First, a PSA: You can now find a complete archive of more than 22,000 of Terry Gross’s invaluable interviews on WHYY’s Fresh Air stretching back 40 years here, and I literally cannot think of a better or more entertaining way to educate yourself about whatever important issue or famous person might interest you. (If you listen to Terry with, say, David Letterman from 1981, you’ll find it is also a fun time capsule.) I imagine if you went through the entire archive, you might not know as many facts about the world as my new hero, Matt Amodio, but you might know almost all you need to know to be a well-informed citizen.
My crush on Terry began in September 1992, when she interviewed me for my first book, Sound and Fury. I admit to having just listened to it, here. What strikes me now is just how meager and relatively manageable were the problems with America’s mass media back then, There was no Fox News, no Facebook, no Breitbart, barely any Rush Limbaugh, and the word “Trump” was confined to the gossip pages of New York City tabloids, with stories based on lies passed along by the fictional PR flack “John Barron.”
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