Here we are again, at the end of another impossibly long, intense, and exhausting year of reporting the news that matters from the grassroots level. As we try to do with all our reporting, we have taken you to the front lines of struggle, publishing unique, thoughtful, principled, and in-depth video, text, and audio reports. And today, as we’ve done in the past, we want to take a moment here on the Real News podcast to reflect on the great work we’ve done with our audio reporting this year… from a hate church in Spokane, Washington, to the farming fields of rural Brazil, from Teamsters UPS rallies in Boston to worker-led protests at the Game Awards in LA, from Gaza to Austin, Texas, we have produced an incredible amount of audio-only reporting for our Real News listeners this year, and we’ve got a lot more coming in 2024.
Studio/Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rush transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. The Real News is an independent, viewer-supported, grassroots media network. You guys know we don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we don’t put our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but incredible team of folks here who are fiercely dedicated to reporting and lifting up the voices from the front lines of struggle around the world, people fighting for their rights and fighting against exploitation in the workplace. People standing up to defend their civil and human rights against the police and prison industrial complexes and other apparatuses of state repression and surveillance, people fighting the life-shredding madness of imperial domination, colonial occupation, and endless war around the globe. People standing up against racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and all other forms of bigotry in the US and around the world. People fighting against misinformation and fighting to maintain a free press, people fighting to stop the destruction of our shared planet and fighting for a future that’s still worth living in.
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Well, here we are again at the end of another impossibly long, intense, and exhausting year of reporting the news that matters from the grassroots level. As we try to do with all of our reporting, we have taken you to the front lines of struggle publishing unique, thoughtful, principled, and in-depth video, text, and audio reports all year.
And today, as we have done in the past, we want to take a moment here on The Real News podcast to reflect on the great work that we’ve done with our audio reporting this year. From a hate church in Spokane, Washington, to the farm fields of rural Brazil, from Teamsters UPS rallies in Boston to worker led protests at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, from Gaza to Austin, Texas, we have produced an incredible amount of audio-only reporting for our Real News listeners this year, and we’ve got a lot more coming in 2024. And to take this opportunity to lift up some of the highlights of our audio reporting this year and to talk about what we’ve got in store in the year coming, I could not be more excited to have two of my amazing colleagues and fellow audio reporters on the podcast right now.
Mel Buer: Hi, my name is Mel Buer. I’m a staff reporter here at The Real News Network and the host and producer of The Real News Network podcast. I have been working out of my wonderful little home office studio in Los Angeles, California since earlier this year, and I have been focused primarily on worker struggles on the West Coast for the last six to eight months. So I’m happy to be here. What a year. What a year.
Marc Steiner: And I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to be with both of you today and all of you listening to us out there, across the nation and the globe. And so, I host The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. The Marc Steiner Show has been on the air for, oh, God, 30 plus years. And here, at the moment, we’re focusing on two major issues. One is called Not in Our Name though, that needs to be expanded in some ways because it’s about voices of Jews from across the globe saying no to what Israel is doing to the occupation, especially no to what’s happening at this moment. And the other is called Rise of the Right, which is going to expand even more in the coming year because it is the greatest danger facing us, I think, across the globe is the rise of the racist right, the fascist right, the right wing taking over and what we have to do to stop it, which is what we’ll have to cover. And I’ve been at Real News for a while now. Really a while.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hell, yeah. Well, I mean, I’m so, so grateful to have you both on The Real News pod. It’s really cool to be doing this together because, of course, every week, every month we’re out there doing our best to report for our respective shows on stories that matter to our audience, that matter to our mission. But it’s really seldom that we get a chance to sort of all be on the same podcast together. And I really cherish these moments at the end of the year where we can kind of take a brief step back from the maelstrom that we’re living in on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. It’s not easy being in the news industry. The bad news just keeps coming. You never feel like you’re doing enough.
But we’ve still done a hell of a lot this past year, and that’s what I wanted to have y’all on the show. And for the three of us to talk about over the next half hour is just to take a brief moment to share our thoughts on some of what we feel are the most impactful audio reports that we’ve done, the stories that we’ve shared, talk a bit about what we feel our audio reporting adds to The Real News mission that maybe video and texts don’t, because I think all of us would agree there is something really special about podcasts, radio, audio-only reporting. There’s a way of storytelling through audio that can be more intimate, that can really take you emotionally, intellectually deep into a certain story, a certain place, a certain time. And the three of us are really trying to do that with the work that we do for The Real News podcast, at The Marc Steiner Show, at Working People and all the great audio-only interviews that Mel is working on and stories that she’s putting together.
So I want to kind of talk about that in a second. But Marc, since you mentioned that you are our resident Peabody Award-winning radio legend at The Real News. I am curious, as someone who’s been in this game for so long, how you would compare the audio work that we’re doing here at The Real News to the work that’s out there right now, the work that you’ve seen produced over your storied career. How do you think we’re doing in terms of audio reporting here at The Real News?
Marc Steiner: I think we’re doing really well. I mean, I think that one of the things about Real News is it’s a small staff putting out a huge amount of work, and you’ve got some incredible people here who are some of the best editors I’ve ever worked with who know their stuff, who make it sound crisp and clean. You don’t hear the slash on their edits. So we sound great, and I think we’re producing things, content that is really critical for the future of this country and the globe. So I think that we are, and we’re notching it up all the time. And I think that what we’re finding is that more and more people are listening to what we do and our work is really critical to understanding what’s surrounding us.
