Radio War Nerd EP #221 — Matt Kennard on Journalism, Propaganda & "Declassified UK"
Guest: Matt Kennard, journalist & co-founder Declassified UK
Recorded: March 4, 2020
Since we started this show 4-1/2 years ago, over and over we've been asking in disbelief, "What happened to the Guardian?" This episode we talk to one of the best investigative journalists working today who answered that very question: Matt Kennard, who just launched a new investigative journalism site Declassified UK with another great journalist, Mark Curtis, whose book on British Empire's instrumentalization of Islamism we profiled in RWN EP #77.
Read Declassified UK. Follow Matt Kennard on Twitter. Buy Matt Kennard's books "Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror" and "The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs American Elite"
*WEST COAST WAR NERDS! Don't forget Radio War Nerd live in San Francisco with the almighty TrueAnon! April 22, Verdi Club. Ticket info click here.
Total time: 2:23:18
Comments (11)
US made deal with Taliban. There is important pipe line being built thru country, very important factor in the war.
You guys should do an episode on the 90's kurdistan insurgency
Goddamn, yeah! I'd never even heard of it until you guys referenced it indirectly in this ep.
This needs to be made free and uploaded to your YouTube channel.
any chance of buying the poster?
Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew is a good one about white supremacist recruiting of veterans and how the worldview that led to Vietnam could easily be turned to those purposes.
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain is a good introduction to secrecy in the UK, from the Official Secrets Act, to D-Notices, Operation Legacy, and a history of mass surveillance.
The email links to the audio file are not working. Both throw a 404 error. Please fix.
Have to say, I do often feel like the analysis of the state and its operations is extremely piss poor in the UK, especially given how impactful and long-standing our state is. Declassified UK has been a breath of fresh air to read (since I found out about it from you guys) but it's not enough. The general function of the state, such as where the main ideas surrounding both its real beliefs and its implied beliefs (whether it notices them or nor) sprout up from and how decisions get propogated through it, how the filtering mechanism for who ends up employed by the state works, and how ideology functions within it, is still largely a mystery to me. (Hand-waving about the bourgeois nature of the state is not insightful, as much as some Marxists would like to believe it is, including past me.)
What a fantastic show !! Thanks to Matt Kennard for a honest view of the UK media .. It's what everyone knows here, yet never say out loud .
Yeah, courage is the scarce resource. There's a lot of awareness but very little courage.