In 2014, the podcast Serial debuted, sparking a fascination with long-form reporting that continues to this day. Virtually every major news outlet has a podcast as part of their brand, some have multiple series, each dedicated to a different beat. What is it about this medium that captures our attention? Can this be a place where investigative journalism could find a viable outlet? Hosts Leah Dajches and Matt Jourdan find out by talking with researcher, journalist, and artist Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika.
Special thanks to guest:
Chenjerai Kumanyika is an assistant professor in NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He is the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s influential Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy. Kumanyika has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE. His work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including the George Foster Peabody Award (2018) for Uncivil and The Media Literate Media Award (NAMLE) for Scene on Radio (2021). In 2021, Kumanyika received the Union of Democratic Communications’ Dallas Smythe Award for his career accomplishments and advocacy. He studied mass communication and critical media studies at The Pennsylvania State University’s Donald Bellisario College of Communication where he earned his Ph.D.
Leah Dajches: In 2014, the podcast Serial debuted, sparking a fascination with long form reporting that continues to this day. At a time when print journalism is struggling, podcasting is thriving. Virtually every major news outlet has a podcast as part of their brand, some have multiple series each dedicated to a different beat. From historic happenings to current events, you'd be hard pressed to not find a podcast that caters to your interests no matter how niche they may be. What is it about this medium that captures our attention? Can this be a place where investigative journalism could find a viable outlet? Why might it be better than, say, TV news or social media news?
Matt Jordan: We're going to talk about all of this and more with Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika. He's a researcher journalist and artist who works as an assistant professor at NYU. Chenjerai's research and teaching focuses on the intersections of social justice and emerging media in the cultural and creative industries. He specializes in using narrative, non-fiction, audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about such issues as race, the civil war, and policing. Chenjerai is a co-executive producer and co-host of the podcast, Uncivil. He has also been a contributor to Transom, VICE, and NPR'S Code Switch, and Invisibilia podcasts, and all things considered. He's a news analyst for Rising Up radio with Sonali Kolhatkar. Chenjerai, welcome.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Thanks for having me.
Matt Jordan: So, podcasting has become a huge growth sector in a news and information economy that is, otherwise, pretty bleak for the news. In 2005, only about 11% of the population listened to podcasts or was aware of it. And last year, 64% of the population heard, which is an estimated 183 million. 52% of Americans listen to a podcast once a month, and one of five of those listen to them every day.
Last year, an estimated 109 million people in the United States are expected to be listening to podcasts, and it's supposed to grow by 5.3% in the previous year. So again, this is in a news environment where we're seeing less print journalism. Podcasting is thriving. So why do you think podcasting has grown so much as a form of news media?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Well, let me just start out by saying, I think it's great to hear your take on podcasting because I think there's a lot of people in the industry who have been feeling a lot more pessimistic or just that we're in a space that's less promising. Most of those people, though pushing that particular view, are the people who thought they would make a lot of money in podcasting, and news podcasting, and so forth. And they realized like, oh, wow, this wasn't just a way to just get in and just make intellectual property that we could leverage all kinds of ways and stuff with ads. So that's one sector who is, in some ways, moved on from their investments. So, I just wanted to say that. Another category of people, though—and this is who maybe we relate to a little bit more is people who are working journalists, who are working, and all kinds of producers and different people who were working in this medium, and found a way to do work that was better, to do real investigative reporting, sustained series on topics, build audiences who were really interested in that. And then a lot of those people have found themselves laid off as—in this particular period of the market. So, I know I'm jumping the gun on stuff, but we can get into that. But anyway, to answer your question, I would say there's a way to look at podcasting as really drawing on radio mostly, the pre-existing medium of radio. And so, a lot of what is good about podcasting is what's good about certain forms of radio. I think that it's—you can hear it. You can listen to it. There's something about the voice that I think is just really, deeply human and goes back—the whole idea of a voice telling you stories is a very human thing that precedes really maybe all other forms of storytelling and news, you know, people talking to each other. Before, there was a thing called journalism, just getting the news and that kind of thing. And so, I think that there's something about it on that level that's interesting. When I first started hearing about podcasting, it was really about people going down rabbit holes that