On The Media

For the first time in our history, a former U.S. president has been indicted. On this week’s On the Media, what Israel can teach us about when a nation’s leader runs afoul of the law. Plus, social media companies are back in the hot seat, facing serious legal threats at the local and national levels. 1. Yael Freidson [@YaelFreidson], legal correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on why the crisis in Israel reached a boiling point after Prime Minister Netanyahu's attempts to cut down systems of accountability. Listen. 2. Julia Bacha [@juliabacha], the director of the documentary film ‘Boycott’ and the creative director at Just Vision, a nonprofit media organization that creates content about Israel and Palestine, on how Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs was created to combat the boycott movement—first within borders, then overseas. Listen. 3. Avi Asher-Schapiro [@AASchapiro], tech reporter at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, on the surge of bills across the United States aiming to reduce the impac

In 2022 HBO picked up nearly forty Emmy awards — many of which went to The White Lotus. That year also happened to be the Home Box Office's 50th birthday. John Koblin co-wrote the book It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO with Felix Gillette. Last winter, guest host Ilya Marritz spoke to Koblin, who covers the television industry for The New York Times, about how the network came to be a critical darling, and HBO's fraught future under its new owner, Discovery+.  This is a segment from our December 9, 2022 show, Still Watching?. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Highly politicized, partisan companies like Salem Media Group have a hold on the airwaves — and they don’t plan to give it up. This week, Senior Vice President of Salem Phil Boyce speaks candidly to reporter Katie Thornton about the personalities he handpicked to spread Salem’s message and about the company’s plans to expand into the media world off the airwaves. Peddling election denialism seems to be a solid business model — but is it legal?  This episode is an adaptation of our latest series, The Divided Dial. You can listen to the full series here.  The Divided Dial is reported and hosted by journalist and Fulbright Fellow Katie Thornton. You can follow her work on Instagram or on her website. The Divided Dial was edited by On the Media's executive producer, Katya Rogers. With production support from Max Balton and fact-checking by Tom Colligan, Sona Avakian, and Graham Hacia. Music and sound design by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Art by Michael Brennan. With support from the Fun

If you ask Democrats why the US invaded Iraq in 2003, many will say that President George W. Bush cynically lied about weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, some Republicans will say that President Bush meant well, but had been led astray by faulty intelligence.  As we pass the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, both of these narratives persist — and both distort the past, according to New York Times columnist Max Fisher. Fisher argues that the invasion was instead simply the natural unfolding of the neoconservative worldview. In this week's pod, we revisit his 2018 conversation with Brooke to unpack the hubris behind this worldview and examine how it grew from an esoteric, academic ideology into a force that still shapes American policies and minds today. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]

How did the right get their vice grip of the airwaves, all the while arguing that they were being silenced and censored by a liberal media? This week, we look at the early history of American radio to reveal that censorship of far-right and progressive voices alike was once common on radio. And reporter Katie Thornton explains how, in the post-war and Civil Rights period, the US government encouraged more diverse viewpoints on the airwaves — until it didn’t. Plus, the technological and legal changes that led to conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh taking over the airwaves.  This episode is an adaptation of our latest series, The Divided Dial. You can listen to the full series here.  The Divided Dial is reported and hosted by journalist and Fulbright Fellow Katie Thornton. You can follow her work on Instagram or on her website. The Divided Dial was edited by On the Media's executive producer, Katya Rogers. With production support from Max Balton and fact-checking by Tom Colligan, Sona Avakian, and

Iconic hip hop group De La Soul's music is finally available on streaming platforms, just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop. To say listeners are overjoyed is an understatement. Only a few days after their streaming debut, De La Soul's 1989 debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, soared to no. 5 on the UK album chart, even topping their original 1990 high of no. 13. For fans this was a long time coming. The hip hop group had a towering presence in the 80s and 90s, their playful ingenuity and eccentricity even inspired other greats like the Beastie Boys, Childish Gambino, OutKast, and the Pharcyde. But what kept De La Soul's tunes out of rotation for decades — and thus, largely out of the public imagination — was an infuriating entanglement of legal restrictions surrounding sampling, an art form where producers take snippets of songs and stitch them together to form sonic collages. For this week's pod extra, OTM Correspondent Micah Loewinger speaks to Dan Charnas, an associate arts professor at NYU

In 2016, Christian talk radio host Eric Metaxas begrudgingly encouraged his listeners to vote for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By 2020, he pledged his life to fighting the “stolen election” while talking with Trump on the air. Ahead of the midterm elections, Metaxas and many of his fellow talk radio hosts made sure the falsehood of massive 2020 election fraud was top of mind — on the airwaves and beyond. And while election-denying candidates didn't do as well as many on the right had hoped, at least 170 such candidates have been elected to state and national offices, some of whom will be in charge of future elections. This week, reporter Katie Thornton introduces us to the company whose hosts never backed down from the lies of the stolen 2020 election: Salem Media Group, the largest Christian, conservative multimedia company in the country – and perhaps the most influential media company you’ve never heard of. Thornton traces the company’s rise to power from its scrappy start in the 1970s to the