And I think one of the things that’s really important to hear to me is the lifting up of voices of everyday people, people who are in the midst of struggle, people who are working to make that change, whether it’s in their workplace, in the universities, on the street, wherever that is in the community. And I think that’s really a very unique thing. It’s not just talking heads who think they know everything about everything. It’s people who live their lives every day, who are fighting to make the world a better place, fighting to make their workplace better and their lives better. And those are the voices we’re lifting up, which is not common in the media at all.
Maximillian Alvarez: No, it really, really isn’t. And that’s the kind of thing that makes me endlessly proud of what we’re doing. And I agree. I think that that really does set us apart, our dogged commitment to lifting up those voices from the front lines of struggle. And those voices are the voices of everyday people, people like you and me and everyone listening to this who are taking that brave step to not just live in the world and experience what the world has in store for us, but to take that step to try to change their circumstances, to try to build a better world however they can, wherever they are.
And Mel, I was curious to get your thoughts on that as well. As someone who’s also been in the audio game for a while, you’ve been a podcaster long before you came over here to The Real News. That’s how you and I first connected was through the left podcasting world. But I’m curious, yeah, now after a year here at The Real News, what your sense is about what sets our work apart or how the work that we’re doing, I guess, compares to what else is on offer out there right now?
Mel Buer: Well, I think I have to echo Marc here, particularly about the audio work that we do is really focused on these worker voices and you and I, we’ve podcasted before about and railed against the punditry of the sort of mainstream media and the ways in which other media outlets will engage these professionals or experts or the quote, unquote “Authority” to share their perspective, but you never really get a chance to hear from the man on the street kind of person. I have nothing in common with those types of people. And the cool thing that we do with The Real News that I was really drawn to when I first started freelancing for The Real News and now that I get to do more often here on staff is really just privileging those voices that I consider to be experts in their community.
And the cool thing is is you get to hear those voices, you get to hear them in conversation with us talking about the things that they care about, the things that they’re working on, the things that they really have the most knowledge on. And you get to hear yourself in those people in the work that they’re doing, and it’s really fun and it’s really cool, and you get a chance to really kind of connect with these folks. And I’m privileged to be able to share and uplift those voices in a way that I maybe didn’t have a chance to before. So I love it. I love what The Real News does, and I’m really grateful to be a part of it, and I consider it a great honor to be able to do this kind of work.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hell, yeah. I mean, again, echo all of that, what you both said, and I want to kind of build on that and bring it down to eye level a bit and sort of talk about where over the past year we feel like we’ve really excelled in that work through the audio reporting that we’re doing. I mean, it’s just been such a long year. It’s wild to even think of all the different stories that we have reported on, but in many ways, I’ll kick us off because I want to ask what stories, maybe like a couple stories that really stick out to both of you that you wanted to lift up, highlight, and share with our listeners now. And in many ways, this wild year kind of kicked off with a podcast that I did, and the idea for this podcast actually came from our social media manager, James Daley, who let me know in the beginning of January that the 10-year anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz was coming up and James wanted to know if we were planning on doing anything to commemorate Aaron’s death.
Aaron, of course, a fierce advocate, one of the fiercest this country has ever produced for an open internet, a genius, a freedom fighter, someone who believed deeply in the people’s right to free information. And Aaron foresaw many of the pitfalls and injustices of the sort of capital captured and enclosed world of the internet that we’ve ended up with.
And so, I recorded a commemorative deep-dive podcast with two brilliant audio reporters in their own right from Canada, Shawn and Aaron from the Srsly Wrong podcast, and Shawn himself was the youngest leader of the Pirate Party in Canada. And so, he had a very deep connection to Aaron.
So, anyway, we did this podcast that I wasn’t expecting to really take off, but that I wanted to do, that I knew James wanted us to do. It was a really beautiful conversation. And then it just took off. It became one of our top performing pieces of the year.
And what really blew me away was that Aaron Schwartz’s mom reached out to us to thank us for the podcast and to express her appreciation for honoring her son and for telling his story truthfully. And that just meant so, so much to me. I never could have imagined that I would be in that kind of position because we talk about stuff a lot, but then when you break that forth wall and you connect with the people that you’re talking about and the people who are most directly impacted by the stories that you’re reporting on, that takes it to a completely new level.
And I think that’s going to be one of the common themes that we’re talking about here because that’s what we really try to do, we try to get those voices of the people who are actually fighting on the front lines, and I think we achieve that week in, week out, but even when we are sort of providing more high level analysis, to know that that can still reach beyond the sort of echo chambers of academia and the media industry and really kind connect back again with the folks at the grassroots level was something that made me really proud and I was very proud of that podcast.
But I’m curious. I have a couple more I’ll share, but I wanted to toss it back to y’all and ask, yeah, looking back over the past year, what were some stories that stand out to you as ones that you’re really proud of and why? What do you feel made those pieces so special?
