wednesday, beyond this week, what does this por tend if anything on trump's influence and control and direction of the republican party? >> well, it's two things the extent of his influence is so great that you hae a sitting congress, into that is infect calling for violence to protect the vote, a lot of trump media let's go to washington,

let's block aid the capitol, let's make sure they can't vote. and then down the road i think what you are going to see is all the republan presidential wan a about shall-- wannabees, te cruz, marco rubio, josh hawley, are kind of imprisoned. they can't run against trump as long as trump is a potential 2024 nominee because theyas they used to say, they tied their trough to trump, they are willinto abandon pretty of all the norms of a normal political process tohow i'm for trump and more prtrump than nibes. and now they are trapped into standing with him unless they decide maybe i won't, i will go back twhat i said at the beginning. i have been watching politics a pretty long time and i have never seen anything remotably-- remotely like this. it is not an encouraging notion to biden's belief that once i'm

elect and in office, we will rahave a new of cooperation. the signs of that are to be, to put it mildly, minimal. >> jeff greenfield for us tonight from santa barbara, california, thank you, jeff. >> thanks for having me. and or or less hapy new year. >> hill:ovid-19 and complications from these have now claimed the lives of more than 350,000 people in the the staggering loss of life is the highest in the world and confirmed cases of coronavirus fections are predicted t surge in the coming weeks. this morning, dr. anthony fauci, the nation's leadingnfectious disease expert, said he did not expect the death toll to get this high: >> to have 300,000 cases in a given day, and between 2,000 and 3,000 deaths per day, it's just terrible.i mean, it is-- i mean, theris no running away from the numbers, martha. it's something that we've absolutely got to grasp and get arms around and turn that inflection down by very

intensive adherence to the public health measures, uniformly throughout the cntry with no exceptions. >> hill: earlier, president trump took to twitter to try again to cast doubt on the c.d.c.'s official covid-19 count of cases and tit death toll, g "the number of cases and deaths is far exagge" mr. trump's own surgeon general, dr. jerome adams, said he does not doubt the c.d.c. n. >> is the death toll real? is the death toll re a? 350,000 dericans, is that real, is that an actual number, or does e c.d.c. have a bogus way that, when in doubt call it bogus the, the president claims? ec>> from a health perve, i have no reason to doubt those nuders and i think people n to be very aware it's not about the deaths as we talked about earlier, but t hospitalizations and the capacity these cases are having >> hill: hospitalizations due to covid-19 in the u.s. are near record highs, at more than 123,00- a number expected to rise apeople return from holiday travel.

drfauci said there's good news on the vaccination roll out. in the past 72 hours, about 1.5 million vaccine doses have been distributed-- a faster ra than that of the previous weeks. >> hill: for a look ahead to the georgia senate run-offs and the latest national and international news, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. >> hill: we've been looking back at some of the stories from 2020 with our team of producers and reporters here at newshour weekend. hari sreenivasan spoke with christopher booker about some of the cstories ered in what to be an out-of-the- ordinary year. s eenivasan: chris, in some ways, it's almost like dog years, it seems so long ago when you went out to new rhelle, new york, where one of the firsr clusters ofavirus occurred. >> reporter: that right. we went out-- it was mah 14 that the piece ran, which was a saturday, and this was the very

first day that new york state had opened a mobile teing site. and, at that time, they had tested 200 people and they were estimating that they were going to be able to test 500 people the next day with the hopes of being able to test 6,000 peopl a day. and just yesterday, i just lookedyo, ne tested almost 250,000 people. just-- at the time was so was much uncertainty because we were still figuring out what the effects of this virus were going to be on our society. >>eporter: that's right, and new rochelle was the first community to go into essentially a containment zone, and what's interesting is the mayor at the time said, "listen, this isn't a quantine. this doesn't mean that people can't come and go into new rochelle, but it's essentially in an effort to contain the virus." and what's amazing is the people we spoke to at the time, no one was wearing a mask. no oneeally knew what was to come. we went and spoke with a small little rtaant and the restaurant owner was saying, "yeah, business is way down." i actually just called them

today to see if they were still in baniness. sure enough, they're still doing takeout. one of the haunting aspects from that new rochelle repothat during our two way, we reported w e very first death in neyork state. >is> sreenivasan: cwe have any idea how the virus is spreading in new york? >> reporter: right now, what we know, and this will certainly change, is at there are over 500 confirmed cases in new york state, the majority of which are in new york cit and just this morning, new york state reported its first deatd an 82-year-man in new york city who had been suffering from emphysema did indeed die fro the coronavirus. >> sreenivasan: christopher booker joining us from new rochelle to thanks so much. >> porter: since that time, new york has had 36,000 deaths and climbing it's just unbelievable that in such a short amount of time, there's been such loss.ch >> sreenivasans, you were one of the people that we sent out, along with mori rothman, to cover some of the protests in the wake of gege floyd's deh. >> i have to do something. i can't just stay home and pretend like this isn't hpening. hopefully, this brings us cioloser, stops thence,

