This electronic file may not be altered in any way.The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only.Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet.For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com
Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com
Yellow RainRadiolab and the acoustics of strategic maneuvering
Justin EcksteinPacific Lutheran University
The critically acclaimed WNYC program Radiolab found itself embroiled in a controversy for its recent podcast segment “Yellow Rain.” The intent of the seg-ment was to indict the Reagan administration’s dubious pretenses for labeling yellow rain a chemical weapon. But Radiolab’s interview with survivor and his-torian Eng Yang took a harsh turn and concluded with one of Radiolab’s hosts, Robert Krulwich calling Yang’s experience hearsay. This essay uses the “Yellow Rain” controversy to highlight two important features of argumentation in the podcast context. First, podcasts feature what I call ‘the acoustics of strategic maneuvering,’ which describes the way sound itself acts as presentational force in the service of a standpoint. Second, podcasts ephemerality enables Radiolab to revise their arguments to incorporate audience expectations.
Keywords: podcasts, strategic maneuvering, sound, digital media, revision, Radiolab
1. Introduction
Recent data indicates that podcasts are a growing medium of advocacy with more and more citizens using it to both receive and produce content (Baker 2012). A 2010 Pew Research report calculated the existence of around 90,000 podcasts, a 28 percent increase from the year prior (Olmstead, Mitchell, and Rosentiel 2011). Tom Martin (2012) observes that podcasting listening has increased 163 percent from 2006 to 2012. These studies underestimate the quantity of programs, con-sidering the Pew study only evaluates English language podcasts in the United States, and Martin only indexes podcasts available on iTunes. This emerging digi-tal practice marries Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to portable MP3 players, which allows users to automatically receive and upload new content onto portable devices. Whereas analog media may limit standpoints to accommodate page or
time constraints, RSS feeds coupled with limitless space creates a robust market place of ideas. While scrolling through any number of podcast amalgamators, such as iTunes, one is confronted with a breadth of topics and opinions. The con-fluence of open source and inexpensive sound editing software, the availability of free podcast production guides, and a gentle learning curve enables anyone with a microphone and a little bit of time to reach a vast potential audience. In short, podcasts provide everyday citizens an easily accessible context for argumentation. Considering the podcast popularity, I am inclined to ask: what is the podcast’s potential as a site for advocacy?
To explore the podcast as an argumentative context, I look at the contro-versy surrounding a recent episode of a critically acclaimed and popular podcast Radiolab. Radiolab is produced by National Public Radio’s New York affiliate, WYNC, and it translates scientific discoveries into the public sphere. It is one of the most downloaded podcasts on iTunes and is consistently ranked in the top three on the iTunes podcast charts. It has a loyal following of 2.8 million mostly young (17–45), white and college educated listeners (Flagg 2010). Radiolab re-ceives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The show has also won a number of prestigious awards, includ-ing a National Academies Communication Award, a Peabody, and a MacArthur Genius grant. Radiolab, in short, is an exemplary podcast by any metric.
On September 24, 2012, Radiolab released “Facts of the Matter,” which argued that truth cannot be circumscribed to the “facts,” but somewhere between and be-yond them. The episode’s stakes are nothing less than the nature of epistemology and its potential cascading consequences for history, politics, and everyday life. To tackle this big question, Radiolab’s hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, critically engage three narratives that trouble the relationship between evidence and truth. The first narrative, “In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt,” suggests that truth exists in the spaces between evidence. The last segment, “Secret Skelly” argues limited evidence sometimes provides the best insight into another essence. Sandwiched between these two anecdotes is “Yellow Rain,” which cleaves truth from experience. The intent of the segment was to indict the Reagan administra-tion’s dubious pretenses for labeling yellow rain a chemical weapon. But Radiolab’s interview with survivor and historian Eng Yang (E. Yang) and his niece Kao Kalia Yang (K. Yang) took a harsh turn and concluded with Krulwich calling E. Yang’s experience hearsay.
