The Take - Podcast Rankings and reviews

The Take gives up-to-the-minute reports and analyses of today’s most important international news. This podcast provides a level of concise reporting, from journalists on the ground, you won’t find at other mainstream news podcasts. If you are interested in understanding the impact of world conflict upon its citizens, listen to The Take—a well-produced, highly informative daily show. You will feel more connected to the world.

Distills without oversimplifying, excellent choice of diverse interviewees who provide key facts/context (often missing from western media coverage), while also giving the listener a sense of what the overall situation feels like for the human beings in the middle of it. Most international affairs podcasts draw on a small stable of pedigreed think-tank or academic “experts” from US or U.K. who have little experiential knowledge or stake in what they’re talking about. The Take does something much more difficult and valuable, by finding people to interview who have both expertise and on the ground knowledge and an actual humans perspective on the situation. The understanding this gives the listener is qualitatively richer than what one can get from listening to people whose expertise is only academic or business/political-elite oriented.

What’s happening in Gaza right now is an ever worsening atrocity. The depth of the tragedy is compounded when one realizes that the Palestinians have been trapped in many versions and degrees of this nightmare for at least 75 years. So few have empathized with their injustice and fewer have taken action to defend them and tell their story. The Take has brilliantly, courageously and calmly shed light on the history and current horrors which are ongoing with no end in sight for all Palestinians. If everyone could hear these stories and the voices of these experts, perhaps many who have set opinions fueled by generations of Israeli bias and propaganda might realize that they need to reassess their assumptions. The ongoing violence is an outgrowth of generations of policies that have brutalized the Palestinian people. Israel’s justifications and agenda of retribution has turned their own selves into a monster worst than any resistance. . The insightful, intelligent and earnest conversations happening on The Take are desperately needing to enter into the popular dialogue if any road towards peace can ever be paved.

Superlative and often wrenching coverage of global issues. Their reports on the war in Gaza offer intimate and often heartbreaking accounts of the increasingly desperate lives of Palestinians. Absolutely first-rate.