Episode 1218
On the US postal crisis / Sarah Anderson
Aug 13 2020
If you look at what people sort of senior levels in the BBC have said about this, it's this idea that the BBC needs to be a calm space where people, when they surface from their echo chambers, can find reliable information and not feel like they're being attacked for their views. But the problem with that is, first of all, not all echo chambers are equal. Um, you know, social media increasingly has been colonized by far right ideas and rhetoric and propaganda. The other problem is that that only works if the kind of the impartial balanced space that you are providing as the alternative is actually doing the job it should do, which is to tell the truth. On a key issue of the day, the Gaza War, the BBC has not been able to kind of tell the truth about what's happening in as clear and focused away as as we need it to.
Daniel Trilling returns to discuss his new Equator piece, "Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco: How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart."
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Aug 6 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Reading the journals of others, I’m always struck by the way their strengths in one area make up for weaknesses in another. “I wasn’t interested in the majestic mountain ranges, but the old volumes in the village’s small library held me in their thrall.” Or, “My brother’s studies of the classic works of Linnaeus held no interest for me. I lived for the rush of wind as I schussed down the berg.” Or, “I never could get the hang of archery. No, for me, all joy burst forth from the sea as I landed a fish for supper.”
I could never do that memoir schtick. For one thing, I’m too dishonest. And for another, for every weakness of mine, instead of a strength in another area making up for it, there’s an additional weakness. For example, “I never liked other kids much, and they didn’t like me, but at least I had some science fiction to read, which bored me a little less, but was small consolation for a lonely life as child pariah.”
“Oh, blah blah blah, Jeffrey, who wants to listen to you read your creative writing assignment?” I had a boss who used to complain about people’s creative writing assignments being read on NPR. That was the only good thing about my boss. See, I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine. I picked up a shovel and I went to the mine. I hauled sixteen tons of number nine coal and the straw boss said, “Well bless my soul.”
That’s one thing I like to pretend. That I worked in the mines. That I had one fist of iron and the other of steel. The getting another day older and deeper in debt part, well, that I don’t have to imagine. That happened this morning, as it does every morning.
Yep, that’s why I voted for Trump. Because he said he was going to open the mines back up, bring coal back. Not cuz I’m racist. I mean, I am racist, but let’s be honest: Obama made it hard not to be racist, with his audacity to be black and president at the same time, presiding while black, defying the laws of white physics. And white people invented physics, and don’t you forget it. I mean, can you imagine a bunch of Black people achieving a fake moon landing? They’d never get that hoax off the ground. You know why? Because their Jesus doesn’t have German science on his side.
It’s... read more
Aug 5 2020
Jul 30 2020