Podcast post

The conversation-starter "So I was listening this This American Life podcast..." is now ranked second in my life, behind "Do you think Michelle Bachmann is secretly employed by the Colbert Report?" More impressively, the This American Life podcast is the highest-ranked podcast on iTunes. Coming in second is the Adam Carolla Podcast. To me, these rankings represent a hopeful trend.

This American Life is, to my listening, a morally post-conventional radio show. By that I mean that it is integrative of an array of different worldviews. It is integrally aperspectival. It does so in a more flat-land, morally neutral way than I personally agree with much of the time, but it nonetheless epitomizes the integrated diversity public radio listeners so nobly crave. For example, a recent episode chronicled a House subcommittee hearing on rescission in the health insurance industry. The fact that they covered a little-heralded hearing in which health insurance CEOs were lambasted for instances in which their companies rescinded the coverage of patients needing expensive care was laudable enough in and of itself. Hearing one CEO getting hung out to dry by not knowing conditions mentioned on his own company's policy application form provided sufficient satisfaction to justify the segment.

But then, This American Life played clips of the CEOs responding. Particularly, it emphasized their statements that that their "rescission" of policies was not illegal under state laws, and that therefore they wouldn't pledge not to do it in the future. You could almost hear in their beleaguered exasperation a plea to MAKE IT illegal for them to pull such immoral shenanigans. A plea to give them an incentive to NOT commit those kinds of indecencies against fellow human beings for the sake of their shareholders, as they are currently obligated to do. In so doing, they revealed the duplicity of law-makers who grandstand in these kind of hearings yet refuse to introduce or even support legislation to change the underlying conditions that are fundamental to the situations which they decry. And it implicitly indicted the listeners, we constituents who fail to make our voices heard loudly enough by our elected representatives that they will support such necessarily transformative legislation.

In contrast to the achingly insightful and nuanced reporting of TAL, The Adam Carolla Podcast provides hours of solidly nationalistic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. humor. The AceMan, as Carolla calls himself, recently bragged that the US Army is so bad-ass, we have incurred more friendly-fire casualties in recent engagements than we have suffered casualties inflicted by the enemy. Carolla recognizes the other only in his own in-group of white, heterosexual, American males, and as such is (at best) quintessentially conventional in his morality.

The fact that TAL is currently ranked ahead of the AceMan shows me that for the first time in our civilization, we have an emerging media form in which the popularity of a post-conventional entity within that form outstrips that of its conventional counterparts. We are looking, of course, at a very skewed segment of the media-consuming population when considering only podcast downloaders, and the overall number of downloads for conventional podcasts still probably exceeds those of the post-conventional ones. But next time you are toasting, raise one to Ira Glass and Adam Beckwith and the team at TAL for helping to propel the popularity of morally post-conventional media.