Scene on Radio
by Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Our latest is Season 7, Scene on Radio: Capitalism. Previous series include Seeing White (Season 2), looking at the roots and meaning of white supremacy; MEN (Season 3), on patriarchy and its history; The Land That Never Has Been Yet (Season 4), exploring democracy in the U.S. and why we don’t have more of it; The Repair (Season 5), on the cultural roots of the climate crisis; and Season 6, Echoes of a Coup, the story of the only successful coup d'etat in U.S. history, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. Produced and hosted by John Biewen, with collaborators, Scene on Radio comes from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The show is distributed by PRX.
Episodes
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Guest Episode: Question Everything
When it comes to using AI in the creation of "journalism," just how far could things go? We're sharing a fresh episode from the excellent podcast, Question Everything. In Scene on Radio's latest season, we looked at the news media in crisis and some of the ways the work of journalists can get...
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S8 E9: The News, Bonus Q&A
Co-hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika respond to questions sent in by listeners in response to Scene on Radio Season 8: The News. Questions about AI and propaganda, journalistic bias, America's plummeting press freedom ranking, about whether we got it wrong about the media's coverage of...
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Guest Episode: Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising
We're sharing an episode from a new series: Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising, from Future Hindsight. In 2011, in the wake of the financial crisis and Great Recession stemming from Wall Street wheeling and dealing gone bad, protesters gathered in lower Manhattan to take a stand. The movement quickly...
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Guest Episode: The Battle for Free Speech
We're sharing an episode from another series we think will be of interest to our listeners -- one that's closely related to our Season 8 series, The News: The Battle for Free Speech. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary this year, our most basic freedom — the freedom of speech — is...
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First America: It Happened Here
The American Revolution wasn’t just a fight for liberty. It was also a sprawling conflict with Indigenous nations over who would control North America. To stake its claim, the United States was willing to commit genocide. This is episode 3 of First America, a new show about how America’s current...
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First America: Playing Indian
We’re back with Episode 2 of First America, a new show by Indigenous author Rebecca Nagle about how the United States really came to be and how we got to today’s present moment. Rebecca and historian Phil Deloria (Dakota descent) head to Boston to try to understand Americans’ obsession with…
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First America: "Merciless Indian Savages"
We're sharing the first of three episodes from a new series we think our listeners will want to hear. Americans have been told our Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But the last entry of the Declaration focuses on the founders' contempt for the “merciless Indian savages.”…
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S8 E8: Making Media Democratic
This season we've explored how the news media are failing the American people and our democracy. In this concluding episode, we look at solutions -- how to help good journalism survive, and how we might imagine a better, more democratic media system. By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai...
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S8 E7: Can We Blame the Media For THIS?
Many people in the United States and around the world view the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a grave crisis. At the same time, most Americans are angry with the news media. What role did the media play in making a President Trump possible? By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai...
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S8 E6: What Could Have Been
Ever thought about whether America's overwhelmingly corporate, for-profit news system is working as it should? It didn't have to be this way. In the 20th century, reformers fought for a more democratic and more accountable news media in the United States. They won victories, including the…
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S8 E5: Follow the Money
The early history of the news in Europe and the U.S. offers surprising lessons about the best traditions of journalism, and about the news we need in our own time of crisis. By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Pascal Verhoest, Rachael King, Joseph Adelman, and Victor...
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S8 E4: What About Us
Scene on Radio requests and receives an independent analysis of its own journalistic biases. We then return the favor, examining the examiner. The exercise leads to fresh insights into the muddled ways people often think about bias. By John Biewen, with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interview with...
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S8 E3: About that Liberal Media
For generations, many on the political right have claimed that major news media in the U.S. have a pronounced liberal bias. Is it true? And why does it matter? We take a fresh look. By John Biewen with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Michael Massing, Peter Beinart, and William…
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S8 E2: When the News Dies
Many people know that the journalism industry is struggling financially, especially at the local level. But the disastrous depths of that crisis, and its impact on communities and American democracy, are not as well understood. We visit a news desert in southeastern North Carolina. By John Biewen...
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S8 E1: The Myth of the Echo Chamber
Americans have access to a flood of news, and yet we're in a deep information crisis. What's really wrong with the news media? Is it what we think it is? And what about news consumers? Most of us don't trust the media, but can we trust ourselves? By John Biewen with co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika....
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Introducing Scene on Radio: The News
Everybody's mad at the media. And Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. A well informed citizenry we are not. In Scene on Radio's 8th season, producer and host John Biewen and returning co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika…
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Guest Episode: Drilled: Carbon Cowboys
We're happy to share this episode from award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt, co-host of Scene on Radio's 5th season: The Repair. Amy returns with a new season of Drilled, her podcast about the deception, disinformation, and power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach....
