Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting

from Providence, Rhode Island. The internet has quickly gone from being hailed

as the most democratizing force in world history to being decried as a tool, which

nefarious authoritarian and ruthlessly mercantile forces used to exploit and manipulate the dumb masses.

Maybe there's some truth to both.

And perhaps something else entirely different is going on as well.

My guest today is Adrian Chen, a staff writer at the New Yorker. He has a

recent piece in that magazine where he digs into the debate over the internet free-for-all and

fake news.

Comparing it to concerns that were expressed about the new medium of radio in the first half

of the 20th century. Adrian Chen, welcome to the dig.

Thanks for having me. Adrian Chen, welcome to the dig.

Thanks for having me.

You wrote this recent story just out in the New Yorker looking at the debate over whether the internet is amazing or horrible

and comparing it to the reaction to the new medium of radio in the first half of the 20th century. Why did you decide to write this piece?

Well, I think in the wake of the election and in the later days of the campaign, the issue of fake news just seemed to kind of blow up out of nowhere.

And you know, you had all of these these studies that BuzzFeed put out these you know research

papers talking about this plague of fake news these Macedonian teenagers cranking out all this stuff and it just seemed so bizarre and kind of like topsy-turny and scary that I was just kind of like trying to grasp my head around what was going on.

And at the same time I was reading this book by Fred Turner called The Democratic Surround where there's a it's about how people began to think of media as a kind of threat and an authoritarian engine and this all came about during the 30s and

40s and one of the anecdotes he uses to kind of illustrate how people were thinking about radio at the time was the panic around the War of the World broadcast that Orson Wells put out.

And it just struck me that, you know,

this was a fake news episode where

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