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Music The Hello, and welcome to the first episode of the David Frum show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

Why another podcast? It's a natural question.

The answer begins with the chart I recently glimpsed from a media studies organization.

It showed that audiovisual content online tended to bunch up at the far extremes of American

political dialogue, the far left and the far right, with the far right having a big

advantage. The center ground lay abandoned and seemingly barren. Now, that's not the way things are

in real life. In real life, most of us are pretty level-headed people, and we approach the world

in a spirit of curiosity, not anger, looking for insights, not insults. Yet, when the sound

comes on and the video comes up, things are suddenly different. And the worst voices get the biggest

audiences. I don't think it has to be that way. In the text edition of the Atlantic, we prove every

day that Americans want something better.

I'm going to try to give them that something better also here in audio and visual content on the David Fromm show.

We shouldn't assume that just because people have deeply reactionary politics, they're necessarily backwards in their technology.

A century ago, in another dark time, fascists outpaced Democrats

and liberals in their mastery of the then-new technology of the radio. Something similar to that

seems to be happening today. We need to meet the worst forces in our society on the battleground

of ideas using the latest tools.

And that's what we're going to try to do here.

You know, when people produce honest information about vaccines, about trade,

but anything else that's important that has unfortunately become controversial,

...