2 minute read
Podcast Review-Citations Needed
from Spare Rib 21S
by Spare Rib
Review by Sophie S. Williams.
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CITATIONS NEEDED ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Episodes are available wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Modern media is convoluted, to say the least. Citations Needed helps clear it up.
The 24-hour news cycle should make spacious time for reporting diverse content with adequate historical context. But listen to the radio for half an hour and you’ll see that the opposite is true.
The liberal media is an odd title, as press is less free than dictated by pressures from all sides. The major media outlets fixate on an event or even a single quote, picking it apart for hours on end in a vacuum that barely looks beyond a single day. When flipping between Fox, CNN, NBC, and even NPR, I have trouble distinguishing between them at all, with each station picking up on certain phrases and positions and spreading them in a flurry until the word-mandate changes again. The American media isn’t biased toward the left, like the right wing claims, nor biased towards the right, but biased towards the center.
The nearly-endless sea of ongoing history makes it easy to drown in information. A bit of understanding helps you tread water. Give your content intake a level of focus. It’s easy to get lost in doom-scrolling — getting back on Twitter, clicking on an article and diving straight to the comments, sinking into a black hole courtesy of the YouTube Recommended algorithm, or skimming
another Instagram infographic. Pull away from social media, and don’t feel compelled to rely on shallow, sporadic takes from the corporate media on the radio or nightly news. Instead, pick from a catalogue of episodes on specific but pressing topics, things you never thought about critically but always felt were vaguely important.
With over 100 episodes since 2017, Citations Needed offers an approachable look at modern phenomena. Want to know how and why country music grew from radical pro-worker folk into a purity-testing, far-right-all-white genre? Curious about what the wild popularity of HGTV home-makeover programs indicates about houselessness and gentrification in the United States? Interested in how vapid diplomacy-speak disguises the brutality of imperialist foreign policy? This is your show.
Citations Needed, like all the best informa-
tive podcasts, delivers a mixture of the experiences of having a conversation, watching an inter view, and reading a book. The information is thorough, thoughtful, and passionately well-researched, and the earnest yet conversational tone really does drive some loneliness away. The cherry on top — there are no ads, whatsoever. Offering analytical takes on modern details, with accessible language and knowledgeable guests, Citations Needed is news-praxis all the way.
(And their sources are thoroughly cited.)
Listen to Citations Needed wherever you get your podcasts.
Random Bonus Episode:
“Depression, Anxiety, and Turning Suffering Into Compassion” (Rev Left Radio, Janury 28, 2021)