Marc Steiner: It’s really hard to kind of pinpoint for me. I’ve done this for so long that when I’m asked what really stood out, for me, it has been the numbers of voices. Let’s just take Not in Our Name for a moment. It’s the voices of people who are unafraid to stand up in the face of what has been happening between Israel and Palestine. When you hear Jewish voices not afraid to say what they have to say, whether they’re living in Israel or living in France or Britain or the United States or wherever they are, and it takes a lot because you’re standing up to a huge established power. And it’s been more than once that I have been called or gotten emails from people who accused me of being a Judenrat, who were the Jewish collaborators of the Nazis during the Holocaust in World War II. That’s how intense it gets.
And so, for me, I can go through my list here. I’m looking at it right now. I can’t believe how much work we’ve actually done this year. It’s kind of frightening to see all the work we’ve done in a good sense. But I think that it’s uplifting all those voices and making connections for people that combine Not in Our Name with the Rise of the Right, like the thing we did in how India and Israel’s fascists are combining their strength, about how the debates we’ve had about whether we should be voting for Cornel West or not, and those kinds of battles just highlighting stuff you don’t hear in the mainstream media, you will not hear those voices in mainstream media and breaking through that for people. And if anything, I think that the two things that I’ve embarked on here for us, which is the Rise of the Right, Not in Our Name, are going to be extremely explosive in the coming year, extremely explosive because we’re seeing the rise of the right in this country that is now becoming unafraid, be openly neofascist in their rhetoric and what they’re calling for.
And I think that what’s happening in the Middle East now and the Holy Land between Israel and Palestine in Gaza is a paradigm shift in the struggle there. It really is. This is like the Nakba of ’48. So I think that the work we’re doing here could be really important to bring voices out that are not heard other places. I’m now in conversation with people in Gaza who I want to get on after the first of the year to get more Gazan voices on the air to talk about what they’re living through, to make it very real for people in this country to force our elected officials to say, “No, we’re not going to give any more money to an Israeli army that is devastating people, murdering people, blowing up the entire country.” And bringing that to the fore I think is really important. And for me, it’s like thinking about what is to be done, being practical about our passion at the moment and that, yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I mean, I genuinely can’t say enough good things. Not only as Real News editor in chief, but just as a fan, as a listener, as someone who has himself been depending on your work, Marc, to make sense of this madness we’re watching unfold in Gaza, the violence of Israel’s occupation, the ethnic cleansing that has been happening before our very eyes. I mean, I feel like everyone else so impossibly overwhelmed with grief as I’m watching this unfold, as I’m seeing these images on social media, as I’m hearing these lies and half-truths being spouted from mainstream media, I think that I, like so many other people I know, have come to our channel in recent months looking for the kind of perspective that they have not been finding on mainstream and corporate media. And they have found it in your show, in Chris Hedges’s reporting and in the reporting that the rest of us have done to try to help.
I mean, Mel and I both have been trying to uplift the voices of people who are fighting against this violence, students at Dartmouth who are demonstrating on campus, workers and unionists in the UK and Australia who are putting their bodies on the line to try to disrupt the Israeli war machine.
So that’s how we’ve been trying to assist what you’re doing. But what you have been doing with Not in Our Name, which, as Marc mentioned for everyone listening, is a series he’s been doing for years here at The Real News. So I would highly, highly encourage everyone listening to not only re-listen to the pieces Marc has produced on The Marc Steiner Show since October 7th, but definitely go and listen to the pieces he’s produced for that series over the past couple years because you need that essential context. You need the discussions that we have preserved and had on this channel on his show.
Again, Marc, just again, as your colleague, but also as a fellow human being and as someone who has been relying on your work, I wanted to thank you for doing that work with the kind of soul and humanity and principle and care with which you approach all of your work. So I really wanted to say that, and I also wanted to just, yeah, really second to the point about how important the other series that you’ve been doing, Rise to the Right, has been. I mean, this was a series that you and Bill Fletcher started about two years ago as well. It was a highly produced audio project that we expanded into an ongoing series and the conversation that you had with Aparna Gopalan from Jewish Currents about Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the sort of linkages between the respective fascisms of Israel and India. I mean, that was such a powerful and interesting conversation and it brought such an important analysis to what we’re watching on the global stage.
But then at the same time, as part of the Rise of the Right series, you did one piece that I wanted to lift up, which was a piece that you published in June looking at kind of a county in California, Shasta County.
Marc Steiner: Shasta County.
Maximillian Alvarez: A county that I know well, and you really take listeners into Shasta County and show how, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, this county has been taken over by a far right contingent of the Republican Party and what that looks like on the ground level, at the local governance level, at the just interpersonal level, what it looks like when a town is taken over by this far right toxic politics. And you spoke with Sasha Abramsky at The Nation about an article that Sasha wrote on Shasta County, but then you went deeper. You also talked to Doni Chamberlain, who is herself an award-winning journalist living in Redding, California and reporting in Shasta County at great risk to herself.
And it was unlike anything I had heard because it didn’t just talk about the right wing takeover of Shasta County. Like with so much of the work that you do and the work that Mel and I tried to do, it really took people there. It really gave them a sort of chilling, immediate sense of what a fascist sort of takeover, even at a level so local as this, what that looks like and feels like and how we fight it. And so, I just want to commend you again on both of these series, but I know that that piece in particular, which we will link to in the show notes, we’re going to link to some of these highlights for y’all, so you can go back and check them out. But those were definitely some of my favorites as well.
