Shows
Why Now? A Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 13: If I Told You, I Would Have To Kill YouOn this episode, my guest is here to help us parse the world of government secrecy—its history, practices, and dilemmas—and how the classification system undermines our democracy. Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and the co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. He’s the principal investigator of History Lab, a National Science Foundation-funded project that applies data science to the problem of preserving the public record and accelerating declassification. Out of that work came a new book, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Se...2023-02-1345 min
Why Now? A Political Junkie PodcastEpisode 12: All The News That's Fit To PrintToday, conservative critics condemn the so-called “liberal media” for being in cahoots with policymakers and politicians—but there was a time when that was a formal, accepted way of doing business. In her new book, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022), University of Wisconsin historian Kathryn J. McGarr takes us into that world—one in which journalists agreed, as McGarr explains in today’s episode, to publish government lies—but not lie for the government; to work to prevent World War III by serving as informal advisors to the powerful, an...2023-02-0642 min