Introducing The News from Scene on Radio

0:06Pushkin. Hi, listeners. you know that here on Revisionist History, we ask a lot of questions about the systems that have shaped our worldviews. While we're hard at work on our new season, we wanted to share another podcast that hits these points and asks big questions too. It's called Seen on Radio. And today I'm bringing you an episode from their aptly named new season, The News. Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that's true, America's lungs are in rough shape. Many Americans say they don't trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed.

0:47And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape. You can't separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. Hosted by John Bewin and now in its eighth season, the two-time Peabody Award-nominated show explores the roots of this crisis and asks, what's really wrong with the news? It's an eight-part series, so you'll want to check out the rest. But for now, here's episode one. Find Seed on Radio wherever you get podcasts. We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale.

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2:58All right, we're rolling. Good to see you. Thanks, sir. Here we go. Asian markets are mostly down today. Dangerous flash flooding ripping through parts of Milwaukee. This is a Fox News alert. This is our camera angle from our... Americans, if we want to be, are inundated with news from countless sources. From the New York Times, I'm Michael O 'Logh. Welcome back to One American News. And at the same time, we're stuck in a deep information crisis.

3:30It seems like we're helpless to solve our problems. It doesn't help that we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. What is happening right now in the world and what just happened to my friend Charlie Kirk is a battle of sheer evil versus goodness. To me, Fox News, they don't tell the whole story. I consider myself a centrist. I'm not particularly interested in MSNBC. You know what I'm saying is, don't do me. Don't try me today, Scotty. What I'm saying to you is that you know bias. Give a letter to the New York Post. Yo, ain't worth the paper, put it on. On big questions, a whole lot of us don't know what's true.

4:13Or we firmly believe and will fight you over things that are not true. Let's get rid of these voting machines. There's a half a dozen people, whether it's the House or Senate, Larry, that are up here as we speak, that did not get elected. It was all bogus. Just so people understand, wind and solar only work when there's wind and sun. We don't have technology to store the energy from wind and solar. I'm very disappointed in the mainstream media, and that's all I'll say about that. It's hard to imagine putting the toothpaste back in the tube. And maybe there's no golden age to return to anyway. So, now what?

5:00Change your eye. Hey, John. You know, our little montage could have just kept on going. I better stop now, because I feel like you're going to get us in trouble. You know what I mean? We got hundreds, thousands more news and news-ish outlets to choose from. We are awash in media. At least some of us are. But we don't seem very happy about it. Yeah, man. Everybody's mad at the news media. And if I'm being honest, yeah, like, I get it, right? Because if you look around, so much of what passes for news out there is, like, not that good. In fact, a lot of it is trash. We could easily find people who would disagree with you or me about which acts of journalism are the trashy ones.

5:47But no question about it, people are not happy. According to a Gallup poll in 2025, only 28 % of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in the major media. 70 % of us say we have not much or no confidence at all. That crisis of trust is a huge problem for American journalism. And it's not the only problem. A lot of people at first blush might not care about a media crisis, especially if they think the media sucks. But people need the media to live, right? They need to know what the status of their health care is. They need to know what the weather is. You know what I'm saying? And if there's going to be like an earthquake, they need to know if their rights are going to be violated.

6:33Right. I mean, it's just like something that you need to live your everyday lives. And also, how are you going to run a democracy where the people are supposed to govern ourselves if we don't have the information, if we don't have any shared sense of what's going on out there? That's more or less what Thomas Jefferson said, our good buddy. Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. That's good, because I only try to say things that Thomas Jefferson said. You know that about us. That's when I check the child. Every time before I say something, did Thomas Jefferson say this?

7:08Okay. Yeah, exactly. Right. We've picked on him a number of times on this show. Yeah, but I mean, look, he was right. You know what I'm saying? Being a slaveholder and a racist, that don't mean you're not right about anything. Right. But yeah, does anybody here think that the fourth estate, the news media as it's now constructed, is doing its job? that Americans are well enough informed to be trusted with our own government?

7:37From the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, welcome to Seen on Radio Season 8. I'm John B. Wynn, producer and host of the show. And I'm Chinjirai Kumanika, excited to come back as the co-host. Chinj, you are an award-winning podcast maker, Empire City on civil, unruly subjects, and seen on radio. You were my co-host for seasons two and four. And you're a professor at New York University's journalism school with a PhD in mass communication and critical media studies. So you're officially an expert on the thing we're here to explore this time around. Finally, you know what I'm saying?

