Citations Needed is a podcast about the intersection of media, PR, and power, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
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Episode 120: 30 Under 30 Lists and the Problem with Our Youth-Obsessed 'Success' Narratives
Every year, a series of highly anticipated listicles of "successful" and "influential" people hailed for their accomplishments surface in corporate media. Forbes reveals the most successful 30 people under the age of 30, and Fortune hails the most successful 40 Under 40. Meanwhile, other business outlets like TechCrunch, Fast Company and CNBC seek a taste of the hype with their own spinoffs. Each time one of these lists is published, a flurry of meta-press ensues. CNN, BBC, and The Los Angeles Times run pieces fawning over these high-profile lists, cementing their status as career launchers within the worlds of tech, politics, finance, venture capital, and other pockets of industry prized in capitalist economies. To the extent left types are chosen, it’s almost always due to their ability to mimic capitalist brand-building or channel activist energy into billionaire-backed nonprofits. Thematically similar stories of “success” are just as ubiquitous: headlines such as Business Insider’s "What 31 highly successful people were doing at age 25" or Oprah's "20 Things Everyone Should Master by Age 40" all create a ticking time bomb notion of "achievement" and success operating under a very specific capitalist framework of human worth. But why are these outlets entrusted with determining whose "success" or "influence" matters? How do these concepts punish – or at least – disappear the poor, disabled and people of color who don’t have the institutional resources to “achieve” capitalist success at such a young age? And above all, how does American media’s constant fetishization of "youth" and "accomplishment" create psychological wear and tear for the 99 percent of the population who cannot – or don’t want to – meet this definition of "success" by their 30s or 40s. On this episode, we analyze the ways in which corporate media’s narratives of "success" peddle neoliberalism, undermine labor solidarity, reinforce unrealistic expectations that degrade collective mental health, and overwhelmingly center the interests of the white professional class. We are joined by Edward Ongweso Jr. and Sarah Jaffe.
Episode 119: How the Right Shaped Pop Country Music
By now, it's largely taken for granted that country music is a racialized signifier, interchangeable with right-wing politics. And it’s not such an unreasonable generalization: the political currents of twanged and drawled patriotic paeans like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)," and Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" leave little to the imagination. But how, exactly, did this come to be? After all, country music, a descendant of the blues, folk, Tejano, and other genres, with connections to labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World and social-justice movements, has historically attracted musicians spanning the political spectrum, and didn’t necessarily emerge from such a staunchly right-wing political tradition. Rather, popular conceptions of country music have long been deliberately shaped by a series of broader ideological projects. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, conservative politicians and other right-wing forces have exploited the genre to promote illiberalism, racism, revanchist politics, and runaway anti-intellectualism where not giving a shit about the world beyond one’s own cold beer, pickup truck, old lady is not only acceptable, but actively encouraged and flaunted. On this episode, we examine how the genre of country music has been wielded as a tool of reactionary politicking in the US, from the machinations of Henry Ford in the 1920s to the Nixon administration’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s and ‘70s to the heady Shock and Y’all days of the Bush years, and how a once working-class tradition became a cultural cul de sac of worn-out tropes and middle-class, white grievance politics. Our guest is writer, editor and artist Alexander Billet.
Episode 118: The Snitch Economy: How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other
Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping. But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers. In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution. In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction. Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.
Episode 117: The Always 'Lagging' U.S. War Machine
"U.S. military tactics falling behind those of adversaries, Pentagon official warns," The Guardian proclaims. "Russian Propaganda Is Pervasive, and America Is Behind the Power Curve in Countering It," reads a report from the RAND Corporation. "U.S. falling behind in new space race, says CIA's former head of science and tech," cautions CBS News. U.S. media consistently characterize the United States – a country with nearly 800 military bases worldwide and an ever-climbing annual defense budget that's already more than a trillion dollars – as the world's eternal underdog. Somehow, the United States military is always "lagging" or "falling behind" perennial enemies Russia, China and evil Muslim terrorists in everything from nuclear weapons, PSYOPs, Internet security and surveillance, Arctic ice cutters, intercontinental ballistic missiles, drones, dominating outer space, and the always reliable and extremely vague "military readiness." The scam goes something like this: A weapons contractor and military-funded think tank publishes a supposedly neutral "report" or a handful "U.S. officials" run to a media outlet insisting the United States is "lagging behind" in a sector that incidentally coincides with said think tank's funders or government entity's interests. Credulous American media mindlessly repeats the claims, everyone acts panicked, treating the warning like a work of good faith, sober and objective analysis. Congress then reacts and uses media coverage to rationalize even more contracts to the very funders of the think tank that raised the warning, further bloating the Pentagon, State Department and CIA budgets. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, all the while portraying the U.S.'s gargantuan defense expenditures as paltry and insufficient. On this episode, we parse the trope of the always “lagging” United States, who pushes and funds it, who benefits from it, and ask why the inverse question – "what if the U.S. is too powerful and dominant over the rest of the world" – is never broached by American media, much less honestly debated. Our guest is FAIR's Jim Naureckas.