were interesting and very relevant to the news environment, things that were historical, particular dives on topics. Precisely, at the point when you started to really see a retreat and when the newspapers and the places that formerly would have been nodes that assembled the resources to do real investigative journalism reporting, they were being put in crisis because of things that happened with Craigslist, and Facebook, and other things like that. And yet on this other side, you had all these people who were doing these deep dives, building their own audiences. And one of the leaders in public media on that front was, of course, This American Life. And that was coming out of public radio in a way. And so, I think that one thing was that people were seeing the kinds of stories they liked, the kinds of news being covered in a deeper way, than the kind of breathless telling news by the second-hand clock, medium of news. Another thing, though, I would say is that there's a few other things that podcasting—I think, at least, now I'm talking about the narrative audio documentary style that it does, that the news wasn't doing quite as well. Podcasting allows you to form a certain kind of connection to the host and to the person telling the story, which is maybe not necessary, maybe even potentially deceptive and problematic. But it is—it does feel human. We want to know who's telling us this story, and why, and maybe tell us your stakes. If you think about what people—I mean, this was a controversial element of Serial. But the idea that the host is going to tell you, here's why I'm going to tell you this story and a little bit about me. When you're looking at, like, a New York Times 800-word piece on something, you're not going to have the time to do that in 800 words to establish that. And so, I just think that all those things as well as the on-demand of podcasting was another factor that I think really helped it. With radio, you can listen to it while you're in your car. You can listen to it while you're cooking. But what happens if maybe—I have a four-year-old now—if you have kids. What happens if your four-year-old's screaming right at the point when your show is on, when you want to listen to—I'm in New York, so I love The Brian Lehrer Show. You want to listen to Brian Lehrer. So, there's pre-existing news content that really is just news broadcast that podcasts help them become things that were on demand. And I think that that also is great because people could choose a little bit more how they listened. So yeah, there's a lot more to say about this. But I think those are some of the factors.
Leah Dajches: As you're talking to us about this, I'm really interested in this connection that audiences can create with the host. You're mentioning you can get to know the host. And, in fact, there actually is research that shows Americans who get their news from podcasts say they trust the news from podcasts more than the news they get from other sources. And we know that news trust, in general, is relatively low. And so, I'm wondering do you think it's this sense of intimacy or connection that gets fostered with the host that creates trustworthiness? Or are there other elements, or creative ways that we can foster this sense of trust back into media, and in this case news media through podcasts?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Thank you for this great question. I'm going to answer this in a little bit of a nerdy way. When I was back in grad school, the professors who were teaching me critical media theory—one of whom is in this podcast right now--really helped me understand the importance of taking the ideas of trust and thinking about them critically. If we notice that there are affordances or aspects of this media that cause it to be more intimate, how can we reflect on how those things might be helping but also might be part of the problem in a lot of ways, like intimacy, I think? So, all those words—I mean, I actually think trust is a word that—I understand why people want to trust media and trust news. And I understand that in an environment of misinformation and disinformation—I get why people use a word like trust.
But I just actually told my journalism students, actually we don't really need trust. What we need is verification. We have some empirical things that we can verify. And in that regard, I think that you may look at a particular news source and say they have an established track record of putting stuff out there, withstood the test of scrutiny. But that's, I think, different than trust. I mean, I tell my students, don't trust anything I say. Look it all up. Assume I might be wrong, and you're going to figure out why. And then we'll be in a good conversation. And you'll be building strong journalistic practices. And in some ways, if we really want to flip it—I mean, we could say that if you look at Fox News or some of these other places where they've built these cults of personality and celebrity, it's precisely the aura of trust that allows that to function in the way that it does, that kind of disinformation. But you're asking, I think, a really smart and slightly different question, which is, how can we look at what some of the other features are? So, I think there's a couple of things. One is simply the fact that you're allowed some time in a podcast. If you think about a historical podcast like Throughline or Uncivil, we had eight episodes, which was really far too short to unpack the civil war—but just the time that you don't have in print media or in the ridiculous spectacle of cable news, sort of, gamified where everything becomes a horse race. It's like we're about to see. We're about to see a deluge of that in the worst ways over the next year. So, we