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Guest Episode: Master Plan: The Kingmakers
We are sharing a special episode from Master Plan, the award-winning investigative series from our friends at The Lever. Its new season, The Kingmakers, traces the decades-long effort to manufacture an all-powerful presidency. Host David Sirota and his team of journalists investigate the rise of…
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Guest Episode: More Muslim
We're sharing this guest episode from the podcast More Muslim. Reporter Aina Khan reports on the oldest Muslim community in Cape Town, South Africa -- the Cape Malay community. The community, with roots in Indonesia, has survived through centuries of colonialism and oppression, but now faces a…
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Proxy: Nicole Can't Stop Being Aggro
A guest episode from the podcast Proxy: Nicole is an organizer who's good at channeling her anger. The trouble is she can't always downshift -- or even allow herself to feel sad about the problems she's fighting against. That doesn't seem healthy. Maybe it'll help if Nicole can talk with someone...
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Historical Maturity and Cowardice: Keeping ScOR #15
Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. After a visit to his hometown, Mankato, Minnesota -- the subject of the Scene on Radio episode, "Little War on the Prairie" -- John reflects on the changes there and America's latest assault on history. Music by goodnight, Lucas.…
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Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders
We're sharing an episode from another podcast that asks big questions about who we are and how we got here: The Alabama Murders, a new series by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. Entangled in an affair with a parishioner, a Northwest Alabama minister made a...
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Voices of Hiroshima
A rebroadcast of a Scene on Radio episode, eighty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The word “Hiroshima” may bring to mind a black-and-white image of a mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that it’s an actual city with a million people and a...
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Lever Time: Trump, Colbert, And The War On Truth
A bonus episode from the Lever Time podcast: Their latest, exploring the decision by CBS to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the wider context for that move -- Donald Trump's effort to crush dissent through lawsuits and other attacks on media corporations. With host David Sirota and...
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Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7
Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Reflections on the Trump Administration's attempt to wrangle control of the national story and how it's told. Will this attack on factual history succeed? Music by goodnight, Lucas. To read see the Keeping ScOR newsletter archive…
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The New Old Racism: Keeping ScOR#4
Host John Biewen teases Season 8 and reads an installment from his new newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Eight years after our "Seeing White" series, whiteness is still a helluva drug -- and a powerful tool for Trump 2.0. Music by goodnight, Lucas Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
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Bonus: Michael Kliën and the Body Politic
Michael Kliën wants to help bring about profound change in the world, but not through the usual means. An Austrian-born Dance professor at Duke University, Kliën is a leading social choreographer. He sets up experiments involving people moving amongst each other -- wordlessly -- in pursuit of new...
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S7 E13: CAPITALISM Bonus, Live at Motorco
With our Capitalism season and the election behind us, now what? Can we find hope and a way forward? In a live show taped December 5, 2024, at Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina, Season 7 co-hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt are joined by journalism professor, podcast maker, and…
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Post-election '24 All-Star Special
Host John Biewen is joined by Celeste Headlee, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Ellen McGirt, and Amy Westervelt, co-hosts of Scene on Radio's full-length seasons -- Seeing White, MEN, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, The Repair, and Capitalism -- for a free-wheeling conversation about the 2024 U.S.…
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S7 E12: Reimagined Economies
In our season finale, we visit with people on two continents who are turning core structures of capitalism on their heads – or, at least, sideways. By John Biewen with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with John Fullerton, Ander Etxeberria, Deseree Fontenot, Corrina Gould, Regan Pritzker, Dana...
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S7 E11: Better Capitalism?
In the first of two episodes looking at responses to capitalism’s failings, we explore reforms aimed at making the current economic system more humane, fair, effective, and sustainable. By John Biewen with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with Lutz Schwenke, Jordi Llatje i Espinal, Marjorie…
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S7 E10: The Extracted
A visit to West Africa and Western Europe to look at the cocoa trade. Did the colonial side of early capitalism – Western countries getting rich at the expense of poorer nations – ever change, or does it continue today? Reported by Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo and written by Ugochi and Loretta Williams,...
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S7 E9: At the Tipping Point
In 1972, a team of young scientists at MIT published a study exploring what would happen to human civilization if people kept pursuing endless economic growth on a finite planet. They weren’t just disbelieved, they were ridiculed. The story of Donella Meadows and The Limits to Growth. Reported…
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S7 E8: The People's Pushback
S7 E8: The People’s Pushback Over several decades, a growing number of people in the United States and elsewhere – especially younger people – have turned against capitalism. The reasons are not mysterious. Reported by Lewis Raven Wallace and produced by John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt....
