A few years ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent nations in the world, with gang killings taking the lives of dozens of people every week. 

Nayib Bukele, elected president in 2019, changed all that—today, violence is way down. But his brute-force approach to the problem has involved mass arrests, secret deals, and forced disappearances into a harsh prison system—which is apparently the envy of many in the Trump administration.

Filmmaker Neil Brandvold has covered much of El Salvador’s transition from dangerous gangland to authoritarian dreamworld, and he joins The Kicker to explain the methods Bukele used to construct his fragile peace.

Read/Watch more:

*Neil’s 2024 Fault Lines documentary on El Salvador’s gang crackdown.

*Neil’s 2018 Economist video about a religious reform movement for gang members.

*Neil’s 2019 New York Times video including interview with Nayib Bukele.

*El Faro’s 2020 investigative reporting on Bukele’s early deals with the MS-13 gang. 

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

Kai Ryssdal has been the host of Marketplace, a leading daily radio show and podcast about the economy, produced by American Public Media, since 2005. 

He delivers the news—from the bitter latest on our 401(k)s to unexpected interviews about the modern-day resurgence of train robberies—with an affable, direct tone.

And when he has something he wants listeners to know—as he did all this week, while the policies of the Trump administration sent the stock market, and the global economy, into a tailspin—he’ll just come right out and say it.

This week on The Kicker, Ryssdal explains what, exactly, just happened with the economy, and why he feels it’s so important for Marketplace to call it like they see it.

Read and hear more:

*Listen to Marketplace here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

*“No, I do not.” A report on Ryssdal’s 2019 interview with Janet Yellen, on whether Donald Trump understands macroeconomics.

*“The institutions of this economy work in no small part because the institutions of this democracy work.” Ryssdal’s final comments on February 13.

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

Prosecutors weren’t notified in advance, witnesses are in shock—and Watson’s family celebrates his freedom.

On the day that Carlos Watson, the founder of the digital media company Ozy Media, was due to turn himself in to prison last week, to begin serving a nearly ten-year sentence for fraud and identity theft, he and his family received some unexpected good news: President Donald Trump was commuting his sentence.

Susie Banikarim, who attended nearly every day of the trial last year, and cohosted the CJR special podcast series “The Unraveling of Ozy Media,” returns to The Kicker to explain how this wild turn of events came to pass, and what Watson’s family, former employees—and even the prosecutors—have had to say so far.

Read more:

*“The Unraveling of Ozy Media”—a three-part podcast series from CJR, including a special presentation of evidence from the original trial

*“The Sentencing of Carlos Watson”—a report from Watson’s last day in court

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

If you thought “DOGE” only stood for the “Department of Government Efficiency”—well, you’re not alone. The world of crypto is full of double meanings and inside jokes, making the recent arrival of these alternative currency markets—and their attendant “crypto bros”—into the seat of power in Washington all the more mystifying.

Enter Molly White, a longtime crypto researcher (and skeptic) whose work has appeared in the New York Times as well as in her self-published newsletter, Citation Needed. On this week’s episode, Molly explains what journalists, and everyone else, need to know about meme coins (dogecoin, $TRUMP), crypto’s grifty culture, and what recent policy changes mean for the average consumer.

Read more:

*Lauren Watson in CJR on the lessons of crypto media.

*The Times on how Trump’s meme coin made a few people very rich—at the expense of most everyone else (with research by White).

*White on the strategic bitcoin reserve, and how the crypto industry is trying to shed itself of government oversight.

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

Over the past several months, Donald Trump has mounted a series of legal attacks against the media, including a libel case against ABC, an FCC investigation into CBS, and a lawsuit accusing an Iowa pollster (and the newspaper that publishes her) of “election interference.”

The sometimes far-fetched claims in these cases notwithstanding, the maneuvers are having an effect. The parent company of ABC settled the libel case, over the objections of many news staffers, and CBS has turned over internal documents to the FCC. 

And as Lynn Oberlander, this week’s guest and a longtime media lawyer, explains, the legal assault is already creating a chilling effect in many newsrooms. 

Read More:

*The lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register. Selzer’s attorneys have fought back.  

*ABC pays $15 million to settle a libel lawsuit, over the objections of news staffers.

*CBS turns over raw transcripts in FCC probe.

*FCC commissioner Brendan Carr described his aggressive strategy at a recent Semafor media conference.

In January, the Baltimore Banner released an investigation into the star kicker of the Baltimore Ravens, in which multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior during massages, dating back years. (The player denies the accusations.)

It was an example of a rare kind of journalism these days: hard-hitting accountability reporting on sports. Over the past several years, numerous investigative sports outlets have folded, replaced largely by soft-focused content produced by players and teams themselves.

Small, community-based publications like the Banner face the highest toll for doing this kind of work—boxed out of access from teams, they risk losing a pivotal connection they have with subscribers. But Chris Korman, the paper’s sports editor, says it’s worth it anyway.

Read more:

*The Banner’s investigation into Ravens kicker Justin Tucker

*From the CJR archives: Can sports journalism survive in the era of the athlete? (2024)

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

András Pethő is a Hungarian journalist and a cofounder of Direkt36, an independent investigative news outlet.

Over the past decade, he’s watched as the government of Viktor Orbán—the world leader whom Steve Bannon once praised as “Trump before Trump”—has systematically eroded the freedom of the press in his country, in ways that may feel familiar to Americans watching corporate news leaders succumb to pressure from the administration.

Pethő joins The Kicker to explain why he believes journalists must accept the possibility that the worst is yet to come, while resisting the temptation to turn themselves into martyrs for democracy. “For a while, I thought, This would never happen here,” he said. “The biggest mistake that I made was the failure of imagination.”

Read More:

*András’s 2022 essay on the lessons he learned from experiencing Hungary’s crackdown on a free press

*Direkt36’s latest investigation: a documentary about the secret wealth of Orbán and his allies (with English subtitles)

*The New York Times on the fall of Origo, a once-audacious newsmagazine (2018)

Jon Allsop writes and edits The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. There, he’s closely watched as the American press has struggled to respond to, and cover, the barrage of news that pours out of Donald Trump.

As a frenetic new term begins, Jon joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what the media gets wrong—and how the political press might begin to chart a new relationship with the presidency and the public.

Read More:

*Jon’s latest newsletter, on Trump’s first week back in office

*Jon’s 2020 essay on how the media handled Trump’s first term

*Chris Hayes on attention, on Ezra Klein’s podcast

*Susan Glasser on Trump’s exhausting litany of outrages

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Natalia Antelava spent many years as a correspondent for the BBC, before starting her own media company, Coda Story, in 2016. She’s covered wars in the Middle East and the rise of authoritarianism across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For the past year, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford, where she examined how journalism might survive in an era of AI and tech supremacy.

Antelava joins The Kicker to talk about Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checking, preparing for a second Trump administration, what mainstream reporters can learn from conservative podcasters—and why she’s still optimistic about what journalism can achieve in the year to come.

Read more:

“Noise Is the New Censorship” — Antelava on disinformation and authoritarianism

“Grieving California” — Coda’s 2018 essay on the Tubbs Fire

Hosted by Josh Hersh
Produced by Amanda Darrach

In the finale, Carlos Watson takes the stand—and the jury reaches a verdict.

“The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker, on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review.

Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim
Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach