Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.

He’s also and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously, a correspondent for The Economist and a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

We discussed his research paper The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization, and Populist Backlash.

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Most of you won’t have listened to a radio

service called Voice of America, and

there’s a good reason for that. Actually, it’s not just radio any more; they

describe themselves as a multi-media service. And it’s owned and funded by the

US government. So why haven’t you heard it? Because that’s not allowed.

Not to say that you’re not allowed to tune

in, but they, VOA as they’re known, aren’t allowed to broadcast to you. In the

good old days of shortwave radio broadcasts, that meant that they would aim

their broadcasts at other countries, never at the USA. The main targets were Central

and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East,

and their job was to promote the American point of view. It’s a propaganda

station.

They’ve never really been that successful,

they don’t have the brand recognition that the BBC World Service has, certainly

not the level of trust. Like their Cold War competitors Radio Moscow, they had

a pretty heavy-handed bias that undermined their credibility.

By the way, you shouldn’t confuse Voice of

America with Voice of Europe, which is a clickbait conspiracy website. Anyway,

the reason that VOA isn’t aimed at you, even though you can hear it if you

really want to, is because the US constitution is a bit sniffy about the