Marc Steiner: Well, I appreciate that. And I think about other things like the Zoya Teirstein from Grist who made these connections we’re not making about climate change and the rise of the right and how that battle is taking place. And I think that this story is going to become a critical one in the coming years. I mean, it is the heart of the battle for the future, at least from my perspective, because, this may sound silly in some ways, but I think about I’m a father, I’m a grandfather, and I’m a great-grandfather. And I think about the future that my kids and my grandkids are going to face, which to me is one of the reasons that I’m so bent on doing more about writing and collaborating and producing the Rise of the Right here at The Real News because I think it’s about our future and people have to understand the depth of what we face. This is not just about an election, not just about Donald Trump. It’s about an organized right wing across the globe that could set our entire planet backwards, and we can’t let that happen.
Maximillian Alvarez: And Mel, what about you? Again, congrats on your first year here at The Real News.
Marc Steiner: That’s right.
Mel Buer: Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez: We had a conversation when you were actually here in Baltimore just about how wild it was that we were both here after, again, having met as a little dirtbag Midwestern podcasters no one knew about. So I’m curious, yeah, in the past year, what sort of audio stories that you’ve done or have worked on that you wanted to lift up or that you feel really, really kind of hit that mark that you’re trying to hit with the work you’re doing here?
Mel Buer: The big thing for me was I moved to LA to be closer to my partner, and that’s why I’m out here. And I had never really moved outside of the Midwest. Closest I got was Denver, Colorado for college. And it was really important for me to kind of tap into the community here and to understand how the labor movement works on the West Coast because it is vastly different in many ways than the Midwest. And I wanted to be sure that the stories that I was covering were done so correctly, that I was bringing something of value to the conversations that I was having. And I wasn’t making any blanket sort of assumptions about the politics in California, about the politics on the West Coast, about how the labor movement operates. And so, it took me some time to get comfortable. And what it really comes down to is workers are workers.
And that is a really important thing to remember is that I am also a worker. I’m a union member. I organize within my own union. I’m a member of the IWW and have organized as a freelance journalist for many years with them. And that is common ground to start with, and it’s been refreshing to be able to bring that sort of common ground to my reporting.
I think the reporting that I’ve done this year has been kind of varied. I’ve done one-on-one interviews with Union Pacific workers, and I’ve spoken to journalists who have completed extremely good, important investigations into union-busting practices, which is a subject that I find personally infuriating and fascinating and was really grateful to be able to dive into. And I’ve spent a lot of time talking to workers in white collar industries, tech industries, and the entertainment industry, so the TV and film industry.
And I think the pieces that stick out to me are the ones that could shed light on maybe a sector that some of our audience has never had any exposure to. So the Game Awards picket and the video game workers who are organizing amongst themselves or give really good and important information on business practices. Almost all of my work this year has been really focused in the labor movement and will continue to be. I have a lot of great plans for 2024, which we’ll talk about, but the big thing for me was are these conversations being informative, is it providing context, and is it kind of allowing folks from different sectors to connect the dots between these groups? A big thing about the labor movement obviously is building solidarity outside your own shop and what does that look like and how can we facilitate those conversations?
And I think the best part about the work that I’ve been doing really is kind of opening those doors and allowing for that conversation to lead to a wider sort of sense of solidarity. My goal for the coming year is also to build that conversation out to international solidarity. We’ve seen a lot of really beautiful things that the labor movement in the United States has been doing to try and safeguard the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. We’ve seen so much organizing, some high profile like the UAW, some not so much. A lot of things happening behind closed doors where concerned workers, rank-and-file workers, not even really militant rank-and-file workers, just workers are pushing their leadership to take a more public, a stronger stance on the atrocities that are happening in Palestine, often coming up against what is sort of an established practice of handshakes with Israel like the AFL-CIO is known to do. So just kind of circling back around to the conversations that Marc has been having with the many incredible guests that he’s brought on.
So, for me, that’s the work that really sticks out to me. I picked three of the episodes that I’ve worked on, and I have not done quite a bit. I have not done as many episodes as I wanted to this year. I spent the first half of this year working as an editor, so that was my job for a while. But the plan for the future is really to continue these conversations. How can we draw these through lines? How can we build this community in this space using The Real News as the platform that it is? But yeah, on a personal level. I’m really proud of the conversation that I had with Michael Paul Lindsay about the Baker, California train derailment in April.
I’m also really, really proud of the work that I did talking to Dave Jameson about his reporting on union-busting consultants. That happened in August. And then my most recent episode with the game workers of Southern California who were a diverse group of individuals who care a lot about the game industry. They care a lot about the work that they can do for each other and who are reaching out as a working group to help folks get the information they need so that they feel empowered to organize their shops and to reach out to the wider Los Angeles, Southern California labor movement and really build that solidarity there, which has been really cool to see in Los Angeles this year.
I think probably the most high profile strikes and labor actions have come out of Los Angeles since March, and it’s been fun to be here and to witness this and to speak to folks about how this has built stronger relationships locally, too, and sort of sheds light on a really strong, a really fascinating labor movement in Los Angeles, in Southern California that from my experience as a Midwesterner living in Nebraska, not even a year ago, was never on my radar.