Shortly after the “Facts of the Matter’s” release, K. Yang penned an opin-ion editorial that challenged the context of the critical discussion by alleging that Radiolab ambushed her and her uncle and reduced E. Yang’s experience to a political pawn. In response to the mounting pressure instigated by K. Yang’s arguments, both Abumrad and Krulwich apologized for their conduct while
reaffirming yellow rain’s dubious status as a chemical weapon. A revised podcast that addressed some of the criticisms accompanied each apology. Radiolab’s re-vision frustrated K. Yang who saw it as further discounting of the Hmong. This raises the question, if the initial podcast was pernicious, then was Radiolab’s deci-sion to revise justified? For some the answer is “yes,” because a revision is the last step in a critical discussion. It represents that logical telos of an argumentative encounter as one side succumbs to the better reasons and updates beliefs. For oth-ers, the answer is “no,” because it robs K. Yang of her voice and allows Radiolab to obscure their transgression. To adjudicate these competing claims, we must turn to the problematic of revision.
Revision traverses both argumentation and digital culture. Whereas argumen-tation concerns non-violently inducing changes in beliefs, digital culture is char-acterized by the constant updating of information. As a democratic mechanism to point out errors in reasoning, argumentation requires interlocutors who are willing to commit to the deliberative process and risk their beliefs (Hicks 2007; Ehninger 1970). In the pragma-dialectical tradition, revision occurs in the last step of a critical discussion when parties revise their beliefs to accommodate the better reason (van Eemeren 2010; van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). As an emerging digital practice, revision adapts new media to a rapidly changing terrain. This abil-ity to quickly acclimate is what gives digital media a “real time” feel (Lovink 2010). Unlike analog formats that can visually or audibly testify to a change — perhaps in a skip or a scratch — digital technology can erase evidence of a revision. Through the manipulation of code, producers can change content without scarifying qual-ity or leaving a mark. Thus, digital media adds an additional wrinkle to the already ambiguous resolution stage of critical discussion by allowing interlocutors to re-vise their current beliefs as well as their previous commitments. “Yellow Rain’s” revisions demonstrate this new capability can be utilized strategically to advance a standpoint and thus requires closer scrutiny.
Podcasting provides an ideal site to theorize the intersection between argu-mentation and emerging digital practices. Many scholars have noted that sonic technologies provide the antecedent discourses that characterize other emerging digital practices (Sterne 2012; Dyson 2009). This is because sound, and now digi-tal discourses, trade in immersion, embodiment, and ephemerality. As a result, Jonathan Sterne (2012) argues, “the historical resonance of audio can be extended across the various registers of new media, from their sensual dimensions in both the auditory and visual domains, to their treatment of subjects, to their technical structure and industrial form” (p. 2). Instead of reducing argument to a static text, we should approach it as immersive and ephemeral, something that is constantly evolving and adapting. Thus, theorizing digital media through sonorous technolo-gies allows argumentation scholars to shift the terms of inquiry from “looking at”
to “being-in” an immersive space (Crawford 2009; Couldry 2006). In short, sound recognizes the acoustics of digital argumentation.
In this essay I will use the “Yellow Rain” controversy to highlight two impor-tant features of argumentation in the podcast context. First, podcasts feature what I call ‘the acoustics of strategic maneuvering.’ Simply put, the acoustics of strategic maneuvering describes the tactical deployment of sound as presentational force to modulate listeners’ affect in the service of a standpoint. This level of argumenta-tion surfaces most notably in the way voice can convey conviction, pain, anger, and sincerity. Second, the ephemerality of podcasts enables novel strategic moves. In contrast to a scheduled radio broadcast, podcasts ask listeners to select the ap-propriate time and place to listen. This means that podcasts do not have the same sort of finality as other media: if a producer is ever dissatisfied with a podcast, then she can change it. This allows arguers to revise arguments and standpoints already made in the critical discussion to meet real-time audience expectations. While both of these features may exist in other contexts, I will demonstrate that it is the unique combination of the two that makes podcasting a unique site of argumentation.