should all brace ourselves, and you know take our nausea medicine, or whatever because it's about to get—this is about to get terrible. But you don't get the ability to sit down and really just take some time to say, listen, this particular thing has some history. Here are some of the characters that are involved. Here are some of the stakes—and just really tell a story. And it's interesting the way that the creativity and narrative structure of audio narrative non-fiction podcasting functions because you're looking for plot turns. And part of the plot turns are often drawing out a particular idea of what might have happened and then debunking that very—that same idea. Here's why it looks like this, but then it was this way. So, I think that podcasting, that's a standard of the genre. That's one element. Another element that's important, the way I was taught—and I was taught by people like John Biewen. I was taught by the people at Transom radio workshop, which is a great place that teaches people who want to do audio. And then I got to work at Gimlet. So, I was working under people like Alex Blumberg who co-founded Planet Money, and Gimlet, and all kinds of other really, really talented people—Invisibilia, Lulu Miller who now hosts Radiolab. She was one of the first people in Invisibilia—and Yowei Shaw—to give me a shot. And one of the things they taught me is listeners don't want to be editorialized to in this genre. They want to hear a story and have the sense that they're getting the facts rolling out, and that they get to make up their own mind. Now obviously, we're making all kinds of selective choices that are pushing in certain directions around a particular analysis. But there is a sense of trying to deliver it in a relatively straightforward way. Like, here's what happened. So, you can hear what's happened. Here are some of the things that might even challenge what we think. And then at some point, you tell people what it means. You know that's a big thing that Ira Glass addresses. You say this, and this, and this happened in your structure. And then you tell people what it means.
Matt Jordan: I'm interested here because you said before that, as opposed to an 800-word New York Times thing that is following really the style of The New York Times, where you don't feel the subjectivity or the voice of the journalist. You get the kind of…here's the one side says this. One side says that. We don't know what it means. And we know that that frustrates readers. There's all kinds of research that suggests that readers get really frustrated by this both sides presentation where they don't feel like they understand what it means. And you're saying Ira Glass teaches to do the opposite or to do something more, which is to—at the end, after they've gotten to know you and know what you think and know what you feel—to tell you what it means. Maybe that's one reason that the trust issue is so much more. It's like they're not holding something back, like you feel like sometimes journalists are doing.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think in the end of the day, one way to look at this is the literary form of print writing even offers us all kinds of ways to engage people. It's almost like a waste if you just use those to just firehose information at people. And then you wonder why people don't really want to take the time to read because it's just like, I'm just going through a list of facts being presented. It's like, no. It's like, you have somebody's attention. Pull us in. Think of—what's a question that people might actually care about? I mean, these are things that I think good print writing does that also people ostensibly try to do in some podcasts—in some of the podcasts people like the most is to draw you into a story or a situation, and identify questions that you—I remember in early podcasting workshop, someone asked me—they said, why is the listener listening at this point? And it just forces you as a reporter, investigator, and storyteller to step out for a minute and say, wow, why should people care about this? And also, who's the we? I remember doing my dissertation, defense actually. Hue saying, Chenj, you got to reflect a little more critically on how you're using the word we. And that has become so central to how I critique the news right now. Who is this we? That's a question that has to be asked. And the we of The New York Times is ultimately an elite we. I mean, let's just be real about what it is. I was just talking yesterday. We had hosted an event with Tony Karon, who's the senior editor at AJ+, which is an Al Jazeera news digital outlet. And he was just talking about how essentially, if you go back and look at the conversations that some of these really old newswires were having, the AP and many of the other people, some of the British outlets—at the time when they were really explicit and honest. Like, yeah, our job is just to essentially transmit the needs of Empire. I mean, there's certainly continuities. I don't want to argue that that's never changed and to simplify it. Because I think that a news institution like The New York Times, which overall is failed in such spectacular horrible ways in the genocide that we're currently living through—but these are contested institutions. And the news is producing some of the worst news. Even a place like CNN is contested. There are people in it who want to do better, who are trying to do better. And I think it's important for us not to complete power in the Gramscian sense by just saying that, oh, it's all over there, just one way. No, they're fighting. And a few journalists have told me that some of the harshest critiques of those institutions help the people inside of them to want to do better.
