This is The United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its

grip on our future.

National Geographic magazine recently apologized for a history of racism in its coverage of non-Western cultures and people of color around the world.

Journalists and news outlets can feed into a racialized crime panic by tapping into scripts that have existed for a long time.

I think that we live in a scary time.

People don't know who they can trust.

And when that happens, it's easy to manipulate people.

A number of figures on the left have denounced this show as racist.

The Christian fundamentalist movement is one that believes in, we're right, you're wrong, no matter what what and I saw a lot of that at Fox.

Twitter is treated very differently than the New York Times.

Why are they not treated like media companies?

Today we are all members of the media.

Welcome to the show. I'm Kay Wright.

Ever since Joe Biden managed to take office

and the whole violent insurrection thing passed on by,

a lot of us have been very happy to take a break from national politics.

Right after the election, listeners told us over and over again that you were eager to make space in your minds for something else entirely.

And that is true for me as anybody else, I got to say, I mean, I didn't even watch the president's

congressional speech this past week and I am here to tell you I am the kind of

political nerd who happily watches presidential speeches to Congress but this time I

just felt like I would rather go have dinner in a beer garden instead.

It just felt like a more immediate need.

...