The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Host Brooke Gladstone examines threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm
Podcast Extra: After Oregon
Searching for answers after a tragedy like the shooting at Umpqua Community College can be difficult. But some laws have made searching for even the most basic answers - such as how many concealed weapons owners live in a state - just as difficult to find.
In 2011, Michael Luo of The New York Times was writing a series of articles about gun laws across the country. He requested data from Oregon officials about the state's gun license holders, but when pro-gun rights groups learned he was trying to get the information they lobbied the state legislature to shield the data. Within months a new law had passed: all of the records, formerly in the public domain, were now private. Bob talks with Luo about why the data is important and why shielding it can making searching for answers after a tragedy so difficult.
Bob also revisits his conversation with Tom Teves, whose son Alex was killed in the shooting rampage in Aurora, Colorado, about his efforts to keep the press from turning mass killers into media icons with his group, NoNotoriety.