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In the 1950s, the mainstream American press had very little experience covering segregation and its impacts. In a new book, The Race Beat, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff tell the story of how the civil rights struggle gradually made its way onto the front pages.
In the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s death, U.S. media are debating how the dictator should be remembered. The National Security Archive’s Peter Kornbluh discusses an especially sinister chapter in Pinochet's dealings with his own country's media.
On November 10, 1898, a mob of white supremacists ransacked the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, and toppled its biracial government. 108 years later, The Charolotte Observer and Raleigh’s News & Observer are apologizing for their role in fomenting the violence. Duke historian Tim Tyson tells Bob how newspapers turned neighbor against neighbor and helped usher in Jim Crow.
In "Network," an anchorman erupts and calls on viewers to join him in the now iconic primal scream: "I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!" And in that, he reflected his creator, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. WNYC’s Sara Fishko offers this profile.
The name Henry R. Luce is firmly enshrined in the annals of American publishing. But few remember the legendary Time editor’s erstwhile partner, Briton Hadden. And it was Hadden, not Luce, who conceived of the idea not only for Time, but of the “newsmagazine” itself. Brooke talks to Isaiah Wilner, author of a new biography of the man Luce wiped off the face of history.
In 1965, Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An went to work for Time. He was a tireless writer, with an unerring sense for facts amidst the fog of war, and became an invaluable source of information for American readers. Turns out he was simultaneously an invaluable source of information for the North Vietnamese, moonlighting for more than 30 years as a spy. Thomas Bass profiled An last year in The New Yorker. He tells Bob about the spy who loved us.
The assault this week in Pennsylvania’s Amish country was the sixth deadly school shooting in as many weeks. Media commentators are pointing to the possibility of a copycat effect, but few are examining the media’s own complicity therein. School violence researcher Loren Coleman tells Bob that a little more restraint on the part of the media wouldn’t hurt.
Iva Toguri died this week, though you probably don’t recognize the name. She was commonly, and erroneously, known as Tokyo Rose, a propagandist broadcasting against the Allied side during WWII. An article in 1976 by then Tokyo Bureau chief Ron Yates of the Chicago Tribune uncovered the story of how the FBI framed her for treason. Yates recalls her saga with Bob.
