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Guest:  Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialism Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, and Dedication, a personal history of growing up in a Jewish “red diaper” family. His forthcoming book from Verso, Citizens of the Whole World:  The American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism, is due to be out this fall.
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Guest: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported from more than 50 countries. He spent 15 years at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief and is the author of several books, including his latest The Greatest Evil Is War.  He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, The University of Toronto, and in the New Jersey prison system.  He is the host of the show The Chris Hedges Report.
 
Statements Below from Maximilian Alvarez, Editor in Chief of the Real News Network and Chris Hedges,  host of The Chris Hedges Report
 
Statement from Maximilian Alvarez, Editor in Chief of the Real News:
I can’t speak to Chris’s reasons for doing so, or to the motivations of any outlet that accepted his version of events without bothering to ask me/TRNN about it, but in his public statements he is grossly misrepresenting the situation and our last conversation. Contrary to his original statement on Thursday, I never said, implied, or indicated in our final conversation that TRNN couldn’t continue being a production and copublishing partner of The Chris Hedges Report because I had some issue with Chris’s reporting on Gaza, Israel, Julian Assange, etc. That is completely false, and I’m glad to see that anyone who knows anything about me, TRNN, our team, and our reporting knows that we have covered these issues from a critical perspective long before Chris, and we will continue to do so. It’s unfortunate to see that Chris apparently cared so little about the rest of our team and the work we’ve been doing that he could convince himself that he was somehow the only person at TRNN covering these stories, which he was demonstrably not, and that we’re somehow moving away from that coverage, which we are not.
What actually happened and what I actually said is all there in the statement I put out on Friday: https://therealnews.com/update-on-the-status-of-the-chris-hedges-report-from-trnns-editor-in-chief. I had a witness in the room with me, TRNN’s Chief of Editorial Operations Kayla Rivara, who heard every word of my conversation with Chris on speakerphone and can corroborate everything I said in the statement.
As anyone who listens to Chris’s speeches and interviews knows, and as he has told me numerous times, he feels he has a moral duty to say what’s in his heart about Biden, Trump, the 2024 election, and how people should vote. And that is the one etched-in-stone rule for nonprofits, and the consequences of violating it pose severe, even mortal, risks to an organization like ours. And TRNN’s own longstanding editorial code of ethics prohibits us from campaigning, lobbying, or advocating for/against candidates for elected office in their professional capacity representing TRNN, or while using TRNN’s resources. Chris knows that. Our whole team knows that.
I made the same commitment to Chris a long time ago that I’ve made to all our journalists: I won’t censor them and their journalism. And I understand that he feels a moral obligation to address how he’s voting and/or how others should vote if and when the topic comes up, especially as the election gets closer. Even though Chris and I were trying to keep that separate from the show itself and his coverage for as long as possible, we acknowledged that the topic is going to inevitably come up in relationship to virtually any news story he covers and he’s gonna need to be free to say what’s in his heart. So I freed him to do that and offered to help him find a more suitable outlet to help him produce and copublish the show. Chris needs to be free from the constraints of a nonprofit to say what he needs to say throughout the election season and beyond. That’s what I told him, that’s what I reiterated in the statement. That’s it, plain and simple. Everything else is either rumor and speculation.
Lastly, as I made clear in the statement; I never “fired” Chris because

Guest: Angela Garcia is an anthropologist and writer. She is the author of the book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, and her latest, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos.
 
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Guest: Robert Cohen is a Professor of history and social studies at New York University.  He is the author of several books including, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism and co-author with Sonia E. Murrow of Rethinking America’s Past: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond.
 

 
Photo credit: Wikimedia commons
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A look at burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the US and worldwide, hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
The post Letters and Politics – May 1, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Gray Brechin has worked as a journalist and television producer and is coauthor of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream; and Imperial San Francisco, With a New Preface: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.
The post The Creation of Cities: Wealth, Inequality and Environmental Destruction appeared first on KPFA.