--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I've been going on some dates. Now, not a lot, but a little bit. And dating is a fascinating activity. You meet people you wouldn't have otherwise met and they say something you might not expect.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: One guy believed vaccines cause autism. You know, that's been debunked multiple times, but I didn't press it. And then he also said that Kamala Harris isn't black.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, she did go to Howard. And her dad is black. But I let that go. Another one had some interesting theories about the shape of the earth.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This was after a nice time. I really enjoyed this person. And so when they mentioned this, I said, oh, no. But I wasn't ultimately deterred.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I just said, look, people think different things. People think different things. And, of course, this isn't just about conversations over a glass of wine or margarita with somebody who you're just talking to or trying to have some fun with.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Some of these ideas have also reached the highest levels of the White House and are reshaping our country and our world.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So how did we get here, like, to this moment where so much quote-unquote news isn't based in the truth? That's what we're going to explore today in a segment from Engines of Outrage, a new miniseries from the Landslide podcast distributed by the NPR Network and hosted by reporter Ben Bradford.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It used to be, even just a few decades ago, that Americans largely used and trusted the same news sources. Now, the way we get basic facts about the world is polarized.
--:-- Ben Bradford: We are increasingly split into separate bubbles, absorbing different information that paints conflicting pictures of the same events.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In the introduction to the series, he goes on to explain that our information ecosystem divides into two distinct sides, conservative and progressive.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And these bubbles follow different rules. Only in one of these media bubbles do a huge portion of voters consistently believe a presidential election was stolen.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Only one of them has led Americans to reject basic health interventions. COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Only one has left its audience with the impression that climate change is not real, violent crime is spiking, and a host of outlandish conspiracy theories. Migrants are grilling pets in America.
--:-- Ben Bradford: That is true. After the break, Engines of Outrage takes us back to the moment where our shared media ecosystem split to find out if we can sew it back together.
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--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday story. Here's an excerpt of the first episode of Engines of Outrage, hosted by Ben Bradford.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He starts by taking us back to a moment when it seemed like the nation did have a shared, fact-based, collective reality.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In the 1960s and 70s, when it came to most news, there was really only one game in town. Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkamp.
--:-- Ben Bradford: This is NBC Nightly News, Thursday, October 30th, with John Chancellor reporting.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A huge portion of the country, of all political stripes, sat down each night in front of their TVs and watched the same thing.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It was something like three quarters of everybody who had a television on at 6.30 was watching one of the three networks. And there were only three.
--:-- Andy Tucker: They were very establishment. They were white guys in jackets with silver hair.
--:-- Andy Tucker: Good evening. Prince Juan Carlos de Bourbon. Y Bourbon is the new chief of state in Spain.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But it was, you know, people watched it. People tended to trust it. People tended to find them familiar because they came into your house while you were eating your meatloaf.
--:-- Ben Bradford: That's the way it is. Wednesday, July 31st, 1968.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There is no publication, no organization, no news source now that would have the same kind of reach as those three put together.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In one 1969 survey, nine out of ten Americans said they regularly watched the television news.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It was not the vast variety of sources that we now have.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There was a sense, probably exaggerated, but a sense that people were kind of reading and knowing the same things.
--:-- Ben Bradford: What changed that? Or who?
--:-- Ben Bradford: Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew had transformed almost overnight in 1968, from near-unknown to Richard Nixon's vice presidential pick and his attack dog.
--:-- Ben Bradford: As VP, Agnew was the man Nixon sent to flay administration critics in colorful, alliterative style.
--:-- Ben Bradford: If you've ever heard the nattering nabobs of negativism, that was him.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And about a year after he and Nixon were elected, Agnew appeared for a speech in Des Moines that his office billed as a major address.
--:-- Ben Bradford: I have a subject I think is of great interest to the American people. Tonight I want to discuss the importance of the television medium to the American people.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Agnew focused this night's ire on a surprise subject, the producers of television news.