2. The history of the yellow rain event
The Hmong are an Asian ethnic minority indigenous to the mountainous re-gion of Southeast Asia. During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited them as the Royal Laos Army to disrupt supply lines into Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon). After American troops withdrew from the war, the communist Pathet Loa ascended to power in Laos and attacked the Hmong for aiding the US. Chong Pha Thao, a Hmong veteran of the Vietnam War, recalls “the Vietnamese joined forces with the Laos communists and hunted us like animals in the jungle, leaving our people’s corpses to rot when they killed them”(George 2010). As part of what Pathet Loa called a “pacification campaign,” the communists attacked the Hmong. The attacks followed a consistent pattern; they occurred on “sunny afternoons with gentle wind conditions and were conducted by slow-flying aircraft that dropped bombs or launched air-to-surface rockets” (Tucker 2001: 26). Jonathan Tucker (2001) re-ports that 260 separate attacks resulted in at least 6,500 fatalities from 1975–1981. To escape systemic annihilation, some of the Hmong receded into the jungle — where many still reside today — while others escaped into neighboring Thailand. Those able to make it across the border into Thailand brought with them strange wounds, stories of planes dropping yellow liquid that sounded like rain, and leaves covered in the yellow substance. Concerns grew that this “yellow rain” may be a chemical weapon. Based on these accounts, US intelligence speculated that the
Soviets were using the Hmong to test a new chemical weapon. US intelligence offi-cers shipped samples of the yellow substance to the US for processing and analysis.
On September 13, 1981 the US Secretary of State Alexander Haig reviewed the recently published National Intelligence Estimate’s analysis of the yellow sub-stance and announced to the Berlin Press Association that “we now have physical evidence from Southeast Asia which has been analyzed and found to contain ab-normally high levels of three potent mycotoxins — poisonous substances not in-digenous to the region and which are highly toxic to man and animals” (Hamilton-Merritt 1992: 432). Haig claimed that use of these particular toxins violated the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and he suggested that only the Soviet Union had the technical capacity to produce such a weapon. Haig’s claim was buttressed by a number of factors including yellow rain’s similarities to other suspected Soviet-led chemical attacks (in Cambodia and Afghanistan), Pathet Loa defectors’ accounts of Soviet advisors aiding in the acquisition and deployment of such weapons, and the compound’s resemblance to a biological agent that ravaged Russia after World War II. As a consequence, the Reagan administration restarted its Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) program.
Yet, despite the Reagan administration’s decision, much of the science sur-rounding yellow rain is contested. Many allege that yellow rain provided a con-venient excuse to restart the United States’ CBW program. Even today there are new findings, tests, and studies seeking to prove or disprove yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon. Mathew Meselson’s recent study on yellow rain, for in-stance, found that “there’s not a single shred of objective evidence [that yellow rain was a weapon…] deep inside the United States government I think they know it was a mistake, but unfortunately they have never admitted it” (LaVecchia 2012). Conversely, Princeton and George Washington University both recently released studies that reaffirm yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon (LaVecchia 2012). The debate about yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon extends beyond the laboratory. For the Hmong, yellow rain is a critical component of their narrative of genocide and abandonment. To deny the truth of chemical weapons is to dis-count their experience. In contrast, dissenters view yellow rain as another instance of the US government distorting facts to justify restarting its chemical weapons programs. This controversy includes all the trappings that attract Radiolab to a story; it represents a mystery with historical consequences that can be solved with science. However, those who weigh into a decades old skirmish always risk getting entangled in messy affect.
On September 24, 2012 Radiolab published “Facts of the Matter,” consisting of three stories that trouble empiricism and truth. The episode’s byline asserts, “get-ting a firm hold on the truth is never as simple as nailing down the facts of a situation.”(“Facts of the Matter” 2012).1 “Facts of the Matter” promised to “go after a series of seemingly simple facts — facts that offer surprising insight, facts that inspire deeply different stories, and facts that, in the end, might not matter at all” (“Facts of the Matter” 2012). At stake in this episode is nothing shorter than the nature of truth. Radiolab asks, what counts as the truth? Is it externalized and mea-surable like in a photograph? Or, does the truth reside in subjective experiences that accumulate into a thought? Does the truth even matter?
