"Yes, undocumented immigrants take jobs from working Americans. Here’s the proof," an opinion piece in The Washington Post tells us. "Save our truckers, not affluent students seeking a free ride," pleads longtime Republican consultant Douglas MacKinnon in The Hill. "Biden's Student Debt Cancellation Robs Hard-Working Americans, Will Make Inflation Even Worse," proclaims a so-called Expert Statement from the Heritage Foundation. There’s a warning we hear again and again, particularly from the Rig...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Halloween themed News Brief, we debunk the idea drug dealers are handing out fentanyl candy to our children. But we also examine why these copaganda panics are able to take hold: namely the failure of liberals to provide an alternative, non-carceral vision for how to handle the very real and urgent overdose crisis.
Oct 28, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Live Show Beg-a-Thon, recorded 10/20, we discuss the morality politics of Star Trek and Pro Wrestling with guests are Robert Greene II and Brandi Collins-Dexter.
Oct 26, 2022•2 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Citations Needed is now in its sixth season. Over the past five years, we've dropped 170 episodes and over 125 news briefs. We've been joined by hundreds of amazing guests. We've done live shows, AMAs, newsletters and special interviews. Our small team does all the research, writing, recording, editing, pre-production, production, post-production, transcription, promotion and distribution. We love doing the show and we have more great episodes on the way. But first, we're doing our first PBS-sty...
Oct 22, 2022•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Brief, "DC Media's 'Fare Evasion' Meltdown," we discuss local TV news, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal's breathless coverage of so-called "fare evasion" and how our media decides which theft to care about and which to ignore.
Oct 19, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Brief, we discuss the nominally progressive news network's lies and omissions when covering efforts to reduce the US's unprecedented jail and prison population.
Oct 05, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Increasing Numbers of US Students Look for a ‘Real’ World," read a 1965 headline from the magazine Moderator . "Academics: Get Real!," the Harvard Business Review implored in 2009. "‘Defund the police’ runs into reality," the Washington Post warned in 2021. "As Latin America Shifts Left, Leaders Face a Short Honeymoon," the New York Times declared in 2022. We're often reminded that anyone who espouses some degree of left-wing politics – whether a student, activist, political leader, or anyone i...
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?," inquires The New York Times . "Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?," The Atlantic wonders. "Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy," insists New York Magazine ’s Intelligencer. "Too old to run again? Biden faces questions about his age as crises mount," The Guardian reports. Though these headlines are framed as exploratory questions, news media seem to have their minds made up: the problem with Washington is that it’s chock full...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Education... is a great equalizer of conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery," stated school reformer Horace Mann in 1848. "Math is the great equalizer," preached Jaime Escalante, Edward James Olmos’ character, in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver . "The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education," announced Barack Obama during his 2010 State of the Union address. This message is everywhere, pervading political speeches, Oscar-bait films, think-tank papers, an...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast A white collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that’s taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer’s union-busting tactics. Stories like these represent something we don’t often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs or zealots, thugs or grifters—but as heroes willing to risk their health, homes, and livelihoods for the greater good. This is in contra...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chances are you’ve seen this storyline play out on either a big or small screen: An FBI agent investigates a prominent labor leader. Or maybe a union boss orders a hit on a recalcitrant member of the rank-and-file. Or perhaps a union president skims money off a pension fund to make an illegal loan. Plotlines like these derive from one of Hollywood’s longstanding and most favored tropes: the corrupt, mobbed up union, and more specifically, the corrupt union boss. It lends itself to countless stor...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Brief, we detail the strange quadrennial tradition of acting like the US is "abandoning its principles" by reaffirming decades-long alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Jul 20, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Live Interview from 7/8/22, we break down US media's inflation discourse that places the blame for rising food and gas prices squarely on the shoulders of greedy Burger King cashiers living high on the government hog. With J.W. Mason, Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute....
Jul 13, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Brief we catch up with the latest far right attacks on the liberal state and Democratic Party leadership's pathological inability––or unwillingness––to meet the moment.
Jun 29, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast "John Roberts Passes Test: Politicization of Judicial Appointment is Disheartening," read a 2005 headline from Salisbury, Maryland’s Daily Times. "Ignore the attacks on Neil Gorsuch. He’s an intellectual giant — and a good man," Robert P. George pleaded in The Washington Post in 2017. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination "is beyond politics," South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn told CBS's Face the Nation in 2022. We hear the same refrains over and over about the US federal court...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Live Interview from 5/20, we are joined by Layla A. Jones of the Philadelphia Inquirer whose report, "Lights. Camera. Crime," brilliantly documented the White Flight origins of the "action news" genre and how it dehumanized—and thus helped lawmakers gut—black communities throughout the country.