--:-- Ben Bradford: This little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address but more importantly wield a free hand in selecting presenting and interpreting the great issues in our nation
--:-- Ben Bradford: He essentially said they were enacting their own liberal, partisan agenda.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The speech was cynical. The famously touchy Nixon and his advisors were furious at recent critical coverage of the Vietnam War.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Agnew and Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan had worked up this address to fire back.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It touched a nerve. While polls showed most Americans trusted the news, the accusation of bias had circulated on the right and left.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Black newspapers sprang up in the 40s and 50s in response to a media establishment that was overwhelmingly white.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In the battle for civil rights, segregationists such as George Wallace routinely complained they were being treated unfairly by the media.
--:-- Ben Bradford: They try to make it appear that we are bigots, that we are prejudiced, that we are biased, that we are immoral.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Agnew knew this, and in his speech, he was echoing complaints of Wallace and others.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But now it was coming from the vice president of the United States.
--:-- Andy Tucker: Are you saying that the Nixon administration is sort of the first time, at least in modern history, that we see the president, the White House, accusing the media of having a liberal bias?
--:-- Andy Tucker: In the modern era, yeah, I think so. I think so.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Media historians, including Andy Tucker, point to Agnew's speech as a turning point.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It gained wider play. Reporters picked up the story. It was their job.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And Agnew and other Nixon allies continued over the next days and months to hammer this accusation of slant.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The Nixon administration was, well, setting up the press as an enemy.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It was a very vigorous spin operation that had the line of the day, that worked very closely with journalists, but also used the power of the White House to smear the press.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And it coincided with polls showing trust in mainstream news in our shared reality beginning to fall.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Before we go further, it's worth discussing Agnew's charge. Was the news biased?
--:-- Ben Bradford: The answer is, of course, right? Humans are subjective creatures, and choosing what stories to cover, who to talk to, requires subjective judgment.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Even describing what things look like, was a crowd large or small, rowdy or muted, is subjective.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And Agnew was clearly right that a tiny fraction of men living in the same large cities decided what, of all the world's events, most people would see.
--:-- Andy Tucker: It did seem to confirm and valorize the idea of a dominant culture.
--:-- Andy Tucker: The visible faces of that culture were middle-aged white men.
--:-- Andy Tucker: There were certain advantages to the sense that we all know the same stuff, but it also confirmed the establishment as the important institution, cultural institution.
--:-- Andy Tucker: It is funny, you know, I spent a lot of time, just hundreds, I don't know, thousands of hours digging through archives of old evening news broadcasts.
--:-- Andy Tucker: And you look at the rundowns of their programs on any given day. They are 90% identical.
--:-- Andy Tucker: Yeah, the herd instinct is very, very strong in that kind of coverage.
--:-- Andy Tucker: So there were biases. But Tucker says that's different from saying these journalists were enacting an agenda.
--:-- Andy Tucker: Yeah, I want to first acknowledge, of course, that serious, responsible newsrooms do make mistakes.
--:-- Andy Tucker: They get things wrong. They don't see what they're supposed to see.
--:-- Andy Tucker: But there is a process that is rooted in fact-finding, doing your best to challenge your own assumptions so that you report against yourself.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In the wake of Agnew's speech and increasing distrust in media, other sources with a very different intent would gain influence.
--:-- Ben Bradford: We'll be right back with Engines of Outrage.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Engines of Outrage Outside Washington, D.C., in a nondescript office building, behind a locked door guarded by multiple security measures, printers buzzed.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You heard about this in detail in Landslide's first season.