especially against people that look like myself and others. >> rerter: that was actually my very first time out reporting since the pandemic began. it was one of those moments that felt too big. it was clearly, there had-- something had changed and it felt very important that we needed to be there and bear witness and to present what the situation was like on the ground. ad seen images of violen and destruction throughout the country, but that's not what we saw. we saw a very civil, socially disnttanced, for all inand purposes, protest, you know, at a moment when the country really was grappling with-- obviously the pandemic, but a reckoning of our, of racism and social injustice that we still don't necessarily understand what will be the outcome of. >> black livematter! black lives matter! >> sreenivasan: and you did have a chance to do some pieces that got us off of those two big stociries, esly around music. >> reporter: yes. you know, our scole editorial

dule went out the window in march. we had a number of pieces already filmed and plans to do other things but, like everyone else in the world, we changed directions. but we did start to come back to these in the summertime. so we did start to venture out a little bit, producing a few music and arts eces here and there, including with photographer ethan russell. he actually took many of the final photographs of the beatles when they were still a band. there was also a piece with john densmore, the drummer from the doors, who's written a book about creativity, and chris frantz, the -founder and drummer from talking heads about his new book, "remain in love." ( applause )>> 'd like to thank the rock and roll hall of fame for givhag this band y ending. >> reporter: how wa ethat a happying and why? >> well, we hadn't perfmed ertogeor something like 1 w8 years whdid that and, and so, there was that whole pt eriod of like, s wondering why, you know? was it something i said? ( laughs )

♪ ♪ >> reporter: what i really appreciate speaking wthese people about is obvioly they've had remarkable success in the artistic and musical world, but what's so fascinating is so many of these people, their success was short. it was a finite period when you look at their whole life. and now, as they look back, it really provides insight into hov wea full, balanced life. and just to take this a little further, i think that's kind of what we're all going through. obviously, we're not all rock stars and musicians, but all of us in this past nine months have verythingevaluate that we know and everything that we do and how we balance our life and our profession and our existence, and i think it's really kind of endearing to hear thleis from pehat are of note and that we all kind of collective♪ celebrate. ♪ >> sreenivasan: so, chris, you are sitting outside, real t a virtual background. what's it been like doing all of

this work remotely? >> porter: well, i know i'm umck of my living room, and i ass that viewers are sick of my living room. so, i decided for this i would i would sit outside. working remotely has been interesting because at first it was a novelty. we wipere able to kind of across the country very easily. we could interview people, multipeplle in multiple locations throughout the day and almost kind of tickled by how easy this was. now, nine months l, i'm a litttired of it. i miss the human-to-human contact, and in-person conversation. my lifoving room isfull disclosure, is a total disaster now because my kids are in there so, i'm trying to be qunt and sit outsi, but really it's a reflection of own lazess at working from home. >> srsaeeni all right, chris >> hill: we continue with our look back on the stories from 2020 with producer mori rothman. >> sreenivasan: mori, in the news business, there's always what we think the story is, and thsten what thy turns out to be. this year, we were planning on coverithng one big story, an changed. >> reporter: yeah.

i meanye, we came into thi fully planning that we're going to cover the presidential election, kind of figuring out what states we were going to hit, possibly even a road trip. obviously, a lot of tngs changed in march through the coronavirus and then later, through black lives matter. those enmad up being the r stories. but what was interesting about those was that those became the kind of vehicles to which people thought about thelection and began partipating maybe even more in our democracy. and for us as reporters our rules changed a little bit as well. you know, usually you and i are traveling somewhere around the u.s. covueering an ihat people may not have heard about, or somewhere in another country talking about an issue that relates back to something back me. this year, i could cover protests g toing on do block and might see a neighbor carrying a sign or we hear the rens outside our homes as ambulances wentrro hospitals inpeople, possibly coronavirus. and so the story is right outside. and, you know, i think that as a result of the stosies being so to home, some of our

reporting became more personal. >> sreenivasan: so, remind people, one of the places that we took t show on the road this year was pennsylvania. we were in bethlehem. why? >> reporter: yeah, we went to bethlehem, which is thert lace of bethlehem steel, because we wanted to cover the election in some way still. pennsylvania is etty close to new york and northeast pennsylvania, wh, e bethlehem a swing district. we talked to a lot of people about ece on and how they were feeling, and one of the main themes that emerged was ple were feeli frustrated with what was happening with the coronavirus, and they diwh't really know re to place that frustration. some people placed it with staelte leaders andthat the lockdown was overly harsh and was hurting their business. othblered president trump for the lack of what they thought was a coordinated plan to stop the spread of the coronavirus. beyo, nd the coronavirople still cared about the major issues-- economics, healthcare, anespecially in a place like bethlehem that has seen some hard times before when the steel plant closed in the '90s, people still really care about what's going on with their wallets. and what weound was that while

