What the Media Should Do During Wartime

What the Media Should Do During Wartime

Founder of Jacobin and president of The Nation Bhaskar Sunkara weighs in. 

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, has become president of The Nation. He joins us to talk about what independent media can and should do during wartime.

Also: “The Left in Purgatory”—at the end of a period of rapid politicization, settling into either gradual decline or slow advance.

Plus: the changing politics of comic books, from WWII to today: Critic J. Hoberman explains how comics served as wartime propaganda in the 1940s, how they were condemned as causing juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, how new kinds of superheroes emerged and then conquered Hollywood, and made billions for the studios—at a time when America was definitely not a superhero in the world. Hoberman reviewed the book Pulp Empire, by Paul S. Hirsch.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

Support The Nation’s June Fundraising Campaign

With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.

As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.

We can play this critical role because of support from readers like you. This June, we’re raising $20,000 to power The Nation’s independent journalism in the run-up to November’s immensely consequential elections.

It’s in our power to build a more just society, and your support at this critical moment brings us closer to that bold vision. I hope you’ll donate today.

Onward,

Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Ad Policy
x