--:-- Ben Bradford: They spat out millions and millions of letters to households around the nation.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The direct mail operation of the political activist Richard Vigory.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Richard Vigory, conservative ideologue, direct mail genius.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You heard how Vigery and his allies in the new right identified voters upset about a variety of separate cultural issues, textbooks, gun rights, abortion, and linked those causes together in fiery letters to an ever-expanding list.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And you heard from a Reagan strategist, just briefly, how this was a new form of media.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You know, now conservatives have talk radio, they have cable news things and all that.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There wasn't anything like that back then.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The only communications channel that you had directly to conservatives was mail.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Vigery's direct mail operation bloomed in the years immediately following Vice President Spiro Agnew's accusation of network news bias.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The idea that the mainstream media is biased against you and that you need to trust alternative media sources, that was something that Vigery didn't create, but he certainly, like, really enhances in the 1970s.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: By creating a kind of alternative ecosystem of conservative newsletters, there was not just claims that the media was biased, but also an alternative source that you could get to see exactly where the news media wasn't covering specific issues or was covering them in a flawed way of some sort.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Here's what they're not telling you. Here's what they're not telling you, exactly.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: It's one thing to say they're biased, it's another thing to say they're biased, and here's the thing that they're missing.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: This medium told you the mainstream news was lying and the truth was here.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: But that truth was apocalyptic, laden with conspiracy theories.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: The newsletters of the New Right from Vigery's printers warned that textbooks were teaching cannibalism, gay people were recruiting children, that Secretary of State was perhaps sacrificing anti-communists in Vietnam.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: You know, Vigery wrote later on of his strategy that political inertia is the normal state for most people.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: And it takes a sledgehammer of an issue to distract them from their ball games, shopping sprees, and daily work preoccupations.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: The tactics of reporting, how that information hits the page and the intent of it is sort of fundamentally different Yeah From the beginning it always been an ideological project It hasn been kind of like a let create a conservative counter news product It was how do we create media that disrupts the kind of mainstream hegemony of the traditional press?
--:-- A.J. Bauer: The newsletters provided information. That information could be true, but it wasn't the point of it.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Vigery wasn't doing journalism. The intent was not to inform. It was to inspire political action, to outreach.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: That's really important because that intent and that style set the template for voices that would soon grow much louder.
--:-- Ben Bradford: At the same time as Vigery's letters were proliferating, a right-wing movement made other gains in American political life.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In 1976, it won control of the Republican Party platform.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The issue of court-ordered busing. The subject was the Panama Canal.
--:-- Ben Bradford: In favor of school prayer. Amnesty, gun control, national health.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And conservative hero Ronald Reagan nearly knocked off the sitting president, Gerald Ford, for the nomination.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Four years later, he won it all.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It all lended legitimacy and visibility to a movement that a few years earlier had been easy to dismiss as fringe.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And movement premised on the idea that the mainstream media was corrupt.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Did news organizations internalize some of this criticism?
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Yeah, absolutely.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Reporters began giving more weight to views that had long been dismissible.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Conservative movement figures increasingly get interviewed, right, by the New York Times and by other traditional mainstream news outlets as though they're representing a kind of responsible opposition.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Now, this is what news is supposed to do, right? Seek and report major sides of a debate.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: You could also argue that reporters became more credulous, less willing to challenge provably false information, which had bubbled up from, say, fever swamps of new right newsletters, because it came from politically legitimized voices.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: But Bauer says pressure by conservatives led to even more inroads in traditional media.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Within mainstream journalism, there's concern that they were losing the trust of the public and they needed to regain it.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: You see conservatives, you know, wedging into that vulnerability.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: The New York Times in the early 1970s hired its first voice from the conservative movement to its opinion pages.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: But not just any voice. A PR man, a spin doctor, the writer of some of Agnew's most blisteringly partisan speeches, including his nattering nabobs line.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: William Sapphire came straight from that White House job to become a consistent critic of the Times from within its own pages.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: After Watergate, it was Sapphire who stuck the suffix gate to other more routine controversies, an effort to suggest that presidents such as Jimmy Carter engaged in a corruption akin to Nixon's.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Mainstream outlets made these adjustments, concessions, to quell criticism, to prove they were fair, and to restore public trust.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Bauer says it had the opposite effect.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: There's an increasing perception that television news is biased and that local news is biased as well.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Instead of relieving criticisms of bias, it lended more credibility to the people making them.
--:-- Ben Bradford: This is exactly the moment where conservative news, those Richard Vigery newsletters, are starting to flourish.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Trust in traditional news was falling.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Newsletters offering a slanted perspective were proliferating, a perspective reinforced by a new crop of right-wing politicians and think tanks.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And in this climate, Bauer says, Americans suddenly got a new option.
--:-- Ben Bradford: They could turn the TV dial somewhere else.
--:-- Ben Bradford: This is at exactly the moment where people are starting to tune out of watching news because they're having more choices.
