Fluent Media
How do media business models drive the content put before us? How can we as consumers filter media more carefully and critically?
Today’s big political and social issues can’t be understood without deep knowledge of the media industry and media influence. Fluent Media engages the most insightful journalists, researchers, scholars, and analysts to illuminate the major media trends, terms and tradeoffs. Take a break from scrolling through media to take in some real insight on media.
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Wait, I’m Not the Crazy One!
Wait, I’m Not the Crazy One! Sarah Longwell, Conservative Watchdog Of Republican Sanity “I’m watching everybody slowly turn into a pro-Trump…
Voice of Reason for Independent Minds
Voice of Reason for Independent Minds Talking Media & Polarization With CNN’s Michael Smerconish “I have been paying attention for thirty…
Online Conspiracies and Virtual Cults
Online Conspiracies and Virtual Cults Social Extremes In Our Hyperpartisan Age Our digital universe is full of information, and misinformation, swirling…
posts
Hollywood’s Fictional Presidents & the Challenges of a Polarized Audience
From the Editors | Prime Time for an Independent President… | Issue 7 | July 15,…
The Magic of Misinformation, Conspiracies, and Cults
From The Editors | The Magic of Misinformation, Conspiracies, and Cults | Issue 5 | June 2,…
podcasts
Voice of Reason for Independent Minds
Voice of Reason for Independent Minds Talking Media & Polarization With CNN’s Michael Smerconish “I have been paying attention for thirty years,” CNN and SiriusXM host & commentator Michael Smerconish tells us. “And during that time the country has been driven into a partisan ditch.” A well-known visage from his CNN show, Smerconish is also…
Wait, I’m Not the Crazy One!
Wait, I’m Not the Crazy One! Sarah Longwell, Conservative Watchdog Of Republican Sanity “I’m watching everybody slowly turn into a pro-Trump zombie that I’ve ever worked with or been around; everyone’s doing their rationalizations.” So recalls special guest this episode, Sarah Longwell, conservative strategist turned watchdog of Republican populism as Executive Director of the Republican…
Speaking Truth in Polarized Times
Top Guest Insights From 2021 Speaking Truth In Polarized Times The year 2021 would certainly be worth forgetting if its worst elements weren’t so clearly continuing on into the New Year 2022 and very likely beyond: the Omicron surge, the worst U.S. inflation in decades, and the maelstrom of misinformation swirling around the clear benefits…
Hollywood Presidents for a Partisan Nation, Part 4
Romance, Grandeur & Smugness on The West Wing Hollywood Presidents for a Partisan Nation, Part 4 Our Purple Principle series on Hollywood Presidents would not be complete without a stroll back in time through that show of all Potus shows, The West Wing, featuring Martin Sheen as President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet. We speak with award-winning…
Hollywood Presidents for a Partisan Nation, Part 3
Hail the Flip-Flopping Egomania of Veep Hollywood Presidents for a Partisan Nation, Part 3 HBO’s Veep, starring Julia Louis Dreyfuss, is quite likely the most successful American political satire in television history. Yet, in seven seasons, the show never mentions the party labels “Democrat” or “Republican,” instead using terms like “the enemy camp” or, more…
Amazing Grace For Our Partisan Times
Amazing Grace For Our Partisan Times Sarah and Beth, Creators of Pantsuit Politics Is it possible to have grace-filled conversations during these ingracious times of ours? After 500 episodes heard by hundreds of thousands of listeners, Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers, the Kentucky-based creators of Pantsuit Politics, can decisively say that it is. In…
A Civic Way to Reverse Polarization?