You think about this monolith of this state and everyone who lives here knows this, but it’s not what a lot of folks in the Midwest or East Coast might think. And being on the Left Coast here and having the chance to talk to folks and learn more about the complexities of working conditions in this state is really cool.
And we’ll talk more about this, I’m sure, but I have some really cool projects that I’ve been working on in the later half of this year, and we’ll be continuing to work on in the early half of next year that hopefully continue that conversation as well. So I’ll get off my little soapbox. You can take it back. Take it back, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hey, man. As a native Southern Californian, dear listeners, I tried to warn Mel when she moved out there, but there’s no preparing anyone. You just got to go there yourself and see it for yourself. But it is a wild and fascinating place, California, and I’m glad that you’re there to kind of cover the history that’s unfolding there because it is really important. And of course, as someone who grew up there, it’s very near and dear to my heart, and I think about it often. And I guess, yeah, just to sort of close the loop on this round to where we’re lifting up some of our highlight stories from the year, and then yeah, we’ll round out by talking about what we’ve got in the hopper for 2024.
Again, there is something about the medium of audio that I’m very partial to, and I think that the sort of intimacy that you can have, even when you’re recording, right? I mean, so many of these deep and emotional and heartbreaking conversations that I record with folks on my show Working People, I feel like you can only have them when it’s just you and the other voice on the other end. I mean, that allows myself and others that I’m talking to to be open in a way that maybe we couldn’t be if we were recording over video or even sitting in front of each other in person. And I think there’s something that I’ve found in that intimacy, in that space of audio recording that I really cherish, and I try, as I know we all do, to try to bring that over to our listeners.
We don’t shy away from it. We, in fact, embrace it, and we see that intimacy, that openness, that vulnerability, that audio sort of invites us to participate in. That itself is a very powerful weapon when it comes to reporting the truth and really giving people a sense of what these stories are, why they’re important. That’s another thing that I’m really proud of, is that just tenderness and humanity with which we try to tell these stories and invite others to tell their stories in as impactful of a way as they can.
And I think that that’s what I was really struck by just sort of looking over the many, many, many bylines that I personally have put out this year, not just at The Real News and my podcast Working People, but the live streams that I do every other week, the segments I do at Breaking Points for my segment, The Art of Class War, all of that. It’s been a wild, wild, intense year, but I think I was just really, yeah, proud of the breadth of coverage that we’ve done, the range of voices, as we’ve mentioned, involved in so many important struggles.
I mean, earlier in this year, I spoke with K-12 teachers about what it is like to teach in the depths of Ron DeSantis’s Florida when public education, unions, and just sanity and good sense are being viciously attacked. And teachers like the folks that I spoke to are really being targeted in a vicious sort of way. And so, it was incredible to talk to two teachers in Florida about just what it’s like to even try to teach students in those conditions.
I spoke to faculty at Rutgers, adjuncts and tenure track, when they went on strike for the first time in their school’s history. We were there. We were there talking to folks as they were literally making history. I spoke to Khali Jama, Somali-American Amazon worker, who with her fellow workers in Minnesota led one of the most heroic struggles to pass legislation providing more protections for warehouse workers around the state. And her story was incredible, too.
I spoke with Ana Jakopič, a Slovenian union organizer about what it’s like to live and organize in Slovenia while the war in Ukraine is happening, while COVID was happening, the different kinds of workers she works with there and the struggles they face and what it means to Ana and to the workers she works with to see these other strikes and union efforts happening across Europe and North America. That was really powerful, too.
But I think I was also just really struck by the conversations I had with Kayla Denker. Kayla is a trans woman who worked at the Park Service and she was targeted, vilified, and viciously attacked for having the gall to stand up and say to murderous bigots like Michael Knowles, that she and other trans people were not just going to lay down and die in this sort of far right genocidal war on LGBTQ+ people. And for that, she was fired. And I spoke to Kayla right after she was fired about not just what she was going through and how awful her situation was at that moment, but we talked about her life. We talked about the process of realizing who she was inside and growing up in a military family and serving in Iraq. I mean, it was just a really intense and powerful conversation that I’m so grateful that I got to have.
But on top of that, I was there on the ground in Boston at Teamsters Local 25, Sean O’Brien’s, old local. I got to talk to him. I got to hear the excitement of UPS Teamsters as they were getting ready for a potential strike, and I could see the energy of the labor movement there on the ground. I saw Starbucks workers there showing solidarity with their brothers and sisters at UPS, and I got to talk to them in the cold on the street. That was just a really incredible experience.
I got to talk to UAW auto workers throughout their historic strike, and I got to talk to folks, again, who are in the labor movement, who were fellow workers, who were doing what they can to stand up against the genocidal violence that Israel is waging against Palestine and Palestinians. I mean, we were the ones who broke this kind of story in a way. Well, we didn’t break the story, but we provided an exclusive in-depth interview with members of UAW Local 2325 in New York. This is the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys in New York who were slapped with a kind of historic and historically awful restraining order. It was something I had never seen before. I had never seen a union get hit with a restraining order, preventing the membership from even voting on a resolution, calling for a ceasefire.
