(Note: Extended length versions of these episodes with additional content can be heard at the News Over Noise website. )
Hosts: Leah Dajches & Matt Jordan
Episode 7: Overcoming Pride and Prejudice through Persuasion
How do you respond when someone disagrees with you? If you’re like many Americans, you probably end the conversation and write them off. And who can blame you when debates are frequently framed as moralistic disputes between the righteous and the enemy? But what's the cost of walking away instead of making an effort to engage? On the next News Over Noise, we’ll find out by talking with Anand Giridharadas, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Persuaders.
Guest: Anand Giridharadas is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Persuaders, the international bestseller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Episode 8: A Pro-democracy Case Against Objectivity
“My experience is that audiences want us to be truthful and fair, but they don’t want us to be robots.” That’s a quote from a blog post by journalist Lewis Raven Wallace—a post that led to him being fired from Marketplace. Wallace has become an outspoken critique of the notion that “objectivity” is a catchall for accurate journalism. In this episode of News Over Noise, hosts Leah Dajches and Matt Jordan talk with Wallace about the concept of journalistic neutrality and about what can be done to restore some lost public trust in journalism.
Guest: Lewis Raven Wallace (he/they/ze) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina, the author and creator of The View from Somewhere book and podcast, and a current Ford Global Fellow and Abolition Journalism Fellow with Interrupting Criminalization. He previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South.
News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost of Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
