Scene On Radio

Ever thought about whether America's overwhelmingly corporate, for-profit news system is working as it should? It didn't have to be this way. In the 20th century, reformers fought for a more democratic and more accountable news media in the United States. They won victories, including the creation of the nation's public broadcasting system. What happened next? 

By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with John Lowery, Dan Schiller, Victor Pickard, and Mark Lloyd. 

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.  

The early history of the news in Europe and the U.S. offers surprising lessons about the best traditions of journalism, and about the news we need in our own time of crisis. 

By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Pascal Verhoest, Rachael King, Joseph Adelman, and Victor Pickard. 

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.  

For more on the relationship between democracy and journalism in the U.S., see Victor Pickard's book, Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society.

Scene on Radio requests and receives an independent analysis of its own journalistic biases. We then return the favor, examining the examiner. The exercise leads to fresh insights into the muddled ways people often think about bias.

By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interview with Vanessa Otero.

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.  

Link to the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart

For generations, many on the political right have claimed that major news media in the U.S. have a pronounced liberal bias. Is it true? And why does it matter? We take a fresh look. 

By John Biewen with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Michael Massing, Peter Beinart, and William Youmans. 

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.  

Many people know that the journalism industry is struggling financially, especially at the local level. But the disastrous depths of that crisis, and its impact on communities and American democracy, are not as well understood. We visit a news desert in southeastern North Carolina. 

By John Biewen with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews: Penny Muse Abernathy, Mark DeLap, Angelica Das, and others. 

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, Goodnight Lucas, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.  

The Local Journalism Index map discussed in the episode, from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. 

Americans have access to a flood of news, and yet we're in a deep information crisis. What's really wrong with the news media? Is it what we think it is? And what about news consumers? Most of us don't trust the media, but can we trust ourselves? 

By John Biewen with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews: Ethan Jordan, Dannagal Young, and others. 

Story editor: Diane Hodson. Assistant Producer, Arlene Arevalo. Fact-checking by Anna Pujol Mazzini. Music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Michelle Osis, Lili Haydn, Alex Weston, James Nathan Jones, Goodnight Lucas, and Jason Hill. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music. 

For more info, and transcripts, go to sceneonradio.org.

Everybody's mad at the media. And Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. A well informed citizenry we are not.

In Scene on Radio's 8th season, producer and host John Biewen and returning co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika will examine the deep crises facing American journalism, how things got this way, and what it might mean to build a better and more democratic news and information system. 

From the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and PRX. Find more, including episode transcripts, at SceneonRadio.org.

We're happy to share this episode from award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt, co-host of Scene on Radio's 5th season: The Repair. Amy returns with a new season of Drilled, her podcast about the deception, disinformation, and power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach. Drilled: Carbon Cowboys exposes how Midwest Republican corn ethanol mogul Bruce Rastetter sold "sustainable aviation fuel" to world leaders, from North Dakota to Brazil. Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts and hear episodes early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.  

We are sharing a special episode from Master Plan, the award-winning investigative series from our friends at The Lever. Its new season, The Kingmakers, traces the decades-long effort to manufacture an all-powerful presidency. Host David Sirota and his team of journalists investigate the rise of a once-fringe legal idea that has hijacked the machinery of American government.

In this episode, you’ll go back more than 50 years, to a moment when Americans feared the rise of an “imperial presidency.” Richard Nixon’s attempts to seize the power of the purse and secretly expand the Vietnam War sparked a constitutional crisis, and a backlash, and set a template for the imperial presidency.

To hear the rest of season two, follow Master Plan on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. 

We're sharing this guest episode from the podcast More Muslim. Reporter Aina Khan reports on the oldest Muslim community in Cape Town, South Africa -- the Cape Malay community. The community, with roots in Indonesia, has survived through centuries of colonialism and oppression, but now faces a new crisis: gentrification. 

To find out more about More Muslim: https://moremuslim.org/

A guest episode from the podcast Proxy: Nicole is an organizer who's good at channeling her anger. The trouble is she can't always downshift -- or even allow herself to feel sad about the problems she's fighting against. That doesn't seem healthy. Maybe it'll help if Nicole can talk with someone who's been there -- years before, in a movement Nicole idolizes. With Proxy host Yowei Shaw.  

Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. After a visit to his hometown, Mankato, Minnesota -- the subject of the Scene on Radio episode, "Little War on the Prairie" -- John reflects on the changes there and America's latest assault on history. 

Music by goodnight, Lucas. 

To read see the Keeping ScOR newsletter archive or subscribe to receive it, go here: https://buttondown.com/KeepingScOR#subscribe-form

We're sharing an episode from another podcast that asks big questions about who we are and how we got here: The Alabama Murders, a new series by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. Entangled in an affair with a parishioner, a Northwest Alabama minister made a devastating choice. Eventually, the consequences led to the center of a hot national debate about who should be allowed to live, who should die, and how the state should kill them. Malcolm asks: why, in our efforts to alleviate suffering, do we so often make it worse? 

A rebroadcast of a Scene on Radio episode, eighty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  

The word “Hiroshima” may bring to mind a black-and-white image of a mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that it’s an actual city with a million people and a popular baseball team. What did the cataclysm of 1945 mean in the place where it happened, to the people who lived through it? John Biewen went to Hiroshima and interviewed A-bomb survivors in 1995. 

“Voices of Hiroshima” is a production of Minnesota Public Radio, from American Public Media.

A bonus episode from the Lever Time podcast: Their latest, exploring the decision by CBS to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the wider context for that move -- Donald Trump's effort to crush dissent through lawsuits and other attacks on media corporations. With host David Sirota and his guest, New York Times journalist David Enrich.  

The fifth and final installment in our between-seasons miniseries, "a few of my favorite things," chosen by host John Biewen -- selections from outstanding podcast series. This project, led by host and senior producer Ruxandra Guidi and editor Rekha Murthy, is called Happy Forgetting. The episode we're sharing, "Finding the Wisdom," by producer Adreanna Rodriguez, explores themes of care, healing -- and history -- among Indigenous and Mexican women in California and Mexico. 

Find the rest of the Happy Forgetting series here: https://happyforgetting.com/

Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Reflections on the Trump Administration's attempt to wrangle control of the national story and how it's told. Will this attack on factual history succeed?  

Music by goodnight, Lucas. 

To read see the Keeping ScOR newsletter archive or subscribe to receive it, go here: https://buttondown.com/KeepingScOR#subscribe-form

The video of David Joy referred to in the episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0g_6uidwcE

The fourth installment in our between-seasons miniseries, "a few of my favorite things," chosen by host John Biewen -- selections from exceptional podcast series. From CBC Podcasts and the L.A. Times, this is Season 1, Episode 5 of The Outlaw Ocean, reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina. The episode, titled "Waves of Extraction," uncovers brutal exploitation of sea life -- and of people. It's a powerful complement to Scene on Radio's Capitalism season. 

To listen to more Outlaw Ocean: https://link.mgln.ai/bW26Ku

The third installment in our between-seasons miniseries, "a few of my favorite things," chosen by host John Biewen -- selections from exceptional podcast series. From producer Jess Shane and Radiotopia Presents, this is Episode 1 of "Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative," an innovative exploration of the process and the ethics of narrative documentary storytelling. 

The second in a between-seasons miniseries, "a few of my favorite things," chosen by host John Biewen: Episode 1 of The Copernic Affair, from the Canadaland network. The series tells the story of a sociology professor living near Ottawa who finds himself accused of a decades-old bombing attack against a synagogue in Paris. Did Hassan Diab do it? By reporters Dana Ballout and Alex Atack.