Scene on Radio

Guest Episode: Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising

We're sharing an episode from a new series: Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising, from Future Hindsight. In 2011, in the wake of the financial crisis and Great Recession stemm

Guest Episode: The Battle for Free Speech

We're sharing an episode from another series we think will be of interest to our listeners -- one that's closely related to our Season 8 series, The News: The Battle for

First America: It Happened Here

The American Revolution wasn’t just a fight for liberty. It was also a sprawling conflict with Indigenous nations over who would control North America. To stake its claim

First America: Playing Indian

We’re back with Episode 2 of First America, a new show by Indigenous author Rebecca Nagle about how the United States really came to be and how we got to today’s present

First America: "Merciless Indian Savages"

We're sharing the first of three episodes from a new series we think our listeners will want to hear.  Americans have been told our Revolution was fought over taxation a

S8 E8: Making Media Democratic

This season we've explored how the news media are failing the American people and our democracy. In this concluding episode, we look at solutions -- how to help good jour

S8 E7: Can We Blame the Media For THIS?

Many people in the United States and around the world view the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a grave crisis. At the same time, most Americans are angry wi

S8 E6: What Could Have Been

Ever thought about whether America's overwhelmingly corporate, for-profit news system is working as it should? It didn't have to be this way. In the 20th century, reforme

S8 E5: Follow the Money

The early history of the news in Europe and the U.S. offers surprising lessons about the best traditions of journalism, and about the news we need in our own time of cris

S8 E4: What About Us

Scene on Radio requests and receives an independent analysis of its own journalistic biases. We then return the favor, examining the examiner. The exercise leads to fresh

S8 E3: About that Liberal Media

For generations, many on the political right have claimed that major news media in the U.S. have a pronounced liberal bias. Is it true? And why does it matter? We take a

S8 E2: When the News Dies

Many people know that the journalism industry is struggling financially, especially at the local level. But the disastrous depths of that crisis, and its impact on commun

S8 E1: The Myth of the Echo Chamber

Americans have access to a flood of news, and yet we're in a deep information crisis. What's really wrong with the news media? Is it what we think it is? And what about n

Introducing Scene on Radio: The News

Everybody's mad at the media. And Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. A well informed c

Guest Episode: Drilled: Carbon Cowboys

We're happy to share this episode from award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt, co-host of Scene on Radio's 5th season: The Repair. Amy returns with a new season

Historical Maturity and Cowardice: Keeping ScOR #15

Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. After a visit to his hometown, Mankato, Minnesota -- the subject of the Scene on Radio episode, "Little

Voices of Hiroshima

A rebroadcast of a Scene on Radio episode, eighty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.   The word “Hiroshima” may brin

Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7

Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Reflections on the Trump Administration's attempt to wrangle control of the national story and how it's

The New Old Racism: Keeping ScOR#4

Host John Biewen teases Season 8 and reads an installment from his new newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Eight years after our "Seeing White" series, whiteness is still a helluva

Bonus: Michael Kliën and the Body Politic

Michael Kliën wants to help bring about profound change in the world, but not through the usual means. An Austrian-born Dance professor at Duke University, Kliën is a lea