Joshua Johnson

speaker

384 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Joshua Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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What if I had asked better questions, like, who influenced you the most in forming these views?

Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments.

Idiots are everywhere.

Some people drive you right up the wall with their opinions, their attitudes, their politics.

I dealt with all kinds of people in my 20-plus years as a broadcast journalist.

Eventually, I found moderating tough conversations with whatever kind of difficult people you just thought of kind of simple to do.

Not easy, but simple.

The trick is to go somewhere I know you'd rather not be.

Closer.

Distance makes things worse.

I came up in public radio, trained by old-school journalists who taught me the art of neutrality.

You neutralize your opinions, deaden your emotions, and you can get through most conversations without rolling your eyes.

Generally, it worked, and it built me a strong reputation for fairness.

But when the subject matter felt personal, neutrality felt phony.

I used to host a national talk show on NPR called 1A, and in one of our early programs, I interviewed a descendant of Confederate soldiers.

He argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved.

Now, as a black man, I felt enormous pressure to remain neutral, so I decided I was just going to focus on his arguments instead of on him.

His logic felt kind of flimsy, and I called him on it.

And eventually, he just folded, and he said, "'It really doesn't matter what I say.'"

And the moment he said that, I knew I had failed.

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