To trouble conventional truth, “Facts of the Matter” offers three stories: Errol Morris’s inquiry into an early war photograph, an investigation into a mysteri-ous yellow substance that rained down on the mountains of Laos, and a narrative about a friend who never tells the truth. The episode begins with “In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt” which details Morris’s obsession with a pair of photos taken during the Crimean War dubbed “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Both pho-tos feature a dirt road winding between two slopes, but only one of them shows the road littered with cannonballs. Radiolab asks, which photo came first? And, why did the cannonballs move? Convention suggests that the photo with the can-nonball came second and was staged. Morris agrees the photographer captured the cannonball picture second, though not because it was staged. He asks listeners to go beyond the truth of a single photograph to explore the space between im-ages. Morris suggests that in the intervening time between pictures, troops moved across the landscape, jostling rocks and dislodging cannon balls, resulting in the second photo. While the cannonballs came second, they reflect another aspect of the war beyond the typically emphasized battles: the troop movements. The last story, “Secret Skelly” tells the story of Skelly, a guy who never told the truth. Skelly’s friends viewed his fibbing as innocent gestures used to obscure regrettable reali-ties. But when Skelly died, his friends questioned whether they really knew their friend at all. This final narrative asks whether truth resides in public performance or private actions. Ultimately, they opt for a more complicated view of truth in
1. When I quote from the Radiolab blogs, which includes the blog texts and the comments, I will refer to them in the parenthetical citations as the name of the blog and the date, i.e., (“Yellow Rain,” 2012). Transcriptions from the podcast will not be given parenthetical citations. There were no transcripts available and multiple different iterations of the podcast. Depending on the particular method of listening (iPod, computer, streaming, and so on) there are different time signatures, all which created difficulty in identifying a particular time. Unless otherwise marked, I transcribed the different iterations of the episodes.
which the details of Skelly’s life seem irrelevant to the truth of friendship. “Yellow Rain,” the middle story, is billed as “one of the strangest stories to come out of the Cold War [which] hinges on evidence that turns out to be deeply entangled with a little-reported tragedy, and a history-shaping accusation” (“Facts of the Matter” 2012). “Yellow Rain” explores the relation between subjective experience and rep-licable observation by contrasting personal testimony (E. Yang’s experience) with scientific discourse (the bee feces hypothesis). The episode concludes by privileg-ing the scientific over the subjective, which discounts E. Yang’s experience. While Radiolab may have intended to demonstrate the polyvalent relationship between observed facts and Truth, they became ensnared in the debate surrounding yellow rain. To explicate the critical discussion that ensues in “Yellow Rain,” I will utilize the framework of strategic maneuvering.
4. Strategic maneuvering
Strategic maneuvering, according to Gordon Mitchell (2010) asks interlocu-tors “to harmonize their rhetorical and dialectical aims” (p. 321). This approach bridges the divide between the rhetorical and dialectical argumentation traditions. Whereas rhetoric highlights the process of inducing an audience to adopt a propo-sition, dialectical theory focuses on reasonable procedures for resolving differenc-es of opinion. In his canonical essay on the perspectives of argumentation, Joseph Wenzel advises treating each perspective as its own tradition, because “attending to an object or a phenomenon from one point of view at a time […] highlight[s] some feature in the foreground of our understanding while allowing other features to recede into the background” (p. 11). For Wenzel, rhetoric directs a critic’s at-tention to the relationship between arguer and audience, while a dialectic critic attends to the rules governing a disagreement. However, each insight also imports a blind spot: a rhetorical perspective has “difficulty in addressing the normative dimension of argumentation” and dialectical approaches rely on an idealist con-ception of arguers (Zarefsky 2006: 400).
Strategic maneuvering offers a more robust account of an argumentative encounter because it both acknowledges the interlocutor’s desire to have their standpoint accepted and provides a normative framework to evaluate arguments. Instead of positing the rhetorical and dialectical perspectives as mutually exclusive, strategic maneuvering conceptualizes them as complementary. Strategic maneu-vering evaluates how well arguers can harmonize their first-order convictions (a commitment to a standpoint) with their second-order convictions (a commitment to the process of critical discussion) (Hicks 2007). Strategic maneuvering revolves around three topoi outlined by Frans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser (2001):
1. redefine problem space for the discussion (topical potential)2. appeal to the audience’s views and beliefs (audience expectation)3. present their standpoint in a voice that could affect listeners (presentational
devices)
Each of these topoi provides arguers a tactic of rhetorically advancing a stand-point. An effective strategic maneuver must maintain both commitments because first-order convictions propel the critical discussion, while the second-order con-victions ensure a reasonable resolution is reached. Failure to balance a rhetorical goal with dialectical procedure results in a derailment.
