For more than a decade, the podcast Scene on Radio has dedicated each season to one big topic: whiteness, men and the origins of misogyny, climate change, and capitalism, among others. Now, after seven seasons, the team is turning the lens inward with a season called The News. The first two episodes dropped last week.
“We started talking about doing a media season probably five years ago,” said John Biewen, host of Scene on Radio. His cohost for this season is media scholar and longtime collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika, who also co-hosted the seasons on whiteness and American democracy. “It intersects with all of these huge topics that we’ve taken on before. It’s very much related to the quality of our democracy, or perhaps the lack of quality of our democracy.”
To report out the season, Biewen drove to North Carolina’s border belt, a news desert a couple of hours away from his home in Durham, where he spoke to everyday North Carolinians — many of whom work in agriculture — about how they got their news.
“We wanted to do a fair amount of looking over the shoulders of ‘ordinary people’ as they consume media, or hearing about how they experience the news,” Biewen told me. “Three of the four counties that we went to are news deserts. It’s a diverse and economically challenged part of the country. So we could have gone to 100 different places, but it seemed like that was enough good reason, and the fact that it was a couple hours away from me by car was convenient.”
Biewen and Kumanyika also spoke with other media scholars, including Penny Muse Abernathy, who lives in the border belt herself, to try and answer a central question: is the news broken, or has it never worked at all? Kumanyika lays out his theory in the first episode:
When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is, the truth about U.S. history and how brutal it is, or the truth about U.S. behavior around the world? Or the way America’s economic system works and why folks are struggling to get by? This idea that Americans used to agree on things — that we ever really had a consensus as a society? Nah.
Biewen and Kumanyika hope their season travels widely; Scene on Radio has a dedicated audience that is interested in structural deep-dives, but, as Kumanyika told me, the news affects peoples’ understanding of the world, which means it could potentially have broader appeal than any of the show’s past seasons. They’ll be doing some live shows to help grow that audience, including a session at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June.
“The news is a lot like the police,” Kumanyika said. “Everybody has a strong opinion about it.”
