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This episode features a clip of MSNBC's Chris Hayes on The Brian Lehrer Show offering up an key insight about the right-wing media bubble. Specifically, the unbelievable ratings that Fox News/Bill O’Reilly have always maintained. Basically, roughly half of the population's attention is distributed across the entire media spectrum (like, every major media outlet you can think of from newspapers to networks to public broadcasting, etc.), while the other half of the country gets its news exclusively from a relative handful of explicitly right-wing outlets. As a result Fox News' ratings is roughly half the viewing public, while everything else is splitting the other half of potential viewers.
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Background music in this episode was "New Berlin, New York" and "The Beekeeper" by The Westerlies from their self-titled album (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify), as well as "Longleaf Pines" by Daniel Hart from the Music from S-Town album (iTunes, Spotify), and finally "Perpetuum Mobile" from Penguin Cafe Orchestra's album Concert Program (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify).
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This episode has clips of Washington Post columnist and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum on Sam Harris’ Waking Up. She describes how Trump, while self-identifying as a great “dealmaker” is utterly oblivious (and hostile to) the role of American dealmaking. That is: Leveraging “soft power” for America's gain. She details how "globalization", while often maligned, is really decades of our diplomats and leaders wheeling and dealing to successfully “Americanize” the world.
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This episode features a clip from SNL's Weekend Update about racist elf Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's perjury, and Mike Pence's routine use of a hacked private email server when sending, among other things, sensitive security-related communiqué.
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Season Finale!
This episode features a clip from Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Trevor Noah's last episode of 2016.
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This episode features a clip from Weird Al's 1989 film UHF where Bob and George pretty well sum up how I feel every day these days. Also, a clip from John Powers' review of HBO's West World on WHYY's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
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