5. The “Yellow Rain” critical discussion and the acoustics of strategic maneuvering
“Yellow Rain” follows Radiolab’s typical story telling formula: segments start with the prevailing narrative (in this case, yellow rain was a chemical weapon deployed against the Hmong) and subsequently use science to challenge that explanation. As in many other episodes, this move creates a tension between subjective ex-perience and external, replicable observations. They interrogate and ultimately discard the survivor’s experiences in favor of a “verifiable” bee feces hypothesis. The resulting story challenges our common sense experience through a scientific discourse of chemicals, neurons, and particles. While the Yangs were originally introduced as evidence for Reagan’s standpoint, they were transformed into an in-terlocutor. Both Radiolab and the Yangs strategically maneuvered to adduce their standpoints. In this section, I will map the “Yellow Rain” onto the four stages of a critical discussion: (1) the confrontation stage where different standpoints are de-fined, (2) the opening stage where a common frame of reference is established, (3) the argumentative stage where participants exchange reasons in favor and against a standpoint, and finally (4) the concluding stage where consensus is reached (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2001).
The confrontation stage
Two standpoints inform the “Yellow Rain” critical discussion. The first stand-point argues that yellow rain was a Soviet-backed chemical weapons attack on the Hmong people. This position stems from Hmong testimony and Chester J. Mirocha’s research that found three non-local, synthetic toxins in leaf samples from the conflict region. The second standpoint suggests yellow rain was not a chemical weapon, but instead an excuse for the Reagan administration to restart
the US’s Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) program. This view rests on Matthew Meselson and Tom Seeley’s research that found that the shape, size, color, texture, and pollen content of the yellow rain were “nearly identical to droppings left by Southeast Asian honeybees”(Tucker, 2001: 32). This observation forms Meselson and Seeley’s bee feces hypothesis, which suggests that the yellow rain is actually a mass honeybee defecation that accompanies hibernation and migration.
The opening stage
The opening stage establishes “a zone of agreement” to conduct a critical conver-sation. Sometimes these shared commitments are explicitly outlined, other times they remain implicit (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). Prior to Radiolab’s interview with the Yangs, Radiolab e-mailed them a set of 17 questions that re-volved around E. Yang’s experience with yellow rain. These questions canvased everything from the American withdraw from the region and his subsequent jour-ney through the jungle into Thailand to his thoughts on the yellow rain contro-versy (Collins 2012). The questions were arranged sequentially, starting with life before the Americans withdrew from Vietnam to the bee feces hypothesis. From this set of questions, Radiolab assumed it would be clear that the nature of the critical discussion would focus on yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon. The Yangs, however, had a different interpretation of the questions. The preponderance of questions focused on E. Yang’s personal experience fleeing from the Pathet Loa and his work in the refugee camps. As such, the Yangs reasoned that yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon would be marginal. To them, the questions suggested an exploration of the Hmong experience. As both parties entered the argumenta-tion stage, these conflicting interpretations over the goal of the critical discussion became more pronounced.
The argumentation stage
The argumentation stage began when Pat Walter asked the Yangs about the bee feces hypothesis. “I have a clarifying question before I interpret that,” K. Yang in-quires. “So they found toxins initially, but when they looked again at the sam-ples the toxins were no longer there?” Walters responds, “that’s right.” K. Yang retorts, “But how do you explain the kids dying? The people and the animals dy-ing?” Abumrad’s voice cuts in to inform listeners that Walters “asked Kalia to tell Eng what the scientists had told us that the Hmong were definitely dying.” “The Hmong were under real attack,” Meseleson’s voice assures listeners. “They were being fired at from airplanes and by soldiers.” “But more importantly,” Abumrad cuts back in, “even if they weren’t being killed by those direct attacks, they were
on the run through the jungle. They were malnourished, drinking from contami-nated streams, diseases like dysentery and cholera were rampant, and the way a lot of people see it, they might have misattributed some of those mysterious deaths to this cloud of bee poop that looked like it could have been a chemical weapon. But Eng said ‘no, not a chance.” ’ The episode cuts back to the interview, when the Yangs rebut, “I speak to what I’ve seen, and there is no inkling in my mind that those deaths were not caused by starvation, [or] dysentery, there was [sic] chemi-cals that were killing my people.”