Matt Jordan: So, you come from a performing background as a hip hop artist and whatnot. How has that informed the way that you use your voice as a podcast host and as a storyteller?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: There's two different stories to be told here. One is the fact that I'm used to talking on a microphone and broadcasting my voice. I'm used to talking to a lot of people because this is something that I started doing as a rapper all the way back in fifth grade. Folks would gather around. And you had to shout over the noises of the schoolyard to get your verses and your bars across. And you had to confront, at fifth grade, all those—all that nervousness. I'm talking to 50 kids right here, and I hope they hear. I think, I sometimes tell—I don't know if I've ever told this story publicly before. But one of my first rap songs I wrote was this overly theoretical and terrible rap called competitive man. I was trying to grasp—I was probably grappling with the fact that since I wasn't a good sports athlete or anything, instead, I took it cerebral. I was like, well—I was grappling with competition—so I tried. In the front of the schoolyard at Roland Park Elementary school, I remember gathering folks around. I mean, folks were battling. And I said, I have a—I said, I'm going to try one of my raps out. This is my time. And I started saying, competitive man. Come on, fifth graders, gather around as we think about—and it was—I just got totally lost, this battle. But I'm sure kid came up and just started blasting me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I learned like, OK, Chenj, you got to make your raps punchy to cut through—you see what I'm saying—if you want to be heard. So, it's things like that. So that's one story. And then I got to practice that obviously as an artist, just hours, and hours, and hours in studios, understanding how the voice is produced. So, the voice is not—the voices that we hear are not just this natural thing that comes out. Everyone brings probably something from their life, their nature and experience to it—nature and nurture to it. But the reality of it is that it's an accomplishment of production for better or worse. And so, the other story—part of this to be told is that in the studio, when you say a rap, people—you have an engineer or you have a producer who's like, I want you to take that, again. I want you to—there's no love affair with the first take really, you know? I mean…and so I got into that practice of revision as a hip hop artist. And that became natural and the suppression of one's ego that needs to happen for someone else to tell you. So, it's funny, sometimes—because I wrote this piece about voice, and the racial politics of voice, and how I was experiencing those when I first started out as a podcaster. I could talk more about that. But after that, I've gotten a lot—I've done a lot of interviews where people say, well, Chenj, what's your secret to articulating the Black voice? And I'm like, yeah, well, I have a multiracial team of people—to tell you when your voice sounds good or who can choose. Literally, they can go in and say, out of the hour you talked, here was the two minutes where you sounded coherent.
Leah Dajches: And I love that quote. There's no love affair with the first take. Shout out to Lindsey, our producer. Because, man, I know that so well how many times we go through doing these openers. And we're doing multiple takes. But as you're talking about this, I'm so intrigued, again, by this idea of the we. Who is the we that's even creating the news, or the podcast, or these stories? And so, I'm wondering, as we're seeing this rise of podcasts and we also tend to see within research and societally this idea of what news is expanding—I'm wondering, are we seeing really this rise in niche audiences or topics that really comes through specifically in the format or the weakness of podcasting?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah. I mean, look, there's someone else who knows all of the hard numbers when it comes to this factor. But I'm someone who, somewhere after my college years, fell in love with public radio. I would be commuting, and driving, and listening. And the comforting voices were there. And I just—I was keeping up on stuff. But it was shows like On The Media, This American Life, and some of these other shows where I was like, wow, these are incredible stories. But at that point, I did feel like I was listening into White people's conversations. I'm like, these stories are brilliant. And they're great. And also, this is not the worlds I've mostly inhabited. And so, I would sometimes try to put friends onto it. Like, yo, I'm trying to tell you, man. Listen, you know what I'm saying? Just imagine me in the barber shop, like, bro, you got to listen to this public radio story. They're like, bro, yeah, we're not listening to that—you know what I mean? And part of why they weren't listening to it, because the voices that constitute the we of news and those communities might be coming off of like, I mean, a morning—well, actually, Philadelphia has got WURD, a Black community station. But even in formats like sports, or some of the R&B, and hip-hop stations, morning shows, those were Black voices in there that were a lot way more dynamic I got to say, by the way, and relating. So it wasn't that people weren't getting news.
So, I think what happened with podcasting was when you have a podcast like The Read that comes out on Loud Speaker Networks—and this is actually before Serial, I'm pretty sure, or Code Switch or Another Round. Or even some people have claimed this about what we did with Uncivil. We're appealing to a different we. And my experience of news and public radio informed me that—I said, look, if I can listen to these White folks on the weekend on—I mean, come on, on NPR. Look, it's fun. But it's very White on the weekend. Let's just be real. What is it? What's the old Prairie—come on.