News Brief: Detailing the Connection Between Gentrification and Racist Police Harassment
One point brought up in Episode 116, highlighting the connection between real estate interests and over-policing, solicited a lot of feedback from listeners. In this News Brief, we wanted to expand upon this topic by interviewing an academic source we cited in the episode: assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver Brenden Beck, whose work focuses on the intersection between "urban development" projects and the targeted, sustain harassment of communities of color.
Episode 116: The Pro-Gentrification Aspirationalism of HGTV's House-Flipping Shows
The popularity of HGTV house-flipping TV shows can’t be overstated: In the second week of July, HGTV was the fourth highest rated cable network, behind only Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, making it the highest rated entertainment network in the United States. Its most prominent programming: the reliable, risk free formula of home flipping shows. All of these shows—Flip or Flop and its many regional spinoffs, Good Bones, Flipping 101, to name just a few—share a basic formula: house-flippers, usually a family business in the form of a husband and wife team or parent and child with a folksy rapport, buy a neglected house on the cheap—cue zoom-ins on mold, water damage, decaying wood, dust and dead bugs—that’s often in a relatively poor or gentrifying neighborhood. They then turn it into something they describe as "beautiful", to be sold at a much higher price to, most likely, young white people looking for a "funky" home in an "up-and-coming" neighborhood. But at what cost do these glossy, get-rich-quick reality shows entertain us? What ideologies do they promote, and how do they erase the working class black and brown families whose housing was condemned, and communities were systemically neglected, before the camera’s even began rolling? On this episode—our Season 3 finale—we take a look at these shows to understand how and why HGTV became a glorified commercial for house-flipping and gentrification, examining its indifference to housing instability and its dead-eyed cheerleading of “middle-class” bourgeois aspirationalism, no matter the social cost. Our guests are culture writer Ann-Derrick Gaillot and Atlanta-based community organizer Kamau Franklin.
Episode 115: Hollywood & Anti-Muslim Racism (Part III) - How the Pentagon & CIA Sponsor American Mythmaking
For over a hundred years, the American film industry has been promoting and glorifying U.S. foreign policy, initially working with the military and Department of Defense, and eventually, the CIA as well. From its origins as a producer of wartime propaganda like 1911’s The Military Air-Scout to its contemporary role as purveyor of high-tech action epics like Iron Man, Hollywood and the American war machine reinforce each other — myth and politics intertwine. In the process, the entertainment industry has reaped handsome rewards. Producers, directors, and other top brass in the entertainment industry are lavished with military equipment for filming, personal tours of government headquarters, and inside information — or at least what government officials want filmmakers to believe is inside information — all under the guise of lending “authenticity” and “realism” to film and, to an extent, television shows as well. But what are the costs of this so-called “authenticity?” How do the U.S. military and intelligence agencies use benign-sounding partnerships like “on-set consulting” and “equipment loaning” arrangements to shape and censor narratives so they make American Empire look, at worst bumbling and good natured, and, at best, heroic and pure hearted? In Parts I and II of this three-part series on Hollywood and anti-Muslim racism, we analyzed over half a dozen films and TV shows, illustrating how state-driven narratives of U.S. nationalism and vilification of an official enemies animate Hollywood’s cultural products, namely those targeting Arabs and Iranians. On this episode, we’ll explore the intersection of U.S. military and intelligence agencies with Hollywood, taking a closer look at how the military state helps shape films and television showing that pro-U.S. messaging used to smear Muslims doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but is often subsidized by the very forces dropping bombs on them. Our guest is Professor Matthew Alford, co-author of National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood.
Episode 114: Anti-Muslim Racism in Hollywood (Part II) - Oscar-Bait Imperialism
More stats Citations Needed PodcastPro Unlimited 10,122 followers10.1K 142 tracks142 Our cultural context for understanding what we see on the news and hear in our politics, is often informed by the films and TV shows we’ve grown up watching. Pop culture is powerful and persuasive, and — for a century now — racist, Orientalist and cartoonish portrayals of Arabs and Muslims have littered our screens, big and small. This is the second episode in our three-part Citations Needed series on anti-Muslim racism in Hollywood. On Part I, we discussed big budget action and adventure films like Delta Force, American Sniper and True Lies, where Muslims get blown away at every turn. But not every movie and TV show is quite so overt in its vilification of the designated enemy. Since the release of these movies, the state curated narrative in film has diversified, broadening to include savvier Oscar-bait productions in which anti-Muslim racism is dressed up in elaborate plot structures and supposedly nuance "debates". Films like Argo, Syriana, and Zero Dark Thirty are lauded for their ostensible complexity, subtlety, and nuance, such as their willingness to suggest that government agencies like the CIA are bloated and bureaucratic. Instead of scenes with a tough action hero bodyslamming or mowing down teeming hordes of Muslim terrorists, these films are part of a smarter genre of jingoistic action film — the prestige thriller — featuring flawed protagonists, some meta comedy, and women CIA agents excelling in a historically male-dominated field of coups and torture. But ultimately, they project the same tired nationalism and ideology reinforcement just in a sleeker, more modern form. On this episode, we’ll examine how anti-Muslim and anti-Arab propaganda is disseminated through the contemporary prestige thriller genre. We're joined by historian, artist and author Maytha Alhassen.