And we were there talking to them about what was happening and as it was happening, and I’m grateful to say that I actually received a message from them yesterday that that restraining order has been lifted. And after a month of being muzzled into silence, the union overwhelmingly voted to pass the resolution, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation. Lastly, I just wanted to sort of really underscore the stories that I feel like I’m most proud of. The first is one that I just never could have imagined I would’ve been recording when I started my show as a broke grad student in Ann Arbor using rented equipment from the library to interview my dad Jesus Alvarez years ago.
Marc Steiner: I love this.
Maximillian Alvarez: And now here, years later in Baltimore, from the offices of The Real News, I got to speak and see and directly hear from farm workers in rural Brazil who were rescued from slave conditions. I got to hear from them through a translator about what that was like, and I got to hear not just that, but about their lives and the new lives they’re trying to build through this government program that is returning land to workers who were freed from these awful conditions. That was just mind blowing to me, and it was such a powerful story that I never thought I would have the privilege to report on myself.
I also really am proud of the work that I’ve done and that we’ve done to continue to report on the struggles of people in East Palestine, Ohio, whose lives have just been turned upside down, whose community has been devastated after the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train on February 3rd of this year, and the subsequent “Controlled release,” quote, unquote, of toxic vinyl chloride. I mean, these people have just been abandoned. They have been sacrificed at the altar of capital, and while most national media forgot about them within the span of a few months, we’ve been one of the few outlets that keeps going back, keeps talking to them, keeps asking them what they’re going through and what people can do to help. It’s not enough. They need so, so much more, but at least we’re there. At least we haven’t forgotten about them. We haven’t given up on them just like we haven’t given up on people in Palestine.
And that’s the last one I want to lift up as, I know folks who listen to The Real News, have listened to my interview with Issa Amro in the West Bank. I mean, that was such an intense interview itself. I’ll just tell the story really quickly. I had been trying for weeks to get hold of someone in Gaza, in someone in the West Bank, and just like every other journalist here, just trying to get the voices of Palestinians on the record when it felt like they were being blacked out by Israel.
And I would make contact with someone in Gaza and I’d lose contact with them, and then I wouldn’t know if they were dead or alive. I would set up interviews with folks and then suddenly they would go dark. This happened over and over and over again in the weeks after October 7th, and finally, Issa Amro, who’s a world renowned Palestinian human rights activist, but also just a human being, a person living in the West Bank. I managed to talk to him on the phone. I called him. The internet wasn’t working, but I could call him over the phone, and I heard his voice and he said, “Yes, I can do the interview today, but I need you to call back in an hour.” So I called back in an hour and he said, “I need you to call back in 30 minutes.” So I did that, and then suddenly the line was dead, and I was sitting at my desk. I had my whole setup. I was waiting. I was so ready to finally get this recording, and then suddenly he was gone, and I didn’t know where he was for hours on end.
So eventually I had to come to the office because I was sitting at my desk at home. So hours later, I come to the office like my brain racked with guilt and grief, wondering what happened to Issa. And then suddenly I get a text from Issa, from Hebron saying, “I’m sorry. I was chased by settlers. I had to escape. I am temporarily safe at a friend’s house, and I can talk for 10 minutes.” And so, I didn’t have my setup. I didn’t have my good mic, I didn’t have anything. I just dropped everything. I flipped open my computer, I hit QuickTime recording, and I called Issa on my speakerphone, and I just held the phone up to the speakers.
And that was the episode that y’all heard that we published last month. And it was the most intense interview I’ve ever done. But I mean, what a necessary, incredible message that Issa shared with me and with the world. And I’m just so grateful that we have the opportunity to do that even amidst these devastating circumstances.
So I’m just, again, really proud of the work I’ve done. I’m so proud of the work that you all have done and that we as a team have done. And I wanted to ask kind of looking forward what we’ve got. And I also want to just kind of also make some honorable mentions here because we’ve got other great folks on our team and folks who work with us regularly, who have also really contributed incredible audio reporting and who are working on really important audio reporting for 2024, our colleague Stephen Janis and Taya Graham, the work that they’ve done to produce the Land of the Unsolved podcast, which is just so rich and unique and compelling.
They’re the ones who produce that incredible interview going deep into the Spokane hate church with a trans journalist who went undercover to report on that, Mike Fox, the brilliant audio reporter, Mike Fox, who is based in Latin America, who produced the Brazil On Fire podcast with us in collaboration with the North American Congress on Latin America or NACLA. We are working with Mike to produce a new audio narrative podcast series that’s going to be released in January called Under the Shadow that is looking at the long shadow of US imperialism over the course of 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine and the legacy of US intervention in Latin America, and the residues that you can still feel on life and politics and culture in Latin America from that foreign influence and interference. It’s going to be an incredible series.
So I also just wanted to thank and lift up the work that other colleagues of ours have been doing to make The Real News Audio podcast feed so rich and important and such a vital addition to our existing slate of reporting. And with that, I want to shut up myself and turn it back to you guys and ask, yeah, what stories you’re looking forward to, what stories and sort of audio reporting that our listeners should be looking forward to in the new year. I guess what’s got you excited? And then yeah, we’ll close out.