Matt Jordan: Prairie Home Companion.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Prairie Home Companion—no, I've listened. I've listened to the whole thing, driving, you know what I'm saying—Car Talk. It's like, look. But I'm like if I can listen to that and still find enjoyment and meaning in those type of shows, then folks can come over to my world a little bit when I'm—when we're—to our we. And I think you have seen those. It's like people addressing things that are interesting. Sometimes that shift in the we is, like, what's important? What's the perspective? What are the assumed norms? What gets into the Overton window of that coverage? Particularly, I think, when you're talking about people who are—come from marginalized or historically oppressed situations, there's an inherent skepticism about the American project that is even baked into some of the informal humor and conversation. And that's the thing that I think I really related to. Because it's like sometimes when I go to dinner with Black people, we might be talking about race the whole dinner. And then when I go to dinner with my—some of my progressive friends, I mean, if they're—listen, if they're real lefties, we just hating on power to hold dinner to. But depending on where they are on the political spectrum, it's like, we're going to have a section where we complain about a couple of the things wrong and figure out, how are Democrats going to solve it? And then we're going to get to the other real issue. Let's talk about succession. That's most of the dinner.
Leah Dajches: As you're talking to us about this, it just has me thinking about the role of podcasts, and what we think of news, and the role of celebrities, and thinking about the niche, and deep dives. I do a lot of deep dives of Taylor Swift. And there are a lot of Taylor Swift podcasts out there but really thinking about fans. I think podcasts create more of an audience that engages in fan practices with the host, with the speaker so something I was very interested to pick your brain about.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: So, I don't like—what I try to think about is, what has podcast been given us that wasn't really on offer in the old news environment? And I think that—I'm just thinking about somebody like Taylor Swift, who—I'm not [INAUDIBLE]—
Leah Dajches: How can you not think about her?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Well--it's embarrassingly easy. But that's because I'm old and increasingly irrelevant person. But I think, before, we would have had just her direct releases from her public relations apparatus, whatever that was. We would have had maybe some kind of paparazzi in the old news environment, just tabloid news, people following her around to see what she's doing. And then there's a tradition of music criticism where people reflect. So, there was those pieces. And then just if something really scandalous happens, she becomes part of the main—the real news. But in the podcast realm, probably something starting more in the blog realm, you just get a way more diversity of different ways to think about how somebody like Taylor swift might be news. There's the ability of fans and the attendance of the fan-produced media that comes out of that where they can say like, look, this is what Taylor swift means to me. And in some ways, what you've seen is more people who can do the work that is being done in popular cultural scholarship. I mean, I've seen—this isn't on a podcast. But I have seen this incredible YouTube essay, for example, that breaks down how the choices in The Last Airbender Netflix series were different than what was in the original cartoon series and what the political implications of those choices are. And this is—somebody's making apparently in their spare time, you see what I'm saying? And so, I've seen podcasts where people take figures like Taylor Swift, Oprah, other folks seriously as objects of study. And I think that that's important because there is a way in which to me, Taylor Swift is ridiculous. But again, I'm not a fan—but, yeah, to take Taylor Swift seriously. What does she mean—to really go into that world. I don't think that the legacy news and media makes enough space for that, but it could be really important. I mean, look, in a way, the real question is how can you not take somebody like Taylor Swift seriously, someone with this much influence? I mean, if you're not—the fact that I'm not fully tuned in to what it means to love a Taylor Swift song and why people like it, means I'm missing something actually about where we're at right now as a culture. There's a big thing I'm missing that probably is going to be influential in other things. I got to say, I was disappointed. The most recent—I mean, I saw Taylor swift comment on the election. And—
Leah Dajches: Yeah.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: --I mean, her commentary, I thought was—I get the reason why she was not doubling down on a particular candidate. I mean, I would hope that Taylor Swift—she seemed in the past, smart enough not to vote for someone like Donald Trump. But there's real critique of Joe Biden right now in the presidency. And some of it is related to how he is—what he has enabled, and supported, and endorsed, and is an accomplice to—in Gaza. And so, I can see—and a lot of young people are very sensitive to that. So it could be that Taylor Swift's trying to walk the middle of the road, and her political endorsements right now is related to that. However, I wish she would have been a little bit more explicit. And I feel that the fact that she wasn't more explicit about it was probably a little bit of brand protection. This is me saying a lot about some s**t I just admitted I don't know anything about.