--:-- Ben Bradford: So let's say you're eating dinner at like 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock. You want to watch TV. Your choice is news, news, or news, basically.
--:-- Ben Bradford: By the early 80s, so 1980 is where cable starts to proliferate.
--:-- Ben Bradford: If you've got cable, you don't have to watch one of those big three news channels anymore for dinner, right? You could watch sports or you could watch a movie or something like that.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Suddenly, there was ESPN, MTV.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You could watch hockey, although good luck seeing the puck, or put Nickelodeon on for your kids.
--:-- Ben Bradford: So people start consuming less news, actually.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A lot of times people think about it as like people switched from mainstream news to some ideological news.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But really what ends up happening is most people kind of opt out, and they're getting less news than they used to.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The network news that just a few years earlier reached almost every American showing them the same reality, was now easy to tune out.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You could unplug from traditional news entirely and just absorb the angry, alternate, partisan worldview of those pamphlets or their ilk.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You're consuming less news, but all of a sudden you're getting all these newsletters that are saying, oh, did you hear about the Equal Rights Amendment and how bad it is?
--:-- Ben Bradford: The drop in audience for mainstream news left an information void.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A void that alternative media could fill.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But it didn't. Not immediately.
--:-- Ben Bradford: For most of the 1980s, right-wing media remained relatively niche, mostly those same products, newsletters, magazines, local radio.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You had to already be somewhat politically engaged to want to tune in.
--:-- Ben Bradford: That was about to change with a new, polarizing voice that would become the right's first media superstar.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And the bubble would expand exponentially.
--:-- Ben Bradford: coming to you live and direct from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The brash, boisterous radio host Rush Limbaugh had not set out to become a right-wing media force.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But in the late 1980s, the one-time failed DJ struck on a formula for success.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And it sounded, eerily, like a live-action, vigory newsletter.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Moral decay is rooted in the Democratic Party.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Demonizing political opponents. Sowing distrust in mainstream media.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Whenever they spot what they think is Republican scandal, that's where they go.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There were conspiracy theories.
--:-- Ben Bradford: We have been told a polar ice capsule melt. And that when this happens, sea levels will rise.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There are so many of these environmental myths, and the reason they exist is because the environmental movement is the new home of the socialist communist movement of the world.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And there was culture war and racial resentment.
--:-- Ben Bradford: I thought white men were the new pigs of society.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Unless, of course, you want a successful and happy marriage, then by all means get a white boy
--:-- Ben Bradford: For three hours a day Limbaugh blasted and lampooned Democrats feminists gay people liberals, journalists, and Republicans he didn't feel were sufficiently conservative.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The fact that he could do this so freely was new, a result of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan scrapping its long-held Fairness Doctrine.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The Fairness Doctrine had required news programs to seek, quote-unquote, balance.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A year after the end of the Doctrine, Limbaugh's program debuted nationally.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And unlike the New Rights newsletters and magazines, with Rush, you didn't have to take the time to pick up and pour through materials sent to your home.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You could switch him on in your car or your office and just immerse yourself.
--:-- Ben Bradford: All right, listen up, folks. of political twisters kicking up across the fruited plain, and you need a conservative compass to point you to the truth.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Limbaugh added one more ingredient to the formula that would define the most powerful right-wing media.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He, again, was not a journalist. He wasn't fact-checking or looking to provide multiple viewpoints.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But he also wasn't an activist, at least at first.
--:-- Ben Bradford: From a young age, he just wanted to be on the radio.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But he washed out as a DJ at four different stations.
--:-- Ben Bradford: So when he finally got this last shot, he wasn't seeking to drive voters.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He wanted advertisers.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He's got more of an entertainer's demeanor, right?
--:-- Ben Bradford: He had worked in radio as kind of a morning zoo crew kind of guy.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He understood that in order to captivate broadcast audiences, you couldn't just disseminate information.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You had to make them feel as though they were getting something out of it.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And that something was entertainment.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Limbaugh, to his target audience, was fun.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: They could listen for hours. Primarily kind of a comedy program.
