News and commentary for the week of April 23-29, 2008 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

An interview with Susan Jacoby author of "The Age of American Unreason."

Jacoby paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, she dissects a culture at odds with America's heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society-on the political right and the left. America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.

Jacoby is the author of eight books. She is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank with offices in Lower Manhattan.

News and commentary for the week of April 16-22, 2008 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of April 9-15, 2008 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

An interview with Nick Davies author of "Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media."

Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He has been a journalist since 1976 and is currently a freelance, working regularly as special correspondent for The Guardian.

News and commentary for the week of April 2-8, 2008 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of March 19-25, 2008 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.