Leah Dajches: No. I mean, that is—that it was a hot topic. And there are some podcasts that they have episodes to that post. They dissect it down. Four years ago, she endorsed Biden. Why isn't she this time around? And what does this mean? Is she going to get political? All of that because as you said, she means a lot to many people.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: That's what I mean. That's a big—it could be that somehow, Taylor Swift is a window to understanding where a certain part of the electorate is at. And I do think that the podcast medium makes a lot more space. I mean, there's all kinds of things just to learn. I think that the engagements with pop culture, the sense of inviting fans—I mean, again, on the positive side, it's like the traditional news addresses you like, hey, you're a listener. It's a deposit model. We're going to deposit info into you, and that's your role. Podcasting is like, no. You can have a say. Unfortunately, as we know, any time you tell 300-plus million Americans they have a say or people in the world, it's like you're going to get a lot of dumb says or a lot of not the smartest takes—but just that idea that you're a part of it. You can comment—you know what I'm saying—your personal take on matters and all that. I think those are things we want in a democracy.
Matt Jordan: So, a big sector of podcasting, I think it's 23% is still true crime, Serial, Bread type stuff. But there's another form that has become really popular. And its news commentary, which I guess you could say comes from—again, from radio. And the most successful of them are those that come from the shock jock format. Joe Rogan just signed a $250 million contract. And he's the heir apparent of the shock jocks. So, who is the we of that group? And what does that tell us about what is now an incredibly popular way of getting—though they may trust it. I would say Joe Rogan is probably one of the biggest super spreaders of misinformation. Dogs are dying of parvo. Florida is overrun with measles because this guy has decided to make anti-vax part of his brand. So, what does that tell us about the we of these news commentary shows?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Well, I think it—one thing it tells you is that it's far more interactive than some of the other old models of legacy news, just the idea of people talking about it, the idea that maybe you could call in or comment somewhere on social media to respond. I mean, just that whole feel, I think is one thing that a lot of people enjoy. Personally, I don't have time to listen to a two-hour news thing, even if I want to. There's ones I have in my queue. I just can't get to them because I don't live that kind of life. So that's one thing. There's another important part of the we I want to—I do want to address here that is, I think—could seem like it's a little bit of field from news. But I think a lot of the liberal to progressive, if we're going to think about the political spectrum and the linear fashion—the ideas people have about gender essentially have accepted some of the basic tenets of feminism that—and have begun to grapple with the ways in which classic masculinity, at least, is toxic. And because of that, there's not many real appeals on the liberal and progressive side to men. I feel like in some ways, the left doesn't really have a program for men other than become a feminist, which that's my take, you know what I mean? Let's think about this. What segment of the population has ever encountered a real serious engagement with any real feminist literature, like having read a book? I mean, we're talking about something—what was it? Less than 60% of the population goes to—gets a bachelor's degree at all. So, 60% to 70% don't get a bachelor's degree. And those that do are divided into disciplines. They might be in business. And it's like engineering where you get very little of—any of that. So, you're talking about a tiny slice has even—probably ever even been able to think about what something like feminism means and think about gender in certain kinds of sophisticated ways at least in formal education, granted that's not the only way to learn. A lot of younger people are learning different ways. My point is that a huge part of this news commentary segment, I think the deeper structure is around gender. Because one thing, you could—look, I think Joe Rogan is indeed, platforms, all kinds of terrible folks. But one thing I had to realize about Joe Rogan and some of my students that were into Joe Rogan is that he's appealing to men. For them, he's a model of a man who reads. He always reads. Even when he has somebody like Cornel West, he'll read the work. He engages them. There's a whole spectrum of podcasts that are essentially saying to men, hey, you feel a little funny about all this feminism stuff. You're confused about what it means to be a man, feel like you're being told you're the enemy. Let