Jun 15, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this News Brief, we examine two New York Times articles—one about Chesa Boudin and one about Eric Adams—and how they serve as object lessons in how liberal outlets repackaging 1990s-era Tough on Crime dogma as sophisticated, sanitized, and progressive.
Jun 08, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Follow The Data” is the name of a Bloomberg Philanthropies podcast that debuted 2016. “How Data Analysis Is Driving Policing,” a 2018 NPR headline read. “Data suggests that schools might be one of the least risky kinds of institutions to reopen,” an opinion piece in The Washington Post told us in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the last 20 or so years, a trend of labeling concepts as “data-driven” emerged. It applied, and continues to apply, to policies affecting everything from e...
Jun 01, 2022•2 hr 33 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Breif, we discuss the phoned-in, cynical response by Republicans to mass shooting and how they've devolved into a dark, meta self-parody.
May 27, 2022•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast After a white nationalist kills 10 in a racist mass shooting in Buffalo, those most responsible for mainstreaming white nationalist talking points try and evade responsibility.
May 18, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Criminal Minds. Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer. Inside the Criminal Mind. Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. Each of these is the title of a series, fictional or otherwise, or documentary that relies on the work of so-called criminal profilers. They’re all premised, more or less, on the same idea: That the ability to venture inside the mind of an individual who’s committed a horrific act of violence–say, serial murder, rape, or kidnapping–is the key to figuring out why that crime ha...
May 11, 2022•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast "NFTs May Seem Like Frivolous Fads. They Should Be the Future of Music," argues Rolling Stone magazine. "How to Buy Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies: A Guide for New Crypto Investors," advises TIME magazine. "'I had $10 in my bank account': This 36-year-old went from living paycheck to paycheck to making over $109,000 selling NFTs," proclaims CNBC. Over the past couple of years, U.S. media have been breathlessly hyping a new economy of digital "investment opportunities" and asset speculation. ...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Is it a higher compliment to be called a) a person of real feeling, or b) a consistently reasonable person?" "Are you more successful at a) following a carefully worked-out plan, or b) dealing with the unexpected and seeing quickly what should have been done?" "Which word in each pair appeals to you more? a) scheduled, or b) unplanned?" Questions like these are posed to millions of current and prospective workers and students every year. They come from personality tests, whether the Myers-Brigg...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Citations Needed Live Interview with Luke Savage from 3/22, we discuss his upcoming collection of essays, "The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History," the abandoned hopes of the Obama era, the rise of Trumpism and the inability—or unwillingness—of Liberalism to offer a moral and more just vision for the world.
Apr 13, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast " It is safe to say that almost no city needs to tolerate slums," wrote New York City official Robert Moses in 1945. "Our ancestors came across the ocean in sailing ships you wouldn't go across a lake in. When they arrived, there was nothing here," Ross Perot proclaimed in 1996. "We proved we can create a budding garden out of obstinate ground," beamed Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2011. These quotes recurring themes within the lore of settler-colonial states: Before settlers arrived in the ...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this News Brief, we examine the convoluted, vague rhetorical labor involved in making purging unhoused populations with cops seem humane and anodyne.
Mar 30, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this public News Brief, we examine the most unhelpful, glib, self-aggrandizing, and cynical responses from American media to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Mar 16, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Let the Culture Wars Begin. Again," The New York Times announces. "How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy," warns Politico. "As The Culture Wars Shift, President Trump Struggles To Adapt," NPR tells us. "Will Democrats Go on the Offensive in the Culture Wars?" Vanity Fair wonders. Over and over, we’re reminded that so-called culture wars are being waged between a simplified Left and Right. Depending on who you ask, they tend to encompass issues under very broad categories: “LGBTQ rights,” ...
Mar 09, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Investigative journalism." It’s a term that conjures imagery of committed, industrious newsrooms like those in the Oscar-winning films All the President’s Men or Spotlight, filled with intrepid reporters dutifully scouring documents, scrutinizing photographs and taking secretive yet explosive phone calls at all hours of the night. It’s a rallying cry for TED Talkers and Brookings Institute essayists, many of whom extol the virtues of scrappy and scrupulous reportage that succeeds in taking down...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Among these central ranges of continental mountains and these great companion parks…lies the pleasure-ground and health-home of the nation,” wrote journalist Samuel Bowles in 1869. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life,” mused naturalist John Muir in 1901. “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,” opined writer...
Feb 23, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