8:19We're in my lane now, you know what I mean? You got the paper credentials this time. We're calling this season the news. We're going to take a hard, deep look at the troubled state of the news media in the U.S. and how that crisis relates to the other profound problems we seem unable or unwilling to solve. Another key thing we're going to do is sort through the various crises in our news and information system and the most common reasons people say they're pissed about the media. And we're going to ask, what's really wrong? Is it what we think it is? We will do some history along the way. We might challenge some mythology around journalistic tradition in America, and parts of U.S.

9:03history itself, for that matter, in ways that could also shed light on how our news media are failing us in this pivotal historical moment. And eventually, we're going to talk about solutions, what it might look like to unbreak the media. Because the thing is, this stuff really matters. The stakes are about as high as they could be. Media are so much a part of our lives that in a real sense we're made of media. The media helps to shape a society but also acts as a mirror, showing us who we are. And, John, like, I have a confession. We talk about people being angry at the news media. And, of course, folks are angry for wildly different reasons.

9:45But what I'm looking at so-called journalism that I see as completely false and dishonest, I find myself getting mad at the people who consume that news and believe it. Like, why are y 'all drinking the Kool-Aid? I know what you mean. And let's put a pin in that thought, as they say. Right now, before we go further, just a quick note for the grammar purists. Yes, you will hear us do that thing that a whole lot of people do now where we say the media as if it's one thing. Right. But the word is plural. And we'll never lose sight of the fact that the media is a tangled web, not a monolith. Here in episode one, let's start with us.

10:30Not Chandra and me, but us. Everybody who consumes news media. Whether you take in a ton of it or hardly any. What drives us as we try to inform ourselves? That's the question, you know what I'm saying? I mean, we talk so much about whether we can trust our news sources, but can we trust ourselves? I've spent some time over the last year or so in a corner of North Carolina talking with folks about a lot of things, their politics, what their lives are like, and about the news. And why did you go to that particular place? It's a good question. in one sense, we could have gone almost anywhere. But as folks will hear throughout the season, this patch of North Carolina, which is not far from where I live, is a compelling place to see some of the most pressing problems with our news media and some impressive efforts to respond and fill the gaping holes in the system.

11:30By the way, Chenj, you know, I think it's safe to say some of those news consumers you're frustrated with live in this place. All right, well, in that case, let me take a deep breath. All right, I can't wait to hear what you found. All your favorite country, way back to back to back. Today's country, the big 95.7 KML. We're going to refer to this part of North Carolina as the border belt. It's an old term used over the last century for a tobacco growing region that ran along both sides of the North and South Carolina border. A lot of the tobacco's gone. Now the farms grow corn and soybeans and other crops.

12:14The radio signals in these rural counties come from a ways off, mainly the bigger cities of Wilmington and Fayetteville. And they sound like it. So get your Wednesday off to a good start with me, Gilbert Bays, on News Talk 640 WFNC. Turn left onto North Carolina 41 South. I spent time just on the North Carolina side, in a cluster of counties. Scotland and Robeson to the west, Bladen and Columbus to the east. This place is racially diverse, with large white, black, and indigenous populations, and long struggling. North Carolina ranks in the bottom half of states in per capita income. In the border belt, folks make$12 ,000 to$20 ,000 less than the state average.

13:05There are a lot of manufactured homes, trailer parks, single wides, double wides, kind of dotted everywhere. The Breakfast Club. Hurry it up. Interviews, surprise guests, music, and more. It's all on The Breakfast Club weekday mornings on Fayetteville's official number one station for hip-hop and R &B, The Big Stick, Foxy 99. Most of these counties are also what are called news deserts. That means they have no more than one local news source. And often the surviving newspapers have shriveled to a few pages of mostly sports and features. They don't print a whole lot of news. John, you want to come in or you want to sit on the porch?

13:47I talked to a range of people in the border belt about their media diets. I usually sit here and have my coffee. And I'm sitting here on the couch and I'm watching the news. local stations which are located in Wilmington, but they carry this area. I don't watch a lot of news, but what I watch, I watch Newsmax or Fox. I try not to get my news from social media too much, but sometimes I'm scrolling through Twitter and I see something and it catches my eye. I still think that a lot of our people get their information from their local radio station too. Whatever they play in between songs and stuff like that, whatever type of news update.

14:30We're going to spend more time getting to know this guy, Ethan Jordan. I find him in Columbus County. He's driving a big John Deere tractor, pulling a planting rig down the road near his family's place. I can just leave it here.