me talk to you about what it means. And I think that that's a real—we don't have nearly as many of those on the other side. So, I think that is the deep structure underneath a lot of the popularity of those things. I think if you look at a big chunk of those news, those commentary shows, you'll see that. I think that's part of it. I think there's another thing that is at work here, which is just that the kind of shows that I make—and this is probably in some ways maybe even more important. To do real news and documentary, it takes time and investigation. And I think that this in the same way that we saw cable news switch over to this gamified talking head format, replacing any real investigation or substance. I don't want to put all the chat podcasts and news commentary podcasts in that bag. But I will say that they tend to be cheaper to make. And so, another thing that we can argue right now that's interesting or another thing that we can observe right now is that it's interesting to live through history and see ideas about how things will work—be broadcast but then have reality as a laboratory where those things can be tested. And we're living through a genocide right now. That's one. And we're living through a period where the US just says, oh, we're going to build a humanitarian aid thing. But we're also going to keep sending weapons and keep vetoing calls for a cease fire at the same time. And podcasting, I mean, since 2014, what we saw was this huge flood of money into podcasting. And I remember at the time, people being evangelicals saying, yeah, this—by embracing capitalism, we're now going to revolutionize news in all these ways. And some of that did happen. I mean, look, nobody—even Marx claims capitalism has incredible productive capacity. But it also has these contradictions and patterns. And one of those patterns is that once the capitalist's realized his capitalism capitalizing fast enough, he retreats. And so first, what we saw was podcasts. Then we saw some deep investments in shows like Serial and shows like my show. And then we saw a retreat from those shows into we're just going to do celebrity commentary, everywhere, because it's cheaper. And then now, we've even mostly backed away from that. Joe Rogans and a few people will get their platform. And now what a company like Spotify is actually doing is saying, let's just take our existing content and turn it through AI into different languages. Because, God forbid, we had human translators of other languages when we could easily have robots do that.
Matt Jordan: So, it's the same, kind of, for profit incentive systems that is essentially giving us the big name. It's interesting. I did a panel with Harry Shearer a bit ago. And he was talking about different radio voices and his word for the—he called it NPR throat. And it's the Chicago-Jewish guy accent, the Ira Glass. And that is the—for him, that was the—that's the sound of the guy on NPR who is maybe not as welcoming to a large mass audience of men who are wanting somebody to whisper to them and tell them what it is to be that kind of person.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: And it's funny to hear that because I've heard Ira talk about how at the point when he started making This American Life, his voice, which sounded so—it was nothing like—he's not like Ted Koppel or—you what I'm saying, one of these kind of people. So, he was like—he said his voice was the outsider voice. But then it became a dominant aesthetic in public radio. And then people were pushing back against—not pushing back against Ira. I wrote this piece. And I remember they put Ira Glass head on the front of the BuzzFeed version of my piece about vocal color and public radio. And I remember just thinking, damn, I don't want—it's not like I'm coming at Ira. Because Ira is like, now I'm the power. I'm the head of—my thing is the hegemonic thing; you know what I'm saying?
Leah Dajches: I mean, as we've been talking about this and we're thinking—we're talking about Joe Rogan. And Matt called him a super spreader. And we see that he's appealing to, I think for lack of a better term, an underserved sector of an audience when we think about podcasting. I'm concerned about—
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Poor men, Lindsey, poor young men. we just can't get our day.
Leah Dajches: Well, that's what it seems to be though, is what it feels like. And so, I'm so concerned about misinformation, disinformation. And so, this podcast is part of the News Literacy Initiative. So naturally, we talk a lot about news literacy. And I'm wondering, do you think that these same news literacy skills that we teach when it comes to print or even online journalism like fact checking, diversifying our sources, or I think you said verification. Do those same skills apply to podcasts? Or do we need to start to shift our understanding of news literacy when it comes to this emerging media format?