Radiolab’s high production and music fade as Krulwich enters the scene and questions the Yangs “as if he were a cross-examining attorney” (Collins 2012). Krulwich presses, “was there always a plane and then rain? A plane and then rain? Or did sometimes the rain happen without a plane?” “We never saw what it was,” K. Yang responds while becoming audibly frustrated. “It was always being dropped on them, and it was always being dropped where there were heavy concentrations of Hmong people.” “But,” Krulwich continues, “we don’t know whether there was a plane causing it, or did you just see the dust?” Again, K. Yang counters, “everybody runs when you hear the planes, so Hmong people didn’t watch bombs coming down. You came out, you sneak your head out, and you watch what happened in the aftermath. You saw broken trees, you saw yellow in the aftermath of what had been bombed.” K. Yang’s voice quivers as she translates, “with my own eyes I saw pollen that could kill grass, could kill leaves, could kill trees.” Krulwich does not let up. Rather, his voice hardens as he pushes for clarification: “but he himself is not clear whether it’s the bee stuff or whether it’s other stuff, because there was so much stuff coming down from the sky?” K. Yang’s voice frays and cracks as she begins to paraphrase her uncle: “you know that there were chemicals being used against the Hmong in the mountains of Laos. Whether this is the chemicals from the bombs or yellow rain, chemicals were being used. It feels like to him like this is a semantic debate, and it feels like, um, like there’s a sad lack of justice that, that, that the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professor from Harvard whose read these accounts.”
As the interview climaxes, Krulwich’s tone stiffens while he repeats a similar line of questioning: “But, as far as I can tell, your uncle didn’t see the bee pollen fall, your uncle didn’t see a plane, all of this is hearsay.” K. Yang (2012) sobs as she explains:
My uncle says for the last twenty years he didn’t know that anyone was interested in the deaths of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. What happened to the Hmong happened, and the world has been uninterested for the last twenty years. He agreed because you were interested. That the story would be heard and the Hmong deaths would be documented and rec-ognized. That’s why he agreed to the interview, that the Hmong heart is broken
and our leaders have been silenced, and what we know has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him, or to me. I agreed to the interview for the same reason, that Radiolab was interested in the Hmong story, that they were inter-ested in documenting the deaths that happened. There was so much that was not told. Everybody knows that chemical warfare was being used. How do you create bombs if not with chemicals? We can play the semantics game, we can, but I’m not interested, my uncle is not interested. We have lost too much heart, and too many people in the process. I, I think the interview is done.
K. Yang was through reasoning with Krulwich; she was no longer interested in en-gaging a “semantic debate” because that exercise only caused more pain. Krulwich’s use of “gotcha journalism” and Western science to discredit indigenous knowledge added to her frustration.
At play in this debate are two different ‘games of truth,’ meaning rules and procedures that dictate whether a claim is valid or true (Foucault 1994).2 The par-ticular game of truth that gains the most purchase is contingent upon historical circumstances and power relations. The Yang’s statements reside in a particular constellation of practices and procedures that allow them to cite personal experi-ence as sufficient evidence. However, Western epistemology discounts indigenous knowledge as superstition in this particular conjuncture. The Yangs were not authorized to make truth claims about yellow rain in this context because they lacked adequate credentials to evaluate the substance falling from the sky; they had neither the right training nor the correct procedure for making an argument. Only accumulations of reports that can be quantified and calculated count as data. Truth then is tied to different regimes of power that sanction who can speak on what issues.
