We all know the newspaper business is in trouble. A weekday edition of the LA Times – once a “national” newspaper, along with the NYTimes, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal – now might be 32 pages and another 100 were recently laid off in the newsroom. The culprit is assumed to be the internet, stealing both stories and ads. Not so fast. I talk with MARGOT SUSCA, a former reporter, now a professor of Journalism, about her first book, HEDGED: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. Her assessment: “What we have is not a crisis of profit. What we have is a crisis of greed and growing inequality.”

The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of White voters was in 1964. ROBERT P JONES, President and Founder of the Public Religion Research Insitute (PRRI) and author of THE HIDDEN ROOTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY and the Path to a Shared American Future, writes that “White Christian nationalism has become central to the…Republican Party, two thirds of whom identify as white and Christian.” To find the origins of white supremacy, he says we need to look beyond 1619 to 1493, when the Pope issued the Doctrine of Discovery – that all territory not already inhabited or controlled by Christians shall be claimed by Christians as their new promised land. Learn more at www.whitetoolong.net

In todays fractionalized & polarized world, facts and reality are too often less important than which narrative you embrace or which stories you believe. Here’s my 2012 conversation with JONAH SACHS, Co-Founder of Free Range Studios – the folks behindthe classic Story of Stuff – and author of WINNING THE STORY WARS. Learn how and why narrative works so well and how to use it to your advantage.

The market – using money in politics to write its own rules – cannot respond effectively to critical challenges we face . JOAN WALSH, formerly at Salon, CNN, and MSNBC and now national affairs correspondent for The Nation, authored CORPORATE BULLSH*T with Nick Hanauer (Pitchfork Economics; Civic Action) & Donald Cohen (The Public Interest). Digging into myths and strategies of the Right, they focus on six big lies used over and over again to hold onto power and hold back progress. To learn more, go to thenation.com – search for Joan Walsh. 

American democracy is under attack in 2024. Last week I talked with SAM DALEY-HARRIS about the life-tested lessons in his book RECLAIMING OUR DEMOCRACY: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy. I recommend the book and the episode. I follow this week with my 2017 conversation with FRANCES MOORE LAPPE and ADAM EICHEN. LAPPE, who published Diet For A Small Planet over 50 years ago and whose work since has consistently updated the best the 60’s had to offer, and EICHEN, who graduated from college in 2015, met on a pro-democracy march. They co-authored DARING DEMOCRACY: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want – their report on pro-democracy movements near the end of Trump’s first year in office.