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah. I think they apply. But there's two ways to answer this question—really good question. One way is to say that, yes, the principles of news literacy, of critical media literacy apply to podcasting. But when you apply them to various things along the podcasting spectrum, you're going to come up with mixed results. There's going to be some things that adhere, and some production teams that really value those kind of literacy values, news values for whatever parts of that is helpful. And then you'll find others that don't, that are just like, I have a mic. And I got an audience. And I'm just going to assert all kinds of things. I mean, certainly the—I mean, I think Naomi Klein's recent book called Doppelganger talks about some manifestations and expressions of podcasting in the conservative world. And I think that it's not about—you don't have to be someone who has a partisan take on this to just be able to understand it. A lot of that content is not going to withstand any kind of scrutiny into what is a fact, what's true, what can be verified. The other thing I think related to this, though, is that we—in some ways, to do that effectively, we need a better term than podcast. This category is just too capacious and full. It tries to include what I do along with what Joe Rogan does along with the very other different things. People are doing like audio, theater, and stuff like that. So, I think we need a little bit more precise naming of these genres. I mean, I think there's two important news genres at least. One is more like a kind of audio documentary. It's in the tradition of documentary. So, we then can tap into different conversations about news practices that already existed. We're not reinventing the wheel here because somebody came up with something called a podcast. It's like, this is documentary. And there's different news. There's different kinds of documentary. Some people have more of a very verité thing where it's like—or direct thing where there's going to be the pretense of less intervention at least. But there's different models we can look at. There's also just the radio talk show model. And there's a set of news practices around those. And you see both of those in podcasting. But I absolutely think that it's important for us to just think about how do we get good information out. And one thing, I currently teach the intro to journalism class at NYU. And one of the things I tell my students is that part of living in an empire is that you—there's a lot of perspectives that aren't a part of the dominant story. And so, this idea of different perspectives has gained popularity with—especially with this movements that have happened, some of the social justice movements that have emerged over the last 20 years, the value of perspectives. But those movements are emerging at a time when you had new media that could include "these perspectives", quote unquote. But the reason why I want to put quotes around it is I'm like, there's also been a thing that's been a push back against notions of objectivity. And objectivity, of course, is something that has a lot of violence has been done in the name of objectivity. And we should think in much more critical ways about those traditional notions and also historically. Like, where does this idea even come from? How was it a part of news business models in the 19th century or something like that? But I tell my students despite all of that, I think objectivity is important and here's why. I say because if someone's sexually assaulted, is that just someone's perspective? Or do we want to figure out whether that happened or not? There's a truth there to be found. And I think in a way, as a journalist, you don't get to toss out objectivity. You have to assume—you have to take a particular theoretical empiricist approach that there is a truth. And we have to try to see what traces of evidence that truth has left for us that we can investigate. And I think you have to do that. Because when you're talking about instances of injustice, like when we're talking about children killed in Gaza, and men, and women, and adults, and everybody else—when we're talking about all these other things climate change, these are—I don't think those—I don't consider those things perspectives. I consider those things facts. Now there's a lot of debates to be had about those facts. There's a lot of different relationships that people with different histories can have to those facts. Maybe some people want to maybe describe that as a little t—truth. But I think that journalism has to take that idea seriously and take that approach. And I just think that somehow, we have to grapple with the fact that we are trying to get different perspectives, that people have different relationships to truth. They come to a fact—even something as deadly and serious as the COVID, people's different historical relationships to the medical establishment, to those that really change how they relate to that truth. But once that fact is in your body and in your lungs moving around, I think at that point, you won't wish it was a perspective or that you was listening to somebody on Rogan's platform or anything else. You wish you had somebody telling you the truth about what that was.
Matt Jordan: Well, Chenjerai, this has been really interesting. I think I've gained a lot of perspective on what is, again, a media that has a lot of appeal to people. Young people are listening more and more to podcasting. So, thanks for talking with us and sharing some of your wisdom.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Thanks for having me.
Matt Jordan: Leah, that was—I learned so much about podcasting there that I hadn't really thought about. So, as I'm processing it, I'm wondering what your takeaway was.
Leah Dajches: We covered a lot of ground. And as people who host a podcast, it was really, I think, validating to think about it as a unique art form that has certain affordances or features that really allow us to connect with our listeners, which I hope that we are able to. And there's just so much to unpack and really think about moving forward as we see podcasts further emerge into people's news diets. What about for you, Matt?
Matt Jordan: Well, I mean, it's true that a huge swath of especially young people are getting their news from podcasting now. But I think we hear from Chenjerai that some of the same issues that we talk about often in relation to news media, in general, are also starting to—it's assert their power in relation to podcasting, which is a relatively new form. So, it's over in the last 10 years really. They've blown up. But we're starting to see those same pressures to be profitable, to be cheaper, to do less research, all of these things. So, it's a medium that really appeals to people. But it's also a medium that people have to be on their toes as they're listening to.
Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, a researcher, journalist, artist, and an assistant professor at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. To learn more, visit newsovernews.org. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well informed.
Matt Jordan: 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 at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy initiative.
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