Andrew Sage

The show was ahead of its time to represent a Black family in ways the television hadn't shown before.

Exactly.

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how freedom is a joke and our lives are the punchline.

I am your host, Mio Wong.

Long ago, 2013, in a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist, purchased the Washington Post.

This was a sign of things to come.

The danger of the American free press is, and has always been, that we do not have a free press, we have a capitalist press.

Writing, and especially reporting, is a material product.

Journalists have to eat, they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people.

All of this requires capital.

And the problem with all of this requiring capital...

is that capital is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess capital have interests.

Fast forward to 2020, as protests and uprisings raged across the United States against the police and white supremacy.

A battle broke out inside of the New York Times' newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called Send in the Troops, calling for, you guessed it, sending in the troops to attack protesters, published by a member of the American government named Tom Cotton.

Editors resigned in outrage.

Debates raged across journalist slacks.

It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the United States fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom.

2020 was a significant danger to the ruling class.