In March 2021, when President Joe Biden announced the nomination of Lina Khan to be a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, the decision was met with a rare kind of excitement for the otherwise sleepy agency. The excitement seemed bipartisan as 21 Republican senators voted to confirm the commissioner. Not long after, then 32-year-old Khan was promoted to chairperson of the agency, making her the youngest chair in the FTC's history. Since then the tone around Khan has changed dramatically, as Republican commissioners at the agency have pushed back against what they see as a radical agenda. For this week's pod OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger speaks with Emily Birnbaum, a technology and lobbying reporter for Bloomberg, about a growing anti-antitrust movement emerging in the press and in Washington and why Khan has become its main target.  On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebo

A billion dollar defamation lawsuit has given the public an unprecedented view into the inner workings of Fox News. On this week’s On the Media, how the network’s election falsehoods reveal the company’s commitment to profit over truth. Plus, the story of how historical fiction became the unexpected darling of the literary world. And, how a historian grapples with gaps in our historical record. 1. Andrew Prokop [@awprokop], senior politics correspondent at Vox, and David Folkenflik [@mjs_DC], media correspondent for NPR News, on the latest revelations in Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News. Listen. 2. OTM producer Eloise Blondiau [@eloiseblondiau] takes a deep dive into how historical fiction became a rich resource for reckoning with our past, feat: Alexander Manshel, assistant professor of English at McGill University [@xandermanshel], and novelitsts Alexander Chee [@alexanderchee] and Min Jin Lee [@minjinlee11]. Listen. 3. Tiya Miles [@TiyaMilesTAM], professor of history at Harvard University

Fox News is in the fight of its legal life right now. Dominion is suing Fox News for 1.6 billion dollars in damages over false claims that it helped rig the 2020 elections for President Biden. Dominion’s legal team draws a direct line from the heated rhetoric of Fox hosts to the January 6, 2021 protests that became a violent siege of the US Capitol. And that forms the basis of an entirely different defamation suit, filed roughly 10,000 miles away. This time, the suit was filed by Lachlan Murdoch against a small Australian paper for an opinion piece that implied the Murdochs had some responsibility in the events of the January 6 insurrection. Guest host David Folkenflik speaks with Lachlan Cartwright, the Editor at Large of the Daily Beast where he covers power, crime, celebrity and justice, to get a look into the lawsuits and what they mean for the future of the Fox empire.  This is a segment from our October 7th, 2022 program, So Sue Me. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donatin

The Supreme Court heard two cases this week that could upend Silicon Valley. On this week’s On The Media, a look at the fragile law holding the modern internet together. Plus, how a century-long PR campaign taught Americans to love the free market and loathe their own government.  1. Emily Birnbaum [@birnbaum_e], tech lobbying reporter with Bloomberg, Mark Joseph Stern [@mjs_DC], senior writer at Slate, and Emma Llanso [@ellanso], director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, on two cases argued in front of the Supreme Court this week and how they could impact the future of the internet. Listen. 2. Naomi Oreskes [@NaomiOreskes], professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author, with Erik M. Conway, of “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” on century-old PR campaign, conducted by big business, to imbue Americans with a quasi-religious belief in the free market. Listen. 3. China Miéville, a

This week we're airing an interview that Brooke did while on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She and her husband Fred Kaplan (author of the War Stories column in Slate), sat down with Mark Hannah, host of the podcast "None of the Above," produced by the Eurasia Group Foundation.  From the Crimean War of 1853 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year, journalists, reporters, and the media have shaped the public’s understanding of war. But do the stories we read and the photos we see provide an impartial picture of the wars they document? As Hannah explained in Foreign Policy, certain aspects of American war coverage—reliance on government sources and incentives to simplify geopolitics as battles between good and evil—have long compelled news organizations to tilt toward military action. This interview originally aired on May 18, 2022. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Face

1. Julia Rock [@jul1arock], reporter at the The Lever, and Allison Fisher [@citizenfisher], director of the Climate and Energy Program for Media Matters for America, on why the Ohio derailment was a foreseeable disaster and how dearth of early media coverage, which failed to hold parties accountable, left space for distrust. Listen. 2. Gönül Tol [@gonultol], the founding director of the Middle East Institute's Turkey program and author of "Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria," on the impact of government corruption on Turkey's death toll after this month's earthquake. Listen. 3. Natasha Hall [@NatashaHallDC], a senior fellow at the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on the ways politics have played into a delay in aid in Syria. Listen. 4. Keren Landman [@landmanspeaking], senior reporter covering public health and emerging infectious diseases at Vox, on the risks of bird flu and if we should be worried about another pandemic. Listen. Music:Fallen