Marc Steiner: Well, one of the things I’ve been doing in the last week is reconnecting with some of the voices I’ve had on over the course of this year and talking together about how to expand what we started, whether it was the folks in Shasta County or people I’ve been talking to in Gaza and Israel and really trying to develop that to bring some new original voices and reporting you’re not going to hear anywhere else. That to me is key about Real News. Real News is a place where voices you will not hear on other media are heard, and a perspective you won’t hear, you’ll hear it in very few other places.
And podcasting. I mean, for us, this world of podcasting is critical because I think more people, this is nothing as video. I spent a lot of time working in video and visual media. I love visual media, produced a bunch and audio podcasting people take with them. So when you bring voices to the air and you create a sound environment for people to listen to, it grabs people by the heart and the brain at the same time, and you became part of it. So I’m going to go back to that over the course of the year and really bring some voices and sound that people will want to begin to really continue to listen to.
I got an email last night from Hebron, and the people want to hear from us at Real News, want to come on the air with us after the first few. I want to bring those voices on the air and some of the guests we’ve had on, the Palestinian guests I’ve been working with and writing back and forth, to helping me find people from Gaza and the West Bank to come on and be part of these conversations. You want to hear that. I’ve been talking to folks who are Israelis, who left Israel about why they left and why they can’t go back, why they do not want to go back.
And I think that also, one of the things that happened with us, Max, when we went to Texas and we produced that piece of Jim Hightower, there’s more to come, is that getting on the road, hearing the voices of the people where they live and work, where they live and struggle, where they fight the right wing, where they’re fighting for a better future for everybody. And if sometimes you can’t really replace being there with them and feeling what it feels like to be on the ground with people and what they face every day, that’s really critically important. I was on the phone last night with a friend of mine in Mississippi. He said, “I thought you said you were coming down here.” And that’s where we need to be is where the people are and getting their voices on.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hey, we’re trying, baby. That’s why we need all of y’all listening to keep supporting us so that we can actually keep getting our folks out there in the field, on the ground. Because, believe me, we want to do it. But like Marc said earlier, we’re a small team with limited resources. So if you want to hear more of that on-the-ground reporting, trust me, we want to do it. We just need your help.
Marc Steiner: So to say that, just go to www.therealnews.com/donate and show your support for The Real News. Listen, I don’t have to take a fancy airplane. Just put money in my gas tank. I’ll drive there. I don’t have to fly. I’ll drive. I love driving. So I’ll drive anywhere. Take me to Oregon, take me to Mississippi. You got to go on the road and bring your stories back for you. Besides that, think of all the depth and voices you hear here on The Real News. You really don’t get that anywhere else. I mean, one of the people on this call right now, on this panel right now, it’s a guy named Max Alvarez, and I’m not blowing smoke. He’s editor in chief. He also reports and he manages the place. I have no idea how he does it except he’s younger than I am, so he has more energy.
But if you ever come through Baltimore, anybody listening to us, come by the studio. Come on down to Holiday Street, pay a visit, see the work that goes on here. Meet Max Alvarez. You can’t meet Mel because you’re in LA. When you go to LA, you can call Mel. But come here and see the work being done by this incredible small team.
Let me just say this, I have been doing this work on the air since 1993, and I’ve been in a number of places mostly on public radio, but the amount of work that comes out of this teeny-tiny staff, the dedication people have in this place is overwhelming and producing some incredible work. So we need your support. Help us grow. Help us get your voice on the air and the voices of your neighbors on the air, the voices of the future on the air. Go to www.therealnews.com/donate whatever you can afford, whatever makes sense for your budget, and just make that donation now.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hell, yeah. And Marc’s not wrong, man. I mean, this work that we are all fiercely dedicated to, if you’re listening to this, you already know that because you’ve heard it yourself. But it does take a lot to produce, especially to edit and design the sound the way that we want to, to make sure we have the equipment that we need to do more field reporting. We do what we can with what we’ve currently got, but we can do a lot more and we can even really level up our storytelling even more with more support from y’all.
And that’s why I want to toss it to Mel, because Mel herself is working on not just kind of expanding our weekly offerings here on The Real News podcast, but also continuing along with Mike Fox to expand our ability to sort of tell stories in a more captivating way, in a way that really impacts people.
And so, Mel, I wanted to sort of ask because already, as you said, you’ve been working on an audio project that’s going to come out later next year, but you’ve been already doing work for that this year. So I wanted to ask if you could just give us a little teaser of what folks got coming on the pod feed in 2024.
Mel Buer: Yeah, so a little bit earlier this year, it’s probably in August, I got an interesting tip from Central California. Interesting is probably the wrong word, a tragic tip about a worker death in the farm fields in Central California. And it began this what is now a months long and will probably be closer to a year long investigation into heat conditions in the farm fields in California. And this is not an under-reported story in the sense that even at The Real News, we’ve done work on heat conditions and protections for extreme heat in new era of climate change.
But there’s some interesting things happening here in the state of California. And I wanted to hear the stories of the workers themselves who are preparing for and dealing with high heat conditions through longer grow seasons in California as the triple digit heats reached farther into the summers than had previously.