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S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0
S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0 After 40 years of neoliberalism, most Americans of every political stripe agree that the economy is “rigged” in favor of corporations and the wealthy. But we may not know the half of it. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with Nancy MacLean, Edward...
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S7 E6: Thirty Glorious Years
How the balance of power shifted, for a time, in the decades after World War II, and led to a better kind of capitalism – if you think prosperity being broadly shared is a good thing. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with Eric Rauchway and Brad DeLong. Thanks to the Studs...
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S7 E5: A New Thing in Human History
An age of invention and mass production, propelled by a new mechanism – the corporate research lab – leads to a surge in material wealth like the world has never seen. How does a new nation, the United States, overtake its parent as the leader of the surging capitalist order? And what does it all...
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S7 E4: Invisible Hand Guy?
Economic change happens in a cultural context. We trace the tectonic shifts in the Western mind that made capitalism thinkable – in part through a look at two Enlightenment thinkers: Baruch Spinoza and Adam Smith. (The real Smith, not the one held up as the patron saint of unfettered capitalism.)...
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S7 E3: Ships, Swords, and Fences
From the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama to colonial conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade, to the privatization of land in western Europe: humanity’s turn toward the capitalist world we live in now. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with Jayati Ghosh, Jason Hickel,...
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S7 E2: BC: Before Capitalism
To fully grasp capitalism, it helps to understand the system it replaced – and the most meaningful differences between feudalism and capitalism. We visit the British Isles of the Middle Ages. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with Karen Dempsey, Ben Jervis, and Eleanor Janega....
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S7 E1: Market Failure
Introduction to our 7th season: Capitalism. The world’s dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn’t been for at least half a century. Millions, young people especially, now see capitalism as the problem, not the solution. Others fear throwing out the baby with the bathwater. By John Biewen,...
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Season 7 Trailer: Capitalism
Welcome to Season 7: Capitalism. The world's dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn't been for at least half a century. This season tells the story of capitalism -- how people with power built and shaped it over time. We'll also explore what to do now that many people see capitalism as…
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Bonus: Long Shadow, In Guns We Trust
As we get ready to launch our Season 7, a bonus episode from another podcast we think our listeners will want to hear: Long Shadow. Episode 1 of its newest season, In Guns We Trust, with host Garrett Graff. Mass shootings have plagued the U.S. for generations. But in 1999, when shots rang out in…
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S6 E5: A Way Forward
What would it take, and what would it even mean, to heal from a wound like the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898 — or from centuries of white supremacist violence, disenfranchisement, and theft? An exploration of that question with community members in Wilmington, and experts on restorative...
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S6 E4: The Forgetting
After the massacre and coup of November 10, 1898, white supremacists in North Carolina soon finished the job of disenfranchising Black citizens and instituting Jim Crow segregation. They also took control of the narrative. A new propaganda campaign, the one after the fact, succeeded for a century…
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S6 E3: A Day of Blood
On November 1898, North Carolina Democrats won a sweeping victory at the polls – confirming the success of their campaign based on white supremacy, intimidation, and fraud. But in Wilmington, the state’s largest city, white supremacist leaders were not satisfied. This episode tells what happened…
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S6 E2: Crying "Negro Rule"
By 1898, two decades after the end of Reconstruction, white elites, backed by violent terror groups, have installed Jim Crow across most of the South. North Carolina, led by its largest city, Wilmington, is different. A Fusion coalition, made up of mostly-Black Republicans and mostly-White…
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S6 E1: What Was Lost
This series tells the story of the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history, and the white supremacist massacre that went with it. It happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in November 1898. But before we get to that story, we explore the surprising world of Wilmington in the 19th century –…
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Season 6 Trailer: Echoes of a Coup
Introduction to Season 6, a series co-produced by Michael A. Betts II and Scene on Radio producer and host John Biewen, with story editor Loretta Williams. Music by Kevin MacLeod, Okaya, and Lucas Biewen. Echoes of a Coup is a project of America’s Hallowed Ground and Scene on Radio, from the…
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Update: Scene on Radio status report
Scene on Radio is on an extended hiatus, but is on its way back. Host and producer John Biewen explains that the show has found a new home: the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
About this show
Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Our latest is Season 7, Scene on Radio: Capitalism. Previous series include Seeing White (Season 2), looking at the roots and meaning of white supremacy; MEN (Season 3), on patriarchy and its history; The Land That Never Has Been Yet (Season 4), exploring democracy in the U.S. and why we don’t have more of it; The Repair (Season 5), on the cultural roots of the climate crisis; and Season 6, Echoes of a Coup, the story of the only successful coup d'etat in U.S. history, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. Produced and hosted by John Biewen, with collaborators, Scene on Radio comes from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The show is distributed by PRX.
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Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
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