Off the Record, On the Stand

More Perfect

WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Scotus, Perfect, History, Court, More, Documentary, Courses, Supreme, Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Recently, On the Media’s Micah Loewinger was called to testify in court. He had reported on militia groups who’d helped lead the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Now the government was using his work as evidence in a case against them. Micah wanted nothing to do with it — he worried that participating in the trial would signal to sources that he couldn’t be trusted, which would compromise his work.

As he considered his options, he uncovered a 1972 case called Branzburg v. Hayes. It involved New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, who was approached multiple times by the FBI to testify against sources in the Black Panther Party. His case — and its decision — transformed the relationship between journalists and the government.

Voices in the episode include:

• Micah Loewinger — correspondent for On the Media

• Earl Caldwell — former New York Times reporter

• Lee Levine — attorney and media law expert

• Congressman Jamie Raskin — representing Maryland’s 8th District

Learn more:

• 1972: Branzburg v. Hayes

• Listen to On the Media's "Seditious Conspiracy" episode. Subscribe to On the Media here.

Special thanks to the Maynard Institute For Journalism Education for allowing the use of its Earl Caldwell oral history.

Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @moreperfectpodcast, and Twitter @moreperfect.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Julei Longoria. This is more perfect.
0:04.0	Today, we're going to spotlight some Supreme Court reporting from a different
0:09.0	corner of WNYC Studios.
0:12.0	So can you go ahead and just introduce yourself?
0:15.0	Yes, my name is Micah Lowinger and I am a reporter with on the media from WNYC.
0:22.0	Micah reports on online communities.
0:26.0	And he kind of backed into a Supreme Court story accidentally.
0:30.0	It began while he was reporting on of all things hurricanes.
0:35.0	So I had learned about volunteer storm relief.
0:39.0	Volunteers would try and help each other out during a storm using an app.
0:44.0	Waky Taki app called Zelo.
0:47.0	You could go on Zelo when a hurricane was approaching the United States.
0:52.0	And you could hear people at first just kind of tracking like armchair meteorologist style.
0:59.0	What do we know about this storm? When's it going to make landfall?
1:02.0	And then once the storm was raging, these Waky Taki groups would actually do something really beautiful.
1:10.0	And they would go out and they would save people from their flooded homes.
1:14.0	You could hear all of this unfold in real time, in audio on Zelo.
1:20.0	Micah started poking around the app and realized it was used by a lot of groups.
1:25.0	Not just do gooders during hurricanes.
1:28.0	I started to see that a lot of the people who are most active had these very strange far right insignias and usernames.
1:37.0	And this is when I started to realize like, oh, these are far right anti-government militia groups.
1:44.0	That's how Micah found himself listening in on a far right group on Zelo on January 6th, 2021.
	...

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