In such a situation, K. Yang’s cry at the end of the interview interrupts the critical discussion and operates as an objection. Kathryn Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight (1994) explain how objections work in an argument: “absent a com-mon agreement as to the means of reaching consensus, debate over the ‘truth’ of an asserted claim is set aside, in whole or in part, and challenges are raised as to the acceptability of the communicative context within which the argument is offered as secured” (p. 251). When deliberation occurs within a shared context — agreed upon values, goals, rules, and facts — the argument progresses smoothly. When a disjunction stands between interlocutors, as in “Yellow Rain” where both parties
2. I am gesturing to Foucault’s (1994) concept of the game of truth. He explains “The word ‘game’ can lead you astray: when I say ‘game,’ I mean a set of rules by which truth is produced. It is not a game in the sense of an amusement; it is a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the bias of its principles and rules of procedure may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing” (38).
disagree on basic facts, hegemonic beliefs take precedence. These conventions can implicate who is sanctioned to speak, the problem space being debated, the con-versation’s stakes, and so on. Objections evidence this differential by making both parties (and often an audience) aware of this gap.
The podcast as argumentative context highlights the acoustics of strategic ma-neuvering. The different interplay of voices, incantations, and rhythms act as pre-sentational devices that aid each party in adducing their standpoint. For instance, K. Yang’s muffled tears, frayed voice, and intense emotions traveled through lis-teners’ headphones, imparting her visceral, negative affect. One listener, Mathew Salesses (2012) sums up the response: “Every time I listen to this, I start to cry. Every time. About ten times now.” Teresa Brennan (2004) explains, vocal rhythm “is a tool in the expression of agency, just as words are. It can literally convey the tone of an utterance, and in this sense, it does unite word and affect”(p. 70). In other words, the tonality and intonation of K. Yang’s voice strengthens her argu-ments. If she presented the same argument in a staccato manner, for instance, then her argument would have lost its force.
The concluding stage
Once K. Yang ended the interview, fifteen seconds of radio silence act as another sonic presentation device to allow the listener to ponder, as an uncomfortable and awkward affect. “Yellow Rain” then cuts to Abumrad, Krulwich, and Walters rumi-nating on the interview. This is Radiolab’s first attempt to represent the interview as an encounter that demands reflection. Walters and Abumrad sympathize with the Yangs. Abumrad interprets K. Yang as suggesting that Krulwich should have “quit focusing on this yellow rain stuff, because when you do that, you’re shoving aside a much larger story, namely that my people were being killed.” Krulwich, however, was less convinced:
Right, that’s exactly what she’s saying. And that is wrong. That is absolutely, to my mind, that is not fair to us. It’s not fair to ask us to not consider the other stories and the other frames of the story. The fact the most powerful man in the world, Ronald Reagan, used this story to order the manufacture of chemical weapons for the first time in twenty years, I mean, that is not unimportant, that’s hugely important, but it’s not important to her, so should that not be important to us?
He acknowledges that K. Yang’s reaction was “very balancing” but proceeds to suggest that “her desire was not for balance, her desire was to monopolize the sto-ry, and that we can’t allow.” Abumrad responds that yellow rain amounts to such a huge part of the Hmong genocide narrative that if “yellow rain isn’t a chemi-cal weapon, it does not just invalidate yellow rain, it negates their whole loss.”
Maybe there are three truths, Abumrad postulates: the Hmong truth, the bee fe-ces hypothesis, and the potential for the Reagan administration to exploit a situa-tion. So Abumrad asks, “what do you do when three truths are right?” Krulwich’s tone lightens as he chuckles and says “which I think that’s the situation we are in.” Krulwich, Walters, and Abumrad conclude this segment in a hushed laughter as they transition to break.
While the end of the podcast gives the appearance of a conclusion, it failed to satisfy the normative and functional dimensions of a concluding stage. As van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004) explain, a “difference of opinion can only be considered to be resolved if the parties are, concerning each component of the difference of opinion, in agreement that the protagonist’s standpoint is acceptable and the antagonist’s doubt must be retracted, or that the standpoint” (p. 61). Quite simply, the interview did not end with either party retracting their proposition. In fact it appears like the opposite occurred, with Krulwich alleging that K. Yang was unamenable to reason and the Yang’s opting to end the interview instead of con-tinuing the conversation. Rather than resolving a difference of opinion, Radiolab’s haphazard attempt to conclude laid the foundation for the next round of objec-tions.