So I went to Fresno and I started speaking with these incredible people, these farm workers, about the work that they do. And what’s going to come out of that is a multi-part podcast series that is likely to be released sometime in the middle of the summer, really kind of breaking it down for folks. It’s been an interesting experience trying to gather information for this, and I don’t want to give too much away because it is a good story to tell. There’s still quite a bit of work to do for this podcast. And I’m really excited because I’m good at the sort of weekly things, the interviews and the conversations. And now I get a chance to take those skills and do deeper dives and have these investigations. And I hope to continue in 2024 more of these investigations within the labor movement, progressive politics, radical media, those are the things that are really fascinating to me.
And yeah, the plans for the weekly show is going to be great, I really think. One thing that I’ve learned the farther I get into union organizing, and the farther that I get into just understanding the workings of the US labor movement is that oftentimes, on an organizer-by-organizer basis, there’s a disconnect from our own labor history. And you may be able to sort of refer to certain labor fights that some organizers may understand, but the regular rank-and-file worker may not quite understand the legacy of labor history in this country that we belong to. It’s radical, it’s militant as hell, it’s really inspiring and there’s many lessons to learn from it. And as I’ve discovered more about our own labor history and immersed myself in that kind of information sharing, the more I want to share it with our audience.
And Max, you already do this really well on Working People, and I want to continue that sort of work into The Real News Network podcast. So you’re going to see not just interviews, but you’re going to see episodes that kind of break down some key moments in labor history that might be able to provide some context and shed some light on current fights and provide information to the working class that listen to our podcast. And there’s plenty of other things that I’ve got planned, but I don’t want to spoil the whole season.
But I’m really excited for the work that we’re doing in 2024. I think we’re doing some really, really cool things. I think we’re going to bring some really amazing things to the podcast feed. I’m really proud to be a part of it. If you had asked me five years ago that this was going to be the work that I was doing, I would’ve told you to kick rocks, you know what I mean? It just didn’t seem possible. I thought I was always going to just be throwing a podcast onto a Patreon to my little corner of 10 listeners, and that was going to be it. And it’s really cool that it’s kind of turned into more of a career than I ever could have hoped for. And my dad, who’s a journalist, got his start in radio and is really proud of the work that I do, too, which is kind of a compliment to me. So yeah, I’m really excited. I’m excited for the work that we’re doing. And I’ll kick it back to you, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: Hell, yeah. I’m right there with you guys. It’s been a long year as we’ve said many times. And so, I’m excited for all of us to get a little bit of rest in the coming days. That I hope for us first and foremost, because I’m very tired after the year we’ve been through, and I know y’all listening to this are tired, too. So I hope that wherever you are, you can be with the people and in the surroundings that make you feel kind and brave and healthy and happy at the end of this year.
And I hope you come back in 2024 like we are ready to keep fighting because we’ve got a world to fight for and a future to win, and the stakes could not be higher. And we’re going to be there talking to the people who are fighting that fight, wherever that fight may be, could be in their workplaces, in their apartment complexes, in front of the White House or the halls of Congress, at their state houses, in the streets. It could be anywhere around the world where people are struggling for better. We want to be there sharing their stories.
And I am so excited, and I’m so proud of the work that we’ve done this year to do that, to uplift those stories of humanity and struggle and love and loss and everything in between. And I am excited to keep doing that work in the new year wherever it takes us. There’s so many stories that need to be told, so many people whose voices and struggles need to be shared, and we need your help to do it. We are trying to make contact with folks who are also experiencing genocidal violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo right now, people in other parts of Africa who are experiencing the harshest realities of climate change. Right now as we speak, we need to be talking to unhoused people, people who are living around us, but are denied so regularly a voice and are denied even visibility in our public kind of consciousness.
I mean, we have so much more work to do, but I know we’ve got the team to do it and I know we’ve got the ability to do it. And with your help, we can keep doing the work that needs to be done at the level that we know we can do it at. So I really, really wanted to thank everyone here listening for tuning in to the work that we do. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing this work. Thank you for caring about the stories that we tell. Please do, if you haven’t already, support us financially because we really, really need it. It’s because of y’all that we are able to do this work week in, week out, that we are able to pay our staff to do the kind of recording, editing, all the labor that goes into preparing pieces for publication, all that good stuff.
It all costs a lot and it all adds up. And so, every dollar that you send to The Real News to support that work really, really helps. I promise you it does. And yeah, I think that this has been a banner year for The Real News podcast, and we’re only going to get stronger moving forward. We’ve also added on the great Nora Loreto who every day you’ve been hearing giving the news updates from Canada, Nora’s incredible, and we’re excited to be partnered with her. As I said, we’re going to kick off 2024 with a bang with journalist Mike Fox’s incredible new narrative podcast series Under the Shadow. You’re going to hear more from me. You’re going to hear more from Marc. You’re going to hear more from Mel. You’re going to hear more from our colleagues, Stephen Janis, Taya Graham, Ju-Hyun Park. We’ve got so much more in store for you guys, but we can’t thank you enough for sticking with us and believing in this work as much as we do.
And so, with that, I guess, let’s close out the year on a high note. Once again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Have a happy New Year, and we will see you back here ready to fight in 2024.
Marc Steiner: And go to www.therealnews.com/donate and become part of the family with us and the future.
Mel Buer: Happy holidays, everyone.
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