Archives for Specials

Camden Conference 2020- Social Media and Democracy: Sorting True Information from “Fake News”

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Broadcast Date: 3-19-20

Social Media, Democracy, Fake News, and Fact Checking

Key Discussion Points:
-Research on how well online news users can distinguish between real news articles and phony “news”
-Methods for establishing “ground truth” for news articles
-Discussion of pros and cons of crowd-sourced fact checking

Guests:
Joshua Tucker, Professor, New York University
David Brancaccio, American Public Media
Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Jeff Jarvis, Professor, City University of New York
Nicco Mele, Kennedy School, Harvard University

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Camden Conference 2020: Cyber Misinformation and the Press

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Broadcast Date: 3-13-20

Key Discussion Points:
-Role of digital information dumps in today’s cyberworld
-Threats to the civic structure of the country from “impostor news”
-Ways the Press can more effectively evaluate dumped information, e.g., WikiLeaks dump of Democratic emails in 2016

Guests:
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Professor, Annenberg School of Communications
Jeff Jarvis, Professor, Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York
David Brancaccio, Host, Marketplace Morning Report, American Public Media

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WERU Special 11/29/19: Word Literary Festival Special, Blue Hill, Maine)

Producer/Host: Phelan Gallagher

Poetry, Piano and Vocal Performance, recorded at the Word, the Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival, October 2019, Blue Hill, Maine. Features Poet Richard Blanco, Pianist and Composer Paul Sullivan, and Vocalist Rose Upton

Synopsis from the Word Festival website “This festival highlight performance is the premiere of an original, collaborative work created just for the Word festival. This performance piece will explore its creators’ immigrant roots—Paul Sullivan’s Irish heritage and Blanco’s from Cuba. Vocalist Rose Upton, originally from Orland, will sing as well.”

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Maine Currents Special 8/29/19: Part 2 of 2- Patrisha McLean’s “Finding Our Voices”

Producer/Host: Amy Browne

Note: Maine Currents will return to our regular time slot – the 1st Thursday of each month at 10, in September.

PLEASE BE ADVISED: This program features women telling their stories of surviving domestic abuse. Some of the descriptions of abuse and violence are graphic.

According to the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, here in Maine a domestic violence assault is reported to law enforcement roughly every 2 hours. And according to a 2018 report by the Maine Domestic Abuse Homicide Review Panel, for more than 10 years, almost half of the homicides in Maine were caused by domestic violence. 16 of the 37 people who were murdered in Maine from 2016 to 2017, were killed by a family member or intimate partner.

My guest on this program is Patrisha McLean. You may know her as an accomplished photographer– and you may also know parts of her personal story as a survivor of domestic violence, as they have played out in the media. Her abuser is a celebrity, so her story was shared far and wide. While that spotlight may have caused some of us to withdraw, Patrisha instead picked up her camera and a recorder and went out to help other women tell their stories on a website and traveling multimedia exhibition, called Finding Our Voices Today we pick up our conversation where it left off on the program that aired yesterday, and we open the phone lines and email to listeners.

The Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence website has resources, including confidential help lines, if you or someone you know would like to talk with someone about domestic abuse/violence. There are links to resources at www.findingourvoices.net as well. The Statewide Domestic Abuse Helpline is: 1-866-834-HELP Hearing Impaired: 1-800-437-1220 The Penobscot Nation’s Domestic & Sexual Violence Advocacy Center’s hotline number is (207) 631-4886

Catch the award-winning Maine Currents, independent local news, views and culture, on the 1st Thursday of every month, 10-11 a.m. on WERU-FM and streaming live at www.weru.org

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WERU Special 7/18/19: “Chemicals Hacking Hormones and Fueling Epidemics” -a talk by Dr. Leonardo Trasande

Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Audio recorded by: Matt Murphy

“Chemicals Hacking Hormones and Fueling Epidemics”, a talk by Dr. Leonardo Trasande at the Shaw Institute in Blue Hill on July 3, 2019. Dr. Transande is an internationally recognized expert on endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the author of the book Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The urgent threat of hormone- disrupting chemicals to our health and future, and what we can do about it.

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WERU Special 5/7/19: Climate crisis and conversion of BIW from building warships

Producer/Host: Carolyn Coe

On April 27, 2019, 25 people were arrested while blocking roads near the North Gate of Bath Iron Works on the morning of the christening ceremony for the warship the Zumwalt Destroyer Lyndon B. Johnson. Bringing attention to the urgency of the moment given the climate crisis and the harm caused by the US military worldwide, activists share why they protested the ceremony and share their calls for the conversion of the shipyard to the building of green technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels, and plastic collectors for polluted oceans.

Guests: Ellen Barfield, Russell Wray, Rob Shetterly, Dud Hendrick, Rev. Mair Honan, Meredith Bruskin, Ginny Schneider, Ethan Hughes, Jim Freeman, Jason Rawn, George Ostensen, Deb Marshall, Connie Jenkins

The above individuals represent many groups including Veterans for Peace, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats, Americans Who Tell the Truth, Maine Veterans for Peace, Peace and Justice Group of Waldo County, Maine War Tax Resisters, Island Peace and Justice, Peninsula Peace and Justice, Pax Christi Maine, and Smilin’ Trees Disarmament Farm.

Veterans for Peace event announcement and flyer

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WERU Special: Camden Conference 3/27/19

Special Presentation from the 2019 Camden Conference: China’s Rise as a World Power, Program 3

“Is This China’s Century?”

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Key Discussion Points:
a) Surveillance in China
b) Surveillance in the US by companies and by government
c) Education in China vs education in the US.

Guests:
Final Q&A Session
Martin Jacques, Senior Fellow, Cambridge Universtiy
Elizabeth Economy, Director of Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Robert Daly, Director of the Kissinger Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center
Professor Yuen Yuen Ang, University of Michigan
Professor Yashen Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Indira Lakshmanan, Executive Editor, Pulitzer Institute on Crisis Reporting
Prof. George S. Yip, Imperial College Business School, London
Kaiser Kuo, Editor at Large, SupChina.com
Professor Wu Xinbo, Fudan University (Shanghai)
Yuki Tatsumi, Director, Japan Program, The Stimson Center
Susan Thornton, Senior Fellow, Paul Tsai China Center, Yale
Ma Jun, Director, Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (Beijing)

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