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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.
When E. coli made its way into a California spinach field, it brought down a vegetable that has enjoyed a remarkable run in the popular imagination. But how did the vegetable acquire its reputation as the leafy-green-that-could? Brooke speaks with food writer Michael Pollan about the spinach industry’s successes – and failures – in creating the super food.
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Now, with bellicosity about Iran in the Beltway air, Ellsberg is renewing his call for insiders to leak. He and Brooke discuss the tension between government employees’ contract to keep secrets and their oath to uphold the Constitution.
When E. coli made its way into a California spinach field, it brought down a vegetable that has enjoyed a remarkable run in the popular imagination. But how did the vegetable acquire its reputation as the leafy-green-that-could? Brooke speaks with food writer Michael Pollan about the spinach industry’s successes – and failures – in creating the super food.
In September 1966, Gene Roddenberry dispatched the crew of the starship Enterprise on its maiden voyage through space and time and into the American living room. It was an inauspicious start, but forty years later the Star Trek universe is still expanding. Brooke explores the various television incarnations of the franchise and the infinitely powerful engine behind it all: the fan.
Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has spent half a billion dollars to beam anti-Castro propaganda into the homes of Cubans via Radio and TV Martí. Earlier this year, Congress boosted the stations’ budget, and in the midst of Fidel’s convalescence, the stations have increased their programming hours. All this despite the fact that hardly anybody in Cuba is tuning in. Bob talks to Penn State communications professor John Nichols about the broadcasting boondoggle.
What does George W. Bush have in common with John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson? Each is a wartime president who took measures to quell dissent at home in the name of an American victory. And all of them, according to Geoffrey R. Stone’s book Perilous Times, went too far. Stone and Bob discuss what happens to the First Amendment when the nation is at war.