YouTube is one of the biggest media companies in the world. In 2020, we uploaded 500 hours of footage to the site every minute. And on average we watched over 5 billion videos every day. It’s a broadcasting machine so complex, it would make Marshall McLuhan’s head explode. OTM Correspondent Micah Loewinger has been obsessed with YouTube since he was 13. Last fall he sat down with journalist Mark Bergen to discuss his new book, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. According to Bergen, the founders of the site originally envisioned something more akin to Tinder than homemade TV. This is a segment from our September 30, 2022 program, Still Loading…. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

It’s a bird, it’s a plane… no, it’s a spy balloon. On this week’s On the Media, how to grasp a news event that’s equal parts concerning and absurd. Plus, the hunt for who poisoned the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and re-reading classic Russian novels in the shadow of the Ukraine war. 1. Jon Allsop [@Jon_Allsop], freelance journalist and author of the Columbia Journalism Review's newsletter The Media Today, on how to understand polarizing reactions to the Chinese spy balloon. Listen. 2. Christo Grozev [@christogrozev], lead Russia investigator at Bellingcat, and Daniel Roher [@DanielRoher], director of the documentary "Navalny," on investigating, and filming, Alexei Navalny's search for the truth behind his own poisoning. Listen. 3. Elif Batuman [@BananaKarenina], novelist and staff writer at The New Yorker, on revisiting classic Russian literature in times of war. Listen. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show

Thirty-four years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” Khomeini declared blasphemous. It caused a worldwide uproar. Rushdie lived in hiding in London for a decade before moving to New York, where he began to let his guard down. “I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago and, and that the world moves on,” he tells David Remnick. “That’s what I had agreed with myself was the case. And then it wasn’t.” In August of last year, a man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie onstage before a public event, stabbing him about a dozen times. Rushdie barely survived. Now, in his first interview since the assassination attempt, Rushdie discusses the long shadow of the fatwa; his recovery from extensive injuries; and his writing. It was “just a piece of fortune, given what happened,” that Rushdie had finished work on a new novel, “Victory City,” weeks before the attack. The book is being pub

On this week’s On the Media, what the data says about how boys and men are struggling today. Plus, the history behind Ticketmaster’s dominance in the live music industry, and how Hollywood trust-busting in the 1930s and 1940s unleashed an era of indie films. 1. Richard Reeves [@RichardvReeves], a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and author of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, on the research that shows gender disparities growing in a surprising direction. Listen. 2. Moe Tkacik and Krista Brown [@moetkacik and @KristaKBrown], researchers at the American Economic Liberties Project, on how the grunge band Pearl Jam tried to take on Ticketmaster in the 1990s. Listen.  3. Peter Labuza [@labuzamovies], a film historian and researcher with the International Cinematographers Guild, on how a Supreme Court case broke up Hollywood's studio system and what this history can teach us about the present moment. Listen.  On the M

Former OTM producer Alana Casanova-Burgess is back with season 2 of her critically acclaimed podcast series, La Brega. This one is all about the music! For over a century, Puerto Rican musicians have been influential across the hemisphere. From the Harlem Hellfighters of WWI who helped develop jazz to the reggaetoneros who dominate today’s charts, Puerto Rican music is everywhere. We start the season with the island’s most celebrated composer Rafael Hernandez, who wrote beloved songs like “Lamento Borincano,” “Ahora Seremos Felices,” and “Perfume de Gardenias” – and one of the island’s unofficial anthems, “Preciosa.” It’s a love song written for Puerto Rico that praises the island’s beauty and, remarkably, also calls out the forces that oppress it. When Bad Bunny exploded onto the scene and became the most-streamed artist in the history of the world, it became undeniable that Puerto Rican lyrics – the poetry of what people sing about, the bregas in every chorus – resonate all over the hemisphere. In September

If millions of Americans have access to classified documents, can we really call them secrets? On this week's On the Media, a former Pentagon official explains how America’s bloated classification system came to be. Plus, a look at the stories we tell about Baby Boomers, and how our country might change after they’re gone. 1. Oona Hathaway [@oonahathaway], professor at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Pentagon, on the complicated nature of classified documents. Listen. 2. Noah Smith [@VildeHaya], contributing reporter for The Washington Post, on how a video game led to leaks of military documents. Listen.  3. Philip Bump [@pbump], national columnist at The Washington Post, on his latest book 'The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.' Listen.  4. Brian Lehrer [@BrianLehrer], host of WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, on the news events that defined generations. Listen.  Music: Passing Time by John RenbournAtlantic City by Randy NewmanEye Surgery by Thomas Ne

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency has cultivated its appeal as an organization shrouded in secrecy, engaged in cutting edge tech and no-holds-barred espionage in defense of the US. It’s an image that sells in Hollywood. The CIA also assisted in the making of some movies about some real life operations. But as the agency ages, it continues to strive to stay up to date. In 2022, when the CIA turned 75, the agency launched operation:podcast. Brooke speaks with David Shamus McCarthy, author of Selling the CIA: Public Relations and the Culture of Secrecy, about the latest venture for the agency and the CIA's long history of public relations initiatives.    On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].