--:-- A.J. Bauer: Not necessarily that I would laugh at all those jokes today, right?
--:-- A.J. Bauer: But when you're listening to it, as somebody who is sympathetic, you're laughing.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Rush Limbaugh, for most admired man in America.
--:-- Ben Bradford: During the Vietnam War, I railed against the long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking protesters.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Rush Limbaugh, inventor of the term feminazi.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Rush Limbaugh, your only choice for most admired man in America.
--:-- Ben Bradford: There's levity. You feel a sense of superiority.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Limbaugh promised, however tongue-in-cheek, that he was offering you facts, reliable information.
--:-- Ben Bradford: I want you to the truth.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You could live ensconced in the reality he presented.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And a lot of people did.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The Rush Limbaugh show's audience expanded rapidly, from just a few hundred thousand listeners at a given time to millions, within five years, 17 million a week.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And his politics became more and more central to the radio host's brand as his influence grew.
--:-- Ben Bradford: He tied himself closer and closer to the Republican Party and vice versa.
--:-- Ben Bradford: A top GOP congressman, Tom DeLay, boasted about the relationship.
--:-- Ben Bradford: We fax Rush Limbaugh almost 24 hours a day.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Where do you think he gets half of the stuff that he puts on the radio program?
--:-- Ben Bradford: In 1992, Limbaugh openly called for listeners to side with President George Bush.
--:-- Ben Bradford: What I really wanted to call about was that I'm really having a hard time with the presidential election.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It's simple. Vote Bush.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Bush invited Limbaugh to the White House, even carried his bags in for him.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And while he still lost, two years later, congressional Republicans, led by their new right leader, Newt Gingrich, won control of the House for the first time since the 1950s.
--:-- Ben Bradford: The new class of Republicans celebrated Limbaugh as their guest of honor.
--:-- Ben Bradford: would like to nominate and make Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of our freshman class, because surely he helped us become the majority.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It was an intertwining of a media figure with political figures that would be unthinkable, disqualifying, instantly fireable for a journalist at any mainstream institution.
--:-- Ben Bradford: But Limbaugh wasn't a journalist, even as he was at the heart of a rapidly expanding media ecosystem.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Radio broadcasters searching for profits sought out their own Limbaugh's.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Other popular hosts included Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Many stations switched to all-conservative talk all the time.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And the radio hosts, competing for audience, found the most salacious stories and extreme conspiracies brought the highest ratings.
--:-- Ben Bradford: They leaned in further.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It turned out that what the new right had done for political gain could be good entertainment, Focusing on outrage, wading into conspiracy theory, villainizing opponents, eroding trust in other media.
--:-- Ben Bradford: All of it building a sense of us versus them.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And it was a self-reinforcing cycle because politicians and media figures echoed the same messages.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Limbaugh could insinuate that the Clintons covered up a corrupt land deal by murdering a White House aide.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And you could read William Sapphire in the New York Times dub it Whitewatergate.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, would stoke the theory.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You can understand why for a lot of Americans, an evidence-less lie seemed true.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And for the people spreading it, there was profit and political gain.
--:-- Ben Bradford: So the bubble expanded.
--:-- Ben Bradford: New websites on the early internet, like the Drudge Report and Newsmax, adopted similar characteristics.
--:-- Ben Bradford: It was an alternate information ecosystem.
--:-- Ben Bradford: With one flaw. Almost all of it was clearly offering opinion, not news, no matter how much you might absorb from it.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Limbaugh joked about it.
--:-- Ben Bradford: Now, I don't take sides in political races, as you well know.
--:-- Ben Bradford: That wouldn't be fair. It would compromise my objectivity as a journalist.
--:-- Ben Bradford: And so the final big innovation that Fox News would bring along, cementing the bubble, was really that word, news.
--:-- Ben Bradford: You can hear the rest of this episode by searching Engines of Outrage wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Ben Bradford: All four episodes of the miniseries are in the feed for the Landslide podcast.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Kim Naderfein-Petersa and edited by Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was engineered by Jimmy Keely.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Sunday Story team also includes Justine Yan, Andrew Lambo, and Jennifer Schmidt.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.