Episodes
Monday Sep 27, 2021
Monday Sep 27, 2021
How the courts have undermined a foundational tenant of their very existence tells us a lot about how we got where we are today. Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law expands on this idea in Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.
Saturday Sep 18, 2021
Saturday Sep 18, 2021
Is this just a temporary blip due to COVID and the pandemic, or has global entertainment undergone a tectonic shift that both reflects and might reshape our culture? We’re going to talk about this with Scott Roxborough.
Tuesday Sep 14, 2021
The News About the News: A conversation with Martha Minow
Tuesday Sep 14, 2021
Tuesday Sep 14, 2021
For local news, however, the story is different. For what’s happening in your neighborhood, your school board, your city council, is a very different story. Thousands of local newspapers and local radio stations have shut down. The economics of the enterprise has proven to be unsustainable, and even large regional papers in places like LA, Chicago, and Miami have proven to be problematic. While many of the best of these papers have been stripped and plundered by hedge funds, let’s also remember that many were acquired by the hedge funds out of bankruptcy.
All of this begs the question as to whether our political, cultural, and social divide stems from the top as is assumed, or whether the hollowing out of news in our communities, something that should be bringing us together, is at the heart of what’s wrong? If so, does the government have a role to play in fixing that effort? Is the problem with the product, with the public, or as it is often so easy to do, should we just blame social media? Understanding this is the work that Martha Minow takes on in Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.
Saturday Sep 04, 2021
The Myth of ”Nobody Saw it Coming”
Saturday Sep 04, 2021
Saturday Sep 04, 2021
We are certainly, because of climate change, complexity and complacency, going to be experiencing more such events, we had better become much better at disaster preparedness.
If we know these disaster events are coming, how can we get better at dealing with the consequences? Fire season is yet to reach its peak this year, hurricanes are starting early and we know that more infrastructure and buildings will collapse.
Therefore, the area of disaster management should be one of our number one priority, just as it has been for my guest Dr. Samantha Montano, the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis
Tuesday Aug 31, 2021
Tuesday Aug 31, 2021
A recent study by the American Press Association reveals that not all Americans universally embrace core journalistic values, and that the trust crisis might best be understood through people’s moral values even more than their politics.
When journalists say they are” just doing their jobs,” the problem is many people harbor doubts about what that job should be.
Couple this with an ever changing media landscape driven by economics, the political bifurcation of news via the long tail of the internet, the news/entertainment nexus, celebrity culture, and now cancel culture, and it makes for an environment that has very little to do with getting at the truth. Maybe democracy dies not in darkness, but in the chaos of competing truths.
This is the world that long time journalist Robert M. Smith explores in Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent.