Introducing Scene on Radio: The News
Scene on Radio
Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
4.9 • 11.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 2 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everybody's mad at the media. And Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. A well informed citizenry we are not.
In Scene on Radio's 8th season, producer and host John Biewen and returning co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika will examine the deep crises facing American journalism, how things got this way, and what it might mean to build a better and more democratic news and information system.
From the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and PRX. Find more, including episode transcripts, at SceneonRadio.org.
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| 0:00.0 | To me, Fox News just not, they don't tell the whole story. |
| 0:04.1 | I'm not particularly interested in MSNBC. |
| 0:07.0 | And that's where I'd get irritated and not want to listen to it. |
| 0:11.7 | Ginger Eye. |
| 0:12.7 | Hey, John. |
| 0:13.9 | Together again. |
| 0:15.9 | And this one's going to hit kind of close to home, isn't it? |
| 0:18.9 | Yeah, man. |
| 0:19.9 | I can't believe we're about to do a whole |
| 0:21.6 | season coming after our job. You know, if we want to be, Americans are inundated with news |
| 0:30.6 | from countless sources, but we're not very happy about it. Definitely not. Most people in the U.S. say they don't trust the news media. |
| 0:39.3 | And that's not the only crisis journalism is dealing with right now. |
| 0:43.3 | The news business at the local level has all but collapsed with dire consequences for communities. |
| 0:49.3 | Because I'm not going to vote if I can't get the information. |
| 0:52.3 | And the fractures in our media and our politics leave lots of us open to bad information. |
| 0:58.3 | On core questions, millions of Americans don't know what's true or believe things that are not true. |
| 1:04.7 | We don't have technology to store the energy from wind and solar. |
| 1:07.8 | I mean, you can't separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises we keep on failing to solve. |
| 1:19.7 | From the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, I'm John Bewin. |
| 1:24.7 | And I'm Chenjerai Kumanika. |
| 1:26.6 | Introducing C-N-On-Radadio, The News. In our eighth season, we're going to dig deep, as usual. |
| 1:34.2 | We're going to ask, how did the news get this way? And what's really wrong with it? Is it what we think it is? |
... |
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