Today, Explained

I am often on the fence with Today Explained (3 Stars), due to their often flippant bias in many episodes. That said, this particular interview was exceptional and really stands out. The asking of hard questions and holding the interviewee to account rather than just puffing them up was refreshing and invigorating! I hope we get more like this where elected officials, of every ilk, are made to justify and support their stances. It is unfortunate this app doesn’t allow people to like/upvote individual episodes and or interviewers like this Astead Herndon.

I am a daily listener of Today, Explained, and I am writing with concern about the recent episode, “Minneapolis vs. ICE.” What troubled me most was the degree of deference given to Republican political talking points. The interview felt less like rigorous journalism and more like a forum in which long-debunked narratives from the past two election cycles were treated as premises requiring rebuttal, rather than as manufactured fictions that should have been contextualized or challenged outright. Spending so much of the episode pressing Attorney General Ellison to respond to these claims came at the expense of interrogating the far more urgent realities of this moment: state power, federal overreach, and the human consequences unfolding now. That choice narrowed the conversation and missed an opportunity to ground listeners in facts rather than rehearse partisan framing. I value this show precisely because it has historically resisted that drift. This episode felt like a departure from that standard, and I hope it is not indicative of a broader shift. There are already many outlets willing to capitulate to political power; Vox should not be one of them. I will continue listening, but with greater skepticism, and I hope the team reflects on how framing decisions shape not just understanding, but credibility. Steve Seattle, WA

Please more like this, we need a break from the political bashing!

He is doing the same thing he used to do on his New York Times podcast, “the run up” - he constantly tries to act like both sides of the political argument have legitimate claims against one another, and that has not been true for a little under a decade. He does this in order to remain neutral, but you can’t be neutral on a moving train. His style and approach is anachronistic and also pretentious. He does it so much that it feels like he is gaslighting listeners and playing right into the hands of the tactics and rhetoric on the political right. It has gotten so blatant and obvious to me that I stopped listening to his previous podcast, and now I will not listen to any episode where he is the host.