Episode 446: Megha Rajagopalan

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2021

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Megha Rajagopalan is a senior correspondent for Buzzfeed News. She won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the Xinjiang detention camps.“It’s not so much that I talk to [the Chinese government] to get information. It’s more that I talk to them to see how they think about things and what’s important to them and what’s their view of the world. … There are so many journalists that have been thrown out of China, so there’s very few people that are able to actually have those conversations. And in the U.S., there are these seismic decisions being made about China policy, and if you don’t talk to the people that run the country, it’s a problem.” Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: @meghara Rajagopalan on Longform Rajagopalan's Buzzfeed News archive 21:00 "This Is What A 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like" (Buzzfeed News • Oct 2017) 35:00 Rajagopalan’s Pulitzer-winning reporting with Alison Killing and Christo Buschek 41:00 "China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims (Part 1)" (Alison Killing, Christo Buschek, Megha Rajagopalan • Buzzfeed News • Aug 2020) 41:00 "What They Saw: Ex-Prisoners Detail The Horrors Of China's Detention Camps (Part 2)" (Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan • Buzzfeed News • Aug 2020) 41:00 "Inside a Xinjiang Detention Camp (Part 3)" (Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan • Buzzfeed News • Dec 2020) 41:00 "We Found The Factories Inside China’s Mass Internment Camps (Part 4)" (Alison Killing, Megha Rajagopalan • Buzzfeed News • Dec 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the Longhorn Podcast. I'm Max on this game here with like co-hosts
0:08.8	Aaron Lammer and Evan Ratliff. Gentlemen, hello. Hey, Max. Hello, hello. Max, what
0:15.4	have you got for us this week on the show? This week on the show, it feels like a slightly
0:18.8	different episode. My guest is mega-ragical pollen who writes for BuzzFeed news and you
0:25.2	guys may be familiar with her because she just won the Pulitzer Prize. She is a foreign
0:30.4	correspondent. She spent almost her entire career in China. She got there like right after
0:35.8	the financial crash and she was reporting in the country for a long time and then a couple
0:42.4	years ago she wrote a story about these camps where many ethnic minorities including
0:50.0	Uyghurs are being interned in the western part of the country. So she wrote this piece about
0:54.4	one of these camps and then she was kicked out of China. Her visa wasn't renewed. It was quite
1:01.3	dramatically so like she was out of the country and had been assured she'd be able to get back in
1:06.8	and then wasn't allowed back in. So her life was just there and taken away from her and the work
1:13.9	that she won the Pulitzer for was instead of being like all right well I've been kicked out of
1:18.6	China. I guess I should go find something else to report on. She kept reporting on these camps
1:24.1	and she ended up doing this incredible four part series where she reported out what was happening
1:30.5	there without being there and she did a bunch of it through satellite imagery and we get into
1:36.6	how she did that reporting in the interview but it's really just it's incredible and that decision
1:42.0	to sort of keep reporting that story without being able to be in the country. I don't know it's
1:47.2	pretty impressive and you know along with with several other journalists she's led this coverage
1:52.5	uncovering what is the largest genocide since World War II over a million people are in these camps
1:59.7	there's no paperwork there's no documentation it's just staggering and it was really really
2:04.8	fascinating to talk to her about how she's done it. Our sponsor this week as always is MailChimp
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