Podcast / The Time of Monsters / Dec 1, 2024

Factchecking Won’t Save Democracy

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, a talk about the rise of anti-system politics.

The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Podcasts

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.

Factchecking Won’t Save Democracy | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

For this week's edition of The Time of Monsters podcast, we're posting a talk that host Jeet Heer gave at Carleton University earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking.

But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawed since voters who respond to antisystem arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with antisystem anger in a more productive way.

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Keynote speaker Jeet Heer questions the role of fact-checking in an increasingly distrusting society at the Reimagining Political Journalism conference at Carleton University on Nov. 15, 2024.

(Natasha Baldin)

For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I gave at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/anti-system. Liberals have tried to fight anti-system politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on fact-checking.

But I maintain that this strategy is deeply flawed, since voters who respond to anti-system arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with anti-system anger in a more productive way.

The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Podcasts

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.

Origins of the Imperial Presidency w/ David Sirota | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

As millions of Americans protest Donald Trump under the slogan of “No Kings,” it is

worth asking how the nation ended up with such an authoritarian president. David Sirota

and the team at The Lever have provided a great answer to this question in their new

podcast seriesMaster Plan: The Kingmakers, which looks at the revival of the Imperial

Presidency after the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. I talked to David about the

history uncovered in this podcast and why Trump is merely a symptom of a much

deeper problem.

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Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

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