New Yorker Editor Kevin Young on 'Hoaxes, Post-Facts, and Fake News'

It's Been a Minute

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🗓️ 16 January 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker, has written a book about 'fake news' before President Trump co-opted the term. It's called "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News." He talks to Sam about the book, as well as Prince, why hoaxes are so tied up with race, Donald Trump and P.T. Barnum, editing poetry at The New Yorker, black twitter, and growing up in Nebraska. Email the show at [email protected] or tweet @NPRItsBeenAMin with your feedback. Follow Sam on Twitter @samsanders and producers Brent Baughman @brentbaughman and Anjuli Sastry @AnjuliSastry.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey y'all, Sam Sanders here.
0:06.6	It's Beneminent.
0:07.6	Today on the show, Kevin Yam, he is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and he is also
0:12.1	the author of a new book.
0:14.0	It is called Bunk, the rise of Hoax's humbug, plagiarist phonies, post-facts, and fake
0:21.1	news.
0:22.5	In many ways now is the perfect time for such a book.
0:26.0	It is all about fake news before there was such a thing as fake news.
0:31.0	Kevin looks at Hoax's and post-facts all the way back to the 1800s, the time of the
0:36.5	circus showman, P.T. Barnum.
0:38.5	And then he goes all the way up to New York Times reporter Jason Blair, who famously just
0:43.6	made up stories like in the early 2000s.
0:46.8	It even looks at the rise of Donald Trump, who has had a few Hoax's himself.
0:51.7	There are two really big, central questions in the book, and they both are really great
0:56.9	questions to ask right now.
0:58.7	They are these.
0:59.7	One, why do we believe things that are not true?
1:03.5	And two, what does that teach us about ourselves?
1:07.3	With that, let's begin.
1:08.3	Here is Kevin Young and me.
1:09.7	We talked a few weeks ago before the end of the year.
1:13.0	Also, forgive us.
	...

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