a lot of president trump's speeches in areas like bethlehem, harrisburg, other places, talked about the return of heavy indtry and hearken ck to the old steel day. the region had really moved on. you know, in the lehigh valley, where wnge did a lot of repor there is a new economy that has to do with e-commerce, biotech, meds and eds. >> sreenivasan: you and i worked on a story for a special, an upda on race and policing. remind our audienceohat that was ut, and maybe even what's happened since then. >> reporter: ye, so, you know, in the beginning of the summer, when the black lives matter protests were going on in almost every city in america, we decided s to docial on policing. and one of the issues that you and i foced on was facial cognition technology being used by police. the resame week that we that special, i.b.m., microsoft and amazon all put, you know, a sliding scale of restrictions on what they would do in terms of selling facial recognition to this has continued to be a major issue, as elected officials look

to answer the call that black livester protests put out wlaith actual legve action. there's a couple of bills in the senate that have been introduced curb the use of facialt would recognition by corporations and another that would look to stop facial recognition use in federal capacities. and it's an issue that is going to continue to be debated into 2021. you know, a couple cities-- portland, oregon, and madison, wisconsin, among others, passed bans on facial recognition. and recently massachusetts has been weighing a major police reform bill, and one of the sticking points is the use of facial recogtion. >> sreenivasan: all right, mori rothman, thanto for all youres this year. happy holidays. >> reporter: thanks so much. ppy holidays. >> hill: and finally, we hear from tom casciato on some of the stories worked on last year. >> sreenivasan: tom, as the pandemic s in, we started doing stories about how it was affecting busineales large and l, and you focused on a bookstore in portland. tell us about it. >> reporter: yeah, portland's my

hometown, and i think anybody who's been to portland or livnd in portnows how central powell's books is to the city. ital's hard toabout a store being a major cultural inhastitution, but ts exactly what powell's is. for decade the center of >> you know, when people come to visit portland, visiting f thel's is at the top list.you know, when you go to a city-- when you go to paris, you want to see the eiffel tower. you go to portland, you want to go to powell's bookstore. >> reporter: samiya bashir, a poet, and a profess at portland's reed college, says powell's is special for reader and for writers. each year powell's' 500-or-so readings draw an estimated 36,000 people-- big numbers in >> reporter: it became very scary when covid hit and it looked like powell's might cl se. they'll hanging on now. they've closed a couple of powell's locations in the city. they had one at portlans airport thatw closed. they had one devoted to books about home and gardening that is now closed. the main store is still open.

i talk oed to one portland the phone the other day who said it used to be that the biggest problem standing in line at powell's this time of year was the long line to check out. now that it's open with limited capacity, the biggest oblem is the long line just to get into the store. >> sreenivasan: your informal beat, in a way, is music. you were able to profile an australian singer. what drew you to courtney? >> repotnrter: co barnett is, i think, perhaps the greatest singer-songwriatr of her genn. i know that taylor swift fans won't ike hearing that. i'm also confident that taylor swift fans don't care what i think anyway. but she has such a cgemand of langsuch a great presence. we you aord kid? were you a kid who loved words, and playinwith words? >> yeah, i loved reading. >> report yer: we making up words then? you do make up words. >> have i words?p that many

i don't think i have. >> reporter: well, you used emphysema as a verb: to emphyseme?ha ♪ ms are shaky my knees are weak ♪ i can't seem to stand on my own two feet ♪ i'm breathing but i'm wheezing ♪ feel like i'm emphyseme-in' ♪ a funnel fiithlike weet-bix, and kerosene ♪ that's n. making that's just-- that's being eative. ()laughs >> reporter: yeah. >> ♪ i'd rather die than owe the hospital 'til i getpold ♪ >> rer: it just seemed like an ordinary profile of a singer. it was supposed to be on the air righ in the middle of march, right around the time you and i and everybody else left the office and went to work at home for these many months. and we waited weeks and weeks to t the piane on the air. finally, there was just so much covid news that was rightly taking up so much new space. we just decided to put it online. so, i fear that fewer people saw that tan i would have hoped. it does stream at poe.org, and it stream on youtube, and i hope maybe they will take a look

at it now online. ♪ ♪ ( cheers and applause ) >> hill: that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. for the latest news updates, visit pbs.org/newshour. i'm michael hill. thanks for watching. stay healthy, and have a good night. captioning spsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the anderson family fund. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein amily. barbara hope zuckerberg. t lnard and norma klorfine

foundation. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we can help you make the most ofow today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and investments. additional sport has been provided by: consumer cellular. and by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. you're watching pbs.

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