Episode description

Ellen and Dan talk with Margaret Low, the CEO of WBUR, one of Boston's two public radio stations. Margaret started as CEO in January 2020. She has had a 40-plus-year career with NPR, and started as an overnight production assistant at Morning Edition. At NPR, Low rose through the ranks and ended up in the top editorial job, where she oversaw 400 journalists worldwide, covering events like the Arab Spring, the re-election of Barack Obama, and the Boston Marathon bombing. She led a digital transformation of her newsroom. She turned Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the Saturday morning quiz show, into a live production. She came to WBUR from The Atlantic, where she was president of AtlanticLIVE, and produced more than 100 live events a year.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the launch of Signal Cleveland. It's well-funded, with $7.5 million to start with, and Rick Edmonds of Poynter Online writes that the news outlet has big goals: It wants to expand throughout Ohio within a few years. 

Dan's Quick Take is on a case in New Hampshire that is of interest to those of us who ascribe to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As Dan puts it, we’d like to think that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that you may not be punished criminally for criticizing the government. But that’s not what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit decided recently. In that case, the court ruled that New Hampshire’s criminal libel law passes constitutional muster. The case was especially pernicious because the defendant, Robert Frese, was charged with claiming, among other things, that the police chief in his town of Exeter was a coward who had “covered up for a dirty cop.” That statement may be entirely false; but the idea that someone could be charged with a misdemeanor for criticizing the police is pretty chilling. InDepthNH has a story here. The case even garnered a Muzzle Award in 2019.