In mid-2018, when the QAnon conspiracy was still in its infancy and not yet a strong artery running through conservative America, Reply All host PJ Vogt asked his co-host Alex Goldman and boss Alex Blumberg to explain a strange string of tweets he found while snooping through Roseanne Barr’s favorites on Twitter. The tweets in question were written in a barrage of emoji and sentence fragments, but all involved a hashtag Vogt had been actively avoiding: #Qanon. In true Reply All fashion, Goldman brings everyone up to speed with what this conspiracy is, how it was birthed, and how it slowly drew the attention of the internet via 4chan. Today, the episode plays out as a slightly naive and dismissive glance at the dangerous conspiracists QAnon has rallied up, but taken alongside the show’s 2020 follow-up episode,“Country Of Liars”—which goes deep down into the rabbit hole to uncover Q’s true identity—it’s the perfect companion that shows two sides of the conspiratorial coin: one side a laughable internet theory crafted by offensive nerds, and the other reckoning with the result of that theory catching on like wildfire. [Kevin Cortez]
Debuting way back in the fall of 2016, this spicy pop culture podcast hosted by New York Times writers of color Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris has been around just as long as this wretched administration. During that time, Wortham and Morris have done many episodes where they chopped it up about the downright dysfunctional state of the country ever since Trump got into the White House, and this one from May 2017 is most notable for the way it breaks down how the situation is partially television’s fault. They invite Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning TV critic for The New Yorker, to the studio to discuss how Trump’s knack for being a savvy, showboating asshole (which helped him become a reality TV superstar on The Apprentice) led to his political ascension. Nussbaum even brings up the possibility that TV viewers’ increasing love for kickass antiheroes made many of them go to the polls and vote for someone they thought of as a real-life Tony Soprano. In the end, all we got was another Ralphie Cifaretto. [Craig D. Lindsey]
At its best, news journalism is considered “objective.” Journalists are expected to eschew their perspective, the lens through which they see the facts—but is that even possible? If it is, does it positively impact journalism as much as we think it does? On this 2020 episode of WAMU’s 1A, panelists Ricardo Sandoval-Palos of PBS, Morgan Givens of 1A (who has since left WAMU for reasons related to so-called objectivity), and Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times beg to differ. They aren’t saying that bias shouldn’t be moved through consciously and critically when reporting on the news. Instead, they make the argument that bias is assumed with inequity, and that one’s closeness to an issue can often result in more informed coverage, rather than contributing to inaccuracies. The clearest example here is Black journalists being turned down for their writing on the Black Lives Matter movement and other stories about racial injustice. And in 2021, this conversation has been renewed in the wake of white nationalists staging a failed coup, making this episode the perfect crash course on what “objective” journalism really means. [Wil Williams]
In 2018, news broke that Cambridge Analytica had secured the personal data of about 87 million Facebook users to assist in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. But an entire year prior, in 2017, WNYC’s Note To Self was already covering the unfolding scandal, speculating on just how bad the data theft was and how much of an impact it would have on Facebook users. Note To Self, now a Luminary exclusive, is a show about how technology affects our lives, but it’s always had a specific edge on talking data privacy. Between “Privacy Paradox,” a mini-series with a built-in challenge to increase your data security, and a harrowing interview with the creator of Facebook’s ad algorithm, Note To Self is a must-listen primer on why data privacy is crucial and how exposure can be wielded against users. “Deep-Dark-Data-Driven Politics” is an ominous listen that doesn’t get everything right; it was created with some understandable shreds of optimism that, of course, wound up undeserved. Listen in for a snapshot from the past, with some uncomfortably telling visions of where this story could have gone, and some shockingly accurate predictions about where it did go. [Wil Williams]
