![]() ![]() Journalism’s ability to hold power to account and form consensus is, and continues to be, “limited”, he added. “Not just over the last few years for our show, the transition happened in 2001,” following the 11 September attacks, Glass said, laden with irony. The US – like many other Western nations – has gone from a place “where it seemed like some sort of consensus was possible”, to a new order in which “every cultural and political moment of significance gets interpreted in two radically different ways”, with there being “very little overlap”, said Glass. Increased reporting on anti-vaxxers, the rise of Trumpism and the conspiracy theorists who believe the 2020 US presidential election was fixed has led some to criticise the show for becoming increasingly “political” in recent years. Covering and trying to understand the rise of the American far right has proved particularly difficult: an interview conducted with Jason Kessler, one of the organisers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally – the white supremacist march that saw a neo-Nazi drive his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman – left Glass and his staff (some of whom are black) thinking: “Do we need to hear from any more people like this at all?” (He’d never brand it as a documentary programme: “That’s like sitting down and eating your vegetables.”) “All we try to do is say: ‘This will be fun.’”īut since the pandemic, and as politics and the media have grown increasingly polarised and toxic, humour has been harder to find. Since the inception of This American Life, Glass and his producers “very consciously” presented the show as entertainment. ![]() “The intimacy is just built into radio,” he explained, “and when you put that in the service of any story, it just gives stories such power.” “I think the thing that listeners liked was the thing that we liked as producers, which was just thinking: ‘Oh, these are really good stories – I wanna hear what’s gonna happen.’” Shows on This American Life are like a pick ’n’ mix bag: episodes exploring “Kid logic” are also complemented by the trials and tribulations of a car dealership in New York’s Long Island trying to meet its monthly sales quota (“129 Cars” Glass’s favourite episode), while more recent reporting has featured stories from the front line of the war in Ukraine.ĭespite the show’s various offshoots – including a TV programme, movies and live shows – Glass continues to be grounded by and enamoured with radio. “At the beginning, I think it seemed very new to be telling stories like this,” Glass said. “A British friend and I talked about this before my girlfriend and I came, and I was like, ‘OK, so what are our chances of me getting some mild case of Covid? Are they 100 per cent or 90 per cent?’” “Nobody here wears a mask at all!” he previously joked to the London audience. “I have Covid that I got in London,” he declared at the beginning of the call. We spoke a few weeks after Glass, who lives in New York, came to London’s Southbank Centre in March to perform Seven Things I’ve Learned, his one-man show, delayed due to the pandemic. The programme attracts around four million listeners every week. This American Life has a wide remit and, despite its name, a global focus telling stories in “acts” centred around a weekly theme, the show covers everything from the most inane and granular aspects of life to more existential issues including elections and protests. Glass seems to be spinning a number of plates at any given time. “Stuff just has to get done… it gets very complicated.” He missed the call because that week’s episode of This American Life, the podcast and radio show he founded in 1995 and still hosts today, had to be completely re-edited and recorded. “It’s really just been like a normal work week, but I just didn’t manage it as ideally as I could have,” he told me, apologetically, when we chat a few days later. ![]() ![]() Ira Glass worked through and missed our scheduled Zoom interview. ![]()
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