RSA Journal: Listen
This piece first appeared in the RSA Journal in November 2018
Five podcast recommendations to help us all be better listeners
Over the past 43 years, the American radio journalist Terry Gross has recorded more than 13,000 interviews with entertainers, politicians and writers for Fresh Air, the nationally syndicated show she presents from the modest offices of WHYY-FM, Philadelphia’s public radio station. Most of her guests, even regulars like humourist David Sedaris, have never met her. Instead they speak to Gross from remote studios, usually in New York or Los Angeles, while she listens, curtains drawn. The conversations sometimes assume the tone of one of those phone calls in which a degree of distance somehow makes it easier to be honest.
In the US her status is that of a national interviewer – she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama – and she is revered by fellow radio journalists. Ira Glass, host of This American Life and producer of blockbuster crime podcast Serial, wrote in 2015: “I’ve always admired how well she imagines herself into the mind of the person she’s interviewing. Like she once asked the magician Ricky Jay something like ‘Is there ever a trick where the behind-the-scenes stuff – the secret stuff we don’t see – is actually more interesting than what we do see?’ Inventing a question like that is such a pure imaginative act of empathy.”
In a polarised world it is worth seeking out interviewers with a gift for empathic inquiry, and podcasts are where you’ll find some of the best. In Political Thinking, the broadcaster Nick Robinson is freed from the Punch-and-Judy format of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, emerging as a generous long-form interviewer. His conversations with the UK’s political big beasts are what you would expect, but episodes with newcomers from the 2015 and 2017 parliamentary intakes – less hardened, less media-trained – are his best. (Turns out, politicians are people too.) Meanwhile the phenomenally successful New York Times podcast, The Daily, is where you will find the best audio journalism on Trump’s America. An interview with a former coal miner with black lung disease was an arresting listen: “If I had to do it all over again, guess what? I would make the same choice.”
Podcasts have also become one of the few remaining ‘safe’ spaces for political discussion to take place in good faith. The medium’s resistance to going viral means there’s little risk of being taken out of context or willfully misunderstood. Helen Lewis often prefaces her comments on the excellent New Statesman podcast with “I would never write this online, but…”
The BBC’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast is a very different exercise in listening. In near-daily episodes, it reports from the independent public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the fire last summer that destroyed a London tower block, killed 72 people and shocked the country. It was introduced by its presenter Eddie Mair with these words upon its launch last May: “It will not be entertaining. Some of it will be grueling and harrowing. I can think of many reasons why you would not want to listen.” And yet there is an odd form of comfort in listening to the truth being methodically uncovered. During the inquiry’s first phase, we hear from firefighters who risked their lives despite faulty equipment, residents who raised concerns years ago, neighbours who helped one another through the smoke. The second phase, focusing on the causes of the fire, will require us to listen very closely indeed.