News Brief: The Harper's Letter and Our Extremely Narrow, Self-Serving Definition of Cancel Culture
A bizarrely vague, cliquish letter demanding everyone be open-minded has no interest in explaining what, precisely, it wants.
Episode 113: Hollywood & Anti-Muslim Racism (Part 1) - Action and Adventure Schlock
The United States and its close allies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing and occupying large sections of the so-called “Muslim world” for decades – drastically ramping up after the 9/11 attacks and seemingly with no end in sight. The U.S., like all empires, cannot operate a large, complex system premised on violence, meddling and subjugation without a moral pretext. This moral pretext, even before 9/11, was primarily about fighting a war on so-called “Terrorism” or “Islamic extremism” while allegedly promoting “stability,” “freedom” and “democracy.” Along with American news media’s constant fear-mongering over scary Muslims lurking in the shadows, a major pillar propping up this moral pretext is pop culture – namely the cultural products coming out of Hollywood. Our decades-long "War on Terror" would no doubt be much more difficult to sustain without a constant reminder from TV and film that, despite the fact that the average American is more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a terrorist attack, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains ever-present and existential, marked by an inevitable “clash of civilizations” devoid of context or any notion that the U.S. is a primary driver of violence across the globe. Over the course of three episodes, we'll be taking a look at how Hollywood’s television and studio film output helps prop up America’s military aggression in the Middle East, engages in both casual and explicit racism, strips conflicts of any historical or imperial context pushes the idea the only Good Muslim is a snitch or CIA agent, and generally leaves its audience angry and ill-informed. In this episode, we review Hollywood’s long history of anti-Muslim racism in both classic and campy action/adventure films and TV and how it both primed us for – and sustains – the never-ending and self-perpetuating "War on Terror."
Episode 112: How "Polarization" Discourse Flattens Power Dynamics and Says Nothing
"Polarization Is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics,” laments The New York Times. “The Constitution Is Threatened by Tribalism,” frets The Atlantic. “American politics has reached peak polarization,” declares Vox. After the past few election cycles, and as uprisings occur throughout the country, we’ve seen endless concern about our alleged zenith of “polarization” and “tribalism.” The Right and the Left, we are told, have grown too radical and today lack the ability to “get things done” and “come together” with a “shared reality.” It’s a superficially appealing narrative — one nostalgic for a non-specified past time of ideal consensus building and Reasonable Centrism. But it’s also a narrative driven by a fantasy that ignores material forces that have shifted the U.S. political establishment further to the right, as the ruling political and economic class has helped sow distrust and paranoia with decades of deadly wars, runaway and rampant inequality, lethal racism and the failed promises of endless economic growth. On this episode, we explore the origins of “polarization” and “partisan tribalism” discourse, profile its biggest pushers, detail who it serves––and who it gets off the hook––and lay out why reductionist and vague “polarization” laments are so beloved by our media and political elite. Our guest is journalist and writer Osita Nwanevu.
Episode 111: How “Small Business” Rhetoric Is Used to Protect Corporate America
“Obama lauds small business owners in his State of the Union,” announced The Washington Post. “I have always said that there is nothing more optimistic – perhaps maybe getting married – than starting a small business,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells us. “John Kerry would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses,” insisted a reelection ad for George W. Bush. Everywhere we turn we are centering the needs of and reminded of the glowing status of the “small business.” They are the bipartisan holiest of holies in our economy – the scrappy little guy that also props up the moral pillars of capitalism – evidence that with a little elbow grease and knowhow anyone can build a business in their image. Small businesses are one of two major vehicles for COVID-19 relief – a wholly uncontroversial good that both parties, all ideologies, everyone!, can agree are worth protecting and prioritizing. But what do pundits and politicians mean exactly when they say “small business”? How does our romantic vision of “small business” match up with reality, and how is their plight used as a messaging vanguard to strip away environmental and labor regulations, tort protections, taxes and a host of safeguards against corporate greed? The rhetoric forces the evocation of a wholesome image of a Mom-and-Pop candy store in Appleton, Wisconsin, in order to push for laws that will ultimately benefit hedge funds, Dupont and Koch Industries, and a murderers row of polluters and worker abusers. Our guests are Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert and Street Fight Radio's Bryan Quinby.
News Brief: The Growing Pushback to Copaganda
In this News Brief we recap the recent mainstream pushback against pro-police pop culture, and discuss how this pushback is raising fundamental questions about the supposed firewall between creators and the political content they produce.
News Brief: Cops Push “Outside Agitator” Line, Exploit Real Fears of Far Right Violence to Delegitimize Protests
In this News Brief we examine the old––and new––ways police and government officials seek to undermine and divide the George Floyd protests.
News Brief: 7 Years On, US Media Still Has No Answer for #BLM Other Than Vague Handwringing
In this News Brief we catch up on the patronizing, racist media coverage of protests in Minneapolis.