Riverdale Weighs in on Political Podcasts
Podcasts can be powerful, for good and for ill. When hosted by dogmatic and closed-minded people, podcasts can be a form of indoctrination and lecturing. On the other hand, podcasts that encourage a more open-ended and free flowing conversation and bring on guests with different points of view can foster dialogue, tolerate difference of opinion, encourage civility, and open people’s minds in a healthy way.
RCS English and podcasting teacher Mr. Sands says: “I think that podcasts being a typically longer form mode of media encourages listeners to approach the discussion at hand with patience, pay close attention to detail and get to know the host on a personal level. The danger is in any form of media where you’re receiving information through a distinct personality that it is up to the listener to engage critically and patiently with attention to detail.” Mr. Sands emphasizes both the power the creator has to put information into the listener’s head, but also the power the listener has to sift through, critically assess the information, and form their own judgements.
Documentary filmmaker and media entrepreneur Lisa Eisenpresser also stresses the importance of the host in shaping the listener’s take: “Right wing talk radio was arguably the original home of combative, ideologically-driven media, and podcasting is just the next evolution of radio. There are ‘honest’ and ‘balanced’ hosts as well as narcissistic lunatics in the space.”
Although every journalistic medium has good and bad actors, there are some podcasts prominently known for allowing the speakers to share their insights and perspectives without being immediately debutted and annihilated for sharing their opinions. Founder of StoryCorps and One Small Step Dave Isay recommends Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, and Ezra Klein as hosts of podcasts that not only avoid political polarization, but and instead combat it. Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly, is a perfect example. Weiss has several episodes taking on debates between completely contrasting opinions. A recent episode, “100 Days of Donald Trump,” featured a pro Trump voter, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a Free Press columnist, who gave him an A++ for his first 100 days, and Brianna Wu, an anti Trump Democratic strategist who awarded him a D- minus. Weiss gives equal airtime to these very different people with opposing views,....
Dave Isay’s life work has been dedicated to putting people in productive dialogue across lines of religion, politics, and background. His goal with StoryCorps is to record people in conversation with family members and saves them in the Library Of Congress, and One Small Step, which he spoke about on Pod Save America and brought recently to Dartmouth and Vanderbilt, is all about opening up lines of dialogue between two strangers from very different orientations. Issay said of the thousands of the participants in One Small Step: “They’re so scared going in, and then once they realize the other person isn’t a monster, just a human being, it’s almost like the endorphins flow and they’re elated. And we have no interest in convincing people they’re wrong. We just want you to get to know someone else as a human being. You have to have some kind of social capital in order to talk about more difficult topics.”
When I asked Lisa Eisenpresser whether she thought podcasts could contribute to lessening political and ideological echo chambers and create a more nuanced space for public discourse, she was clear and firm: “As long as enough podcasts remain independent and are not all swallowed up by the same huge media conglomerates that make mainstream media a corporate instrument, they have a chance to do exactly that: generate nuanced conversation, platform multiple sides of an issue, promote civil discourse, and surface important information to the public that is hard to find elsewhere.” Eisenpresser also mentioned a subscription model for podcasts that hosts like Sam Harris use to make sure that they aren’t answering to advertisers and can remain “cancel-proof.” Subscribers ensure that hosts can speak openly and honestly so that their listeners “have access to the most intellectually and journalistically pure content,” as Eisenpresser puts it.
While there is a vast array of politically oriented podcasts, many stridently rigid in their perspective, another kind of podcast aims to provide a more balanced and expansive conversation in which people are not shut down for not toeing the line or not expressing an opinion sanctioned by the host., but instead Instead, they are allowed to speak their minds, openly and without fear of judgment, in an environment that values pluralism, the free expression of ideas, and the acceptance of multiple points of view. When Dave Isay was featured on Pod Save America, he quoted Mr. Rogers who said: “it’s impossible not to love someone whose story you’ve heard.”
