Why We Need New News

New research looking at at reporting secret assassinations, countering propaganda & how we could update TV news bulletins, from the Being Human Festival, an annual event which involves public events put on by universities across the UK, presented by Shahidha Bari.

Steve Poole teaches at the University of the West of England and is involved in a project - Romancing the Gibbet - that uses smartphone apps to evoke memories of C18th hangings hidden in the English landscape Dr Clare George is Miller Archivist at the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London. She is involved in recreating the Austrian political cabaret theatre that operated in London during WWII to counter Nazi propaganda. Andrew Calcutt teaches at the University of East London and is part of a project which asks what new ways can we tell the news, putting forward experimental formats and asking for audience responses to them. Luca Trenta teaches at Swansea University and is working on a project looking at Kings, Presidents, and Spies: Assassinations from Medieval times to the Present - asking what we are told and what is kept hidden from news reports.

You can find out more at https://beinghumanfestival.org/

You can find more insights from cutting edge academic studies in our New Research Collection on the Free Thinking programme website and available to download as the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast from BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Torquil MacLeod