Daniel Radcliffe Gets His Facts Straight, and Pennsylvania’s Pipeline Politics

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The actor Daniel Radcliffe is on Broadway in a new play called “The Lifespan of a Fact”—perhaps the first-ever work of theatre in which a fact checker is a starring role. Radcliffe’s character is obsessive about his work, and he becomes locked in combat with a writer whose methods are unorthodox. To get a taste of what fact-checking is really like, Radcliffe got lessons from Peter Canby and Parker Henry of The New Yorker, and then had to check a short piece himself: a review of a Mexican restaurant. Fact and opinion, he quickly learned, are not as easily separated as a layman might think. And in Pennsylvania, the reporter Eliza Griswold follows the route of a pipeline that carries fracking by-products through the back yards of some unhappy voters who think both parties are to blame.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and on today's episode, Daniel Radcliffe, who stars as a fact-checker in a new play on Broadway, gets trained for the role by the crack fact-checking team at the New Yorker.
0:22.1	That's just ahead.
0:23.5	But we're going to start by taking a look at the elections that are just days away.
0:28.0	The midterm elections are often said to be a referendum on the presidency, and that's never
0:32.3	been more true than this year in the era of Donald Trump.
0:36.4	At the same time, no matter where you live, there are also other issues on your mind as a voter,
0:40.8	local stuff that has maybe nothing to do with whether you watch Fox or CNN or even how
0:46.1	you feel about Donald Trump.
0:48.2	Reporter Eliza Griswold has been spending a lot of time following races in the state of Pennsylvania.
0:53.5	And what she found is that
0:55.7	for voters across a wide swath of the state, the thing that's foremost on people's minds
1:00.7	is a gas pipeline. It's already under construction and it goes through a lot of people's
1:06.3	backyards and they're really unhappy about it. One of the communities Eliza visited was Exton, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
1:15.6	Exton is a place where two tectonic plates in American politics meet.
1:21.6	We saw Pennsylvania go narrowly for Donald Trump in 2016,
1:25.6	and the Philadelphia suburbs are one of those places that
1:28.3	political consultants like to talk about is kind of a bellwether. Although the larger county
1:33.0	went for Hillary Clinton, Exxon is heavily Republican. About two-thirds of its voters are Republicans.
1:39.4	Danielle Frau-Ottin is running as a Democrat for state assembly, and she thinks she has a chance.
1:44.7	We're going rogue.
1:46.6	We're on a leafy suburban street.
	...

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