Inside El Salvador’s Dystopian Prison Network
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 Salva...
24 Apr 29min
Kai Ryssdal Was America’s Economic Voice of Reason This Week
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, int...
11 Apr 24min
Carlos Watson Goes Free: A Surprising Coda to the CJR Podcast
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 coho...
4 Apr 19min
Molly White Knows You Don’t Understand Crypto
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....
28 Mar 25min
The Legal War on Journalism
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 inter...
12 Mar 25min
The Kicker, the Masseuses, and the Price of Doing Sports Journalism
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...
27 Feb 27min
A Warning from a Hungarian Journalist: ‘Brace Yourself for the Worst’
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 journali...
13 Feb 26min
CJR’s Jon Allsop on the Return of the Trump Whirlwind
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’...
31 Jan 32min