A Civic Way to Reverse Polarization? New Vitality In Education & Legislation Is civics education in the U.S. having a moment, as in a long overdue upgrade, for a topic essential to our democracy? And will that moment translate into more substantial education on the rights and obligations of our citizens and voters-to-be at the…
Woking up to Backlash
Woking up to Backlash New York Times Columnist Thomas Edsall on Reason & Responsibility in Polarized Politics “The rise of the conservative movement on the right and the decline of liberalism on the left have been a preoccupation of mine for 40 years or more,” Thomas Edsall confides in our latest Season Two episode, “Woking…
Hollywood Presidents For A Partisan Nation, Part 2
Hail the Independent & Designated Survivor Hollywood Presidents For A Partisan Nation, Part 2 Imagine creating a television series premised on a U.S. Capitol building attack, then watching a less lethal yet all too real version of that event unfold years later. Writer/Creator David Guggenheim relates how that felt in the second part of our…
Hollywood Presidents For A Partisan Nation, Part 1
Hail The Independent Commander In Chief Hollywood Presidents For A Partisan Nation, Part 1 In a time of extreme polarization, how does Hollywood portray a POTUS with broad audience appeal? That question is at the heart of our multi-part series on Hollywood Presidents, starting with special guest Rod Lurie, the first to create an independent…
Nicest Troll in Town
Nicest Troll in Town On- and Offline identity, Extremism, and Polarization Social media is not fundamentally a source of information or a competition of ideas, but a competition of identities. With that and other provocative findings, Dr. Chris Bail, Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab and author of Breaking the Social Media Prism (Princeton…
Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults
Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults Part 2: Celebrity Makes The World Go Flat Do we live in an age where online conspiracies and cults proliferate ever more frequently and powerfully? We continue to explore this question, focusing this episode on the tremendous growth of the flat earth movement in “Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults, Part…
What combats Vax Skepticism?
What combats Vax Skepticism? An Interview with Dr. Jeanine Guidry, Director of VCU’s Health & Media Lab Battling the COVID pandemic has been a war on many fronts – disease management, the race to develop safe, effective vaccines, and now the equally trickly public relations battle against vaccine misinformation and committed skeptics of all kinds….
Civil Society and Campus Politics
Civil Society and Campus Politics Two Collegians Take on Polarization Colleges have come to be known as havens for divisive politics, cancel culture, and trollism, all miserably co-existing with academic stress, social pressure and stale pizza. In Episode 18, “Civil Society and Campus Politics.” The Purple Principle profiles two college students pushing back against the…
Centennial of Yeats’ The Second Coming
Centennial of Yeats’ The Second Coming Part 2: Things Fall Apart Today (Much Like A Century Ago) Exactly one hundred years ago this month, at a time of deep political polarization and the Spanish Flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming”, a poem premised on the cycles of history that resonates today with…
The Second Coming Turns 100
The Second Coming Turns 100 A Discussion of W.B. Yeats’ Classic Poem of Polarization with Pulitzer winner Paul Muldoon How does a century-old poem written in Ireland as European civil wars erupted in the aftermath of World War I still resonate as if written for our own partisan era? That is the central question The…
Science, Comedy & Partisanship
Science, Comedy & Partisanship Shane Mauss Stands up and Speaks Out What makes a stand-up comedian wake up one day and decide comedy needs more science? Or science needs more comedy? A road comic for 13 years, Shane Mauss made one or both of these enlightened decisions five plus years ago in launching his science…
Comedy & Partisanship
Comedy & Partisanship The Transcendent Laugh With Special Guest, Myq Kaplan Ok, Comedians, make America laugh with surprising, original jokes that offend absolutely no one and work equally well in our very blue, very red and very antagonized parts of the country… to the Purple Principle team, that seemed a near-impossible challenge in today’s partisan environment. …
Social Media & Partisanship
Social Media & Partisanship Polarizing Algorithms And A Blind Date With Dividends How do social media algorithms feed us news, entertainment, advertisements, even suggesting friends and lovers? By grossly simplifying human nature, according to featured guest Dr. Robert Elliott Smith, Research Fellow in Computer Science at University College London and author of Rage Inside the…
Broadcast Media and Partisanship
Broadcast Media and Partisanship Side of Spin with Your Nightly News, with Dr. Dominik Stecula What the heck happened to broadcast news in recent decades? That is the burning question we ask of Dr. Dominik Stecula, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University and expert on broadcast media trends in the US over…
Front Lines of Partisanship
Front Lines of Partisanship With Dr. Charles Wheelan from Unite America In Episode 2, our guests include a former Republican speechwriter, a former centrist Democratic congressional candidate, a former Economist Magazine correspondent, a current Professor of Public Policy (Dartmouth College) and the founder of the non-partisan group, Unite America…. Lots of guests for one podcast?…