http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/etao.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/etao-podcast-42.mp3

Headliner: NoviNews puts you in the shoes of he/she/xe who curates the news in a country that is rapidly going strange, and just as rapidly becoming politically unstable. It’s a game about information as a tool, news as a product, and ideology as a career.

We talk about the process of being even-handed and open minded without slipping into being anything so soppy and unhelpful as neutral or, for that matter, centrist. We talk about the world-building connections between NoviNews and the first HEADLINER, not to mention Jakub’s other games. We talk about biases more pervasive in the news than oft-cited left/right biases. We talk about late night comedy and TED Talks, and unavoidably, we talk about capital-P Politics.

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• Here’s Samantha Bee on Watergate.

• A lot of what I’m saying about frequently-undiscussed media biases comes from Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine.

• The TED talk Jakub mentions was not what I was thinking of. Nor was this. Hm.

• Here’s Jakub talking about his data-mining back when he was making the first HEADLINER.

• There are some better predictors of voting for Trump, and specifically for the being an Obama/Trump voter, than Apprentice viewership.

• Yes, Operation Wetback was a thing, and yes, it was called that.

• The exportation of Texan biases too all of U.S. public education is a hell of a thing.

• And here’s an excellent retrospective of the nuances of free speech in the United States.

• Do actually get out there and vote, yeah?

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Podbay, PocketCasts, and RadioPublic.

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