WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts

By WhoWhatWhySociety & Culture News

WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts episodes

May 21, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Police Becoming Sixth Branch of US Military?
No one ever said it was easy to be a cop, and the gig only gets tougher. On the one hand, community organizers and local leaders are calling for more personal policing; more positive interactions between law enforcement and civilians. On the other hand, we're handing out riot gear and war weaponry as if the police were another branch of the military.

Terminator-style SWAT equipment and armored carriers are now ubiquitous in precincts nationwide. One needs only to look at the images of Baltimore earlier this year, or Boston after the Marathon bombing, to see how this equipment can result in police ability to lockdown a city as if it were an occupying force.

Washington Post reporter and author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop Radley Balko talks with WhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman about the perfect storm that led to the militarization of America's police forces and what it means for our liberty.
27 min
May 14, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Shawn Carrie
48 min
May 14, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Shawn Carrie
48 min
May 07, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Looking Back to King as Baltimore Burns
It’s been 23 years since the 1992 race riots in LA sparked by the beating of Rodney King. With Baltimore burning, what’s really changed?

32 min
May 01, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Trials are Not a Search for the Truth
33 min
April 30, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: The FBI should be glad that a criminal trial is never a search for the truth
RaidioWhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman sits down with Russian-American writer and activist Masha Gessen.
32 min
April 29, 2015 Listen: The Real Story of the Boston Bombing Marathon

WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker is interviewed by Boston-based syndicated radio host Chuck Morse about the Boston Marathon Bombing trial and the FBI.
20 min
April 23, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: The Great American Health Hoax
American medicine, we are told, is among the best in the world. Yet treating sickness is only one measure of quality, and whether or not the system itself is healthy is up for debate. A system that treats sickness but doesn’t offer preventative measures to assure continued health is broken.

From after-the-fact health care to our love affair with pharmaceuticals, we are on the road to disaster, as crusading reformer Raymond Francis of MIT explains to our host, Jeff Schechtman. Francis has some ideas on how we can do much, much, better and end the Great American Health Hoax.

25 min
April 15, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Think You Know the First Amendment? Think Again.
A random walk through what the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights are really all about. A talk with the former national legal director of the ACLU and the founder of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.
36 min
April 09, 2015 RadioWhoWhatWhy: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Warren Zevon's great song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money,”was about a kid getting out of trouble in various Latin American countries. Today, however, as we approach the 2016 presidential election, it might very well be a description of our election process.

It seems that lawyers, money and enforcement are an ever-growing part of American elections. A new set of rules seems to prevail. Issues such as campaign finance, voting rights, voter ID, electronic voting and ballot access itself are now debatable parts of voting in America.

How did we get here, how did democracy become so complex, and what’s the historical context? Just how deeply is fraud really built into the system? WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman talks with David Schultz, Hamline University professor in the School of Business, senior fellow at the Institute of Law and Politics at the University of Minnesota Law School, and professor of election law.

32 min