Scene of the Crime
On the Media
WNYC Studios
4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s On the Media, a look at the journalists and newspapers we lost in 2021, and hopes for the press in the year ahead. Plus, is the ever-popular genre of true crime good for us? And the mob gets a podcast. 1. Micah Loewinger [@micahloewinger], tells Brooke about a year of newspaper closures, murdered journalists, and the end of the Trump Bump. Listen.
2. Emma Berquist [@eeberquist], author of Devils Unto Dust, on how the true crime genre can rot our brains. Listen.
3. Rachel Corbett [@RachelNCorbett], author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, on why the feds love podcasts by mobsters. Listen.
Music:After The Fact by John ScofieldThe Hammer of Los by John ZornSmooth Criminal by 2Cellos
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 2021 broke records for the most journalists jailed in a year. China helped push up the |
| 0:06.6 | numbers with a law called... |
| 0:08.7 | Picking quarrels and provoking trouble. Could you imagine how many New Yorkers would be |
| 0:13.3 | arrested if you could prosecute people for picking quarrels and provoking trouble? |
| 0:17.5 | From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also this week, how |
| 0:23.0 | true crime might not be just the sweet little binge that you think it is. |
| 0:28.1 | A lot of women that I talked to about true crime tell me that they're watching it for |
| 0:33.5 | a sense of control. Which I don't think that that's a particularly good way to look |
| 0:37.7 | at it though because it's not going to give you tips on how to survive. |
| 0:41.0 | So true crime won't keep you breathing. But with mobsters in that racket, it might |
| 0:45.4 | warm a few cold cases. |
| 0:47.5 | He was involved in nineteen murders and now he tells the tales of these crimes and many |
| 0:52.8 | others from the Phoenix suburbs where he lives to be near his grandkids. |
| 0:56.7 | It's all coming up after this. |
| 1:02.7 | This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. |
| 1:05.7 | How will you remember 2021? It was the year of the vaccine, the year of the insurrection, |
| 1:13.5 | the year of American troops leaving Afghanistan, a year of workers' strikes, deadly storms, |
| 1:19.9 | televised courtroom verdicts, crypto-mania, supply chain meltdowns, culture war spats, |
| 1:26.3 | big public funding bills, and amacron. |
| 1:31.1 | More people died from COVID-19 this year than last. It's been a year of hope and anger |
| 1:37.1 | and loss. |
| 1:39.4 | In 2021, we at on the media focused on the narrative, the ideas and beliefs that shape |
... |
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