14:50I climb the ladder to his two-person tractor cab. You got enough room to make it work? Oh, yeah. How you doing? Good. Nice to meet you. Let me get that door a little bit better so it won't rattle. Ethan's in his late 20s. He has reddish-brown hair and a round face. He and his family raise corn, soybeans, peanuts, and beef cattle. On this April day, he's planting corn. Right here, we farm a total of 2 ,200 acres between me and my dad and two employees. I believe if you get back home to eighth generation of Jordan farming on this land, that we're on right now. Actually, this is some of the original farm we're on.

15:30In front of Ethan in the cab are a half-dozen screens. They monitor the seed and fertilizer he's dropping, the weather conditions, the technology that's doing the driving. Yes, sir, that's my GPS, which controls the auto insurance. You see, I'm not touching the steering wheel, and it's steering. And for the long hours he spends in the tractor, he also has media handy. I know I have Fox News on this iPad, and I will watch Fox News from time to time. And it's not Newsmax, it's that app that has all the news in it. Well, you see, I have Fox News here. But there's an app that I can't call the name of right now.

16:10He finds it, his go-to news aggregator. It's right here. It's this app right here. Matter of fact, Newsbreak. Newsbreak app. And it kind of, you know, I guess it goes through your algorithm of what you look up and stuff like that. because if you look at mine, it talks about farmers react to Trump's tariffs, tells me about the local news, and so I have that that pops up, and it'll be anywhere from CNBC to WCT to Daily Beast. I don't know, but anyway, it just shows local and national news, and if it's national news, it's more related to what I look up, which is obviously farming, agriculture-related topics.

16:52is where I get a lot of my news from. To say I actually sit down and watch the news, it's kind of hard to say. Now, we'll watch it if something interesting is going on on the iPad, if I'm in a tractor running it. Ethan lives with his fiancée, who's a lawyer. There's a local newspaper, The News Reporter, out of nearby Whiteville that comes out twice a week. Ethan sometimes looks at its website, but he and his fiancée don't subscribe. I've lived by myself, I lived out of my parents' house for now going on the fifth year, and I can say I've honestly never had a newspaper in my house. Or even picked one up.

17:31I know there's not one that's been in my house. My parents get one every week, but... For local news, he relies on Facebook, which includes reports from nearby outlets and comments from the community. He mentions a recent criminal incident in a nearby town. We're sitting there talking with a group of friends and where'd you read that? Oh, if you go on Facebook, look at WWAY's post about it, but look at the comments and you can see the video. So now you kind of, you know, you look at Facebook calls, yeah, the papers and, you know, they'll tell you about it. A lot of times you can read through the comments and find somebody who actually lived it and see their opinion.

18:12And, you know, sometimes opinions are biased, but you do get kind of see more of a real live feeling by reading the comments. So a lot of my news, not to say I trust Facebook by no stretch of the matter because everybody has a different opinion, but you can kind of see the gist of what's going on. Ethan votes Republican, along with everybody in his family and their neighbors, he says. Historically, this region, white folks included, voted for Democrats until 10 or 20 years ago. We were all Democrats, and then all of a sudden we woke up one day and we're Republicans. As much as we all rely on the media to get information and to decide how to vote, it's worth highlighting what Ethan says when I ask who he voted for in the North Carolina governor's race in 2024.

19:01Martin Robinson. You did? Yes, I did. You may remember hearing about Mark Robinson, no matter how far you are from North Carolina. He was the Republican nominee who lost to Democrat Josh Stein. Robinson made international news for inflammatory statements he apparently made, including on a porn website, maligning Martin Luther King, defending Hitler, questioning the Holocaust, and calling himself a black Nazi. Ethan tells me he had to choose between the two candidates, suggesting it was a vote for his preferred party. But he also says this about Robinson. I have met him personally. So, I mean, you know, I look at politics different than some people.

19:47You know, you got diehard Republicans, you got diehard Democrats, you got diehard liberals, and there's other parties. You know, there's a whole list of them now. I look at the ones like that that I've personally had shook their hand or met them personally. And I have met Mark Robinson. He spent some time down in Columbus County. And I have met him personally. So he probably didn't remember my name or know who I was, but he called my name one time and shook my hand. So, I mean, if you feel like you've got a close and personal connection with him, that's kind of the way I look at it, whether you're Democrat or Republican.

20:21Maybe there's still special power in what comes to us not from a screen, but through in-person experience, the way people used to learn most of what they knew about the world. Despite his conservative views, Ethan says he finds Fox News too far to the right at times, when it harps too much on gun rights or undocumented immigrants. But then a network like NBC will annoy him even more in the other direction. During the election it was always negative on Trump, negative on Trump, constantly, you know, this, that, and the other. And, you know, I kind of look at it and I'm like, well, everybody's not perfect.

21:01But when y 'all were pro for it, Kamala, you were pro Kamala, like I can find problems with her too, just as good as you can find with Trump. It's kind of, you know, if you're going to tell the story, tell it on both sides. Tell the bad pros and the cons of both, not just constantly over and over and over and over again. And that's where I get irritated and not want to listen to it.

21:37Hey, Tenge. What are you thinking so far? Well, I got to say, I really like listening to Ethan. You know, and I'm not mad at him. I mean, if you said to me, white North Carolina farmer who votes Republican, I feel like I was going to picture somebody very different. Somebody who's maybe not as open or really just has their mind made up. Now, I would like to hear Ethan explain why he voted for Mark Robinson, who's a Holocaust denier who called himself a black Nazi for governor. So there is that part. Yeah. But putting that aside for a second, just listening to him, I got a feel for where he's at, even though we only heard him for a few minutes.

22:17You wouldn't vote for the people he votes for, you're saying, but he comes across as a sincere person, doing his best to make sense of things, right? Yeah, like based on the information he has. You know what I'm saying? And when he talks about the news he pays attention to, he sounds real familiar to me. He wants the facts. He wants fairness. And when the news tells him something very different from what he and the people around him think is true, then it sounds unfair or oversimplified. That makes him want to change the channel or tap over to a different source. We said this episode was going to be about us, those of us on the receiving end of the news.

22:57I talked to an expert who has fascinating insights into our biases as news consumers, including how changes in our society have amplified those biases. Often when I'm talking about this to audiences, I'll say, you know, how many of you would say that your main goal as you're engaging with the world is to be accurate in what you perceive? And everyone raises their hand. And I'm like, actually, it's not. Actually, you're wrong. This is Dana Gal Young. I'm a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, where I direct the Center for Political Communication. Young studies how people process information in connection with our politics.

23:40She wrote the recent book, Wrong, How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Dana says when you turn on a cable news and opinion channel or go to a news website, you're bringing along deep desires, needs really, that go well beyond wanting accurate information. Your goal is not to be accurate because your goal really is survival. And there are three areas that sort of speak to survival needs that serve as sort of the underbelly of human survival. They all facilitate action because in order to survive, you need to act. in your own survival interests. So those three needs are comprehension, control, and community.

24:25As we go about our lives, we want to feel that we know basically what the hell is going on in our world, and we want to feel some ability to control what happens to us. But Dana says maybe even more important than comprehension and control is that third C word, community. And this simply captures the notion that we are social animals who do not exist truly as individuals in a vacuum. We only exist embedded within a social context. And that has to do with how we were able to survive historically. Even here in the U.S., that notion even of rampant, you know, ardent individualism is itself, believe it or not, a group norm.

25:11We are individualists because everyone around us also prizes that value of individualism, which I think is kind of hilariously ironic. So Young says as we take in the news, we do so, consciously or not, as members of the social groups we identify with. And in a country that's bitterly divided politically, most Americans identify with a political team. We might as well be wearing our team's uniform as we go looking for news. That means that when we comprehend the world, we're going to comprehend the world the same way that our team does. And we're going to want to comprehend the world in ways that make our team look good.

25:54Dana is talking about general human tendencies in part. But it hasn't always been like this. She says historical trends in the U.S., in politics and the media, have helped to intensify our divisions. These changes have made Americans less open to information we don't like and more vulnerable to mis - and disinformation. To start with, she points to the sorting of the political parties starting in the middle of the 20th century. Up until the 50s and 60s, our two major political parties were actually quite mixed. in terms of policy positions, in terms of the kinds of people who identified with each, in terms of where those people lived, in terms of the religious identification of the people within the parties.

26:44And part of the reason that that was the case was because there was this great compromise that was made on the issue of race in the United States. That's a nice way of saying the two parties were pretty much in sync white supremacy-wise. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had members, elite members within them, who supported the idea of states' rights, who supported the idea of the disempowerment of African American people.

27:22As millions of black people migrated out of the Jim Crow South, populating northern cities and turning into voters, that put pressure on the Democrats and gave them an opportunity. And we ended up with that sort of great racial realignment where the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights and the Republican Party became the party in opposition to that movement. Most black people moved from the GOP, the party of Lincoln, to the Democrats. Most white Southerners and other conservative white people, many of whom had been Democrats, joined the Republicans. Other kinds of sorting followed.