6. Transparency and the conditions for critical discussion
While Radiolab concludes the original episode of “Yellow Rain” with the hosts re-flecting on the exchange with the Yangs, the critical discussion continued on blogs and other digital periodicals. Instead of debating yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon, the conversation refocused on Radiolab’s conduct and their treatment of the Yangs. Shortly after the release of “Facts of the Matter,” K. Yang (2012) penned an op-ed for Hyphen, a digital publication interested in issues facing the Asian American community. She felt the need to respond, because “the Hmong are not in the media very often — when we are, how we are portrayed is so critical to our own understanding of ourselves and our place in America” (Lappin 2012). In her piece, K. Yang (2012) continues the line of reasoning started on “Yellow Rain” that Radiolab ambushed her and her uncle.
K. Yang (2012) mentions that when she was contacted by Radiolab’s produc-ers, she was asked to describe the Hmong experience and “Ronald Reagan and the American politics were not at all mentioned in any of the correspondences between me and Radiolab.” Buttressing this claim is the fact that the questions sent the Yangs prior to the interview offered no indication that the bee feces hypothesis was the primary focus: only 2 of 17 questions had anything to do with bee poop (Salesses 2012). So, when Radiolab began pressing yellow rain, she did prepare
an adequate response. For K. Yang, Radiolab’s conduct violated the “obligation to defend,” that the other party is required to defend a standpoint only if s/he is prepared to do so. If either party is not prepared to defend, then the conditions for a critical discussion are not satisfied and thus the exchange either ends or is post-poned. Hence, because the Yangs were surprised by the confrontation, they could not really participate in the critical discussion.
Additionally, the Yangs did not wish to debate yellow rain’s status as a chemical weapon because it carried so much cultural significance. As many commentators have noted, asking the Yangs to defend the merits of yellow rain is the equivalent of asking a Holocaust survivor to debate Zyklon B (“Yellow Rain” 2012). Radiolab’s surprise attack, thus, bypassed the opening stage of a critical discussion. Failure to establish this shared frame of reference means “there is no point in venturing to resolve a different of opinion through an argumentative exchange of views if there is no mutual commitment to a common starting point, which may include procedural commitments as well as substantive agreement” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004: 60). For K. Yang, Radiolab violated the norms of consent re-quired for a critical discussion.
K. Yang’s argument refocused the topical potential onto the conditions of the podcasts production. Central to her standpoint is the idea of transparency, which dictates that both parties openly display their commitments and inten-tions before entering into a critical discussion. This definition of transparency in-dicts Radiolab’s mode of inquiry by challenging the procedure’s fairness. Even if Radiolab’s findings were correct, they would be illegitimate because they were fruit of the poisonous tree. K. Yang’s arguments reverberated through the blogosphere. The public lambasted Radiolab for its clumsy coverage and its unfair treatment of the Yangs. On Radiolab’s “Yellow Rain” blog, a listener named Robert scolds them because they, “made pawns of the interviewees who trusted Radiolab to actually be frank, fair, and balanced (like we all did)” (“Yellow Rain” 2012). Minnesota Public Radio correspondent Bob Collins (2012) worries that “the story appeared […] to invalidate the Hmong loss and suffering in Laos.” Aaron, a commenter on Current Magazine’s coverage of the controversy, calls the episode “inexcusable science, nothing close to journalism, and if only ‘a story,’ one that cements errone-ous ideas in the minds of its listeners” (Lapin 2012). Kirti Kamboj (2012), writing for Hyphen, describes “Yellow Rain” as “heartbreaking,” “utterly infuriating,” and an exemplar of “Orientalist, ethnocentric framing” designed to privilege Western knowledge.
7. The revision as a strategic maneuver in the podcast context
In the wake of vitriolic responses to Radiolab’s coverage of yellow rain, both Abumrad and Krulwich wrote responses on Radiolab’s blog and released revised versions of “Yellow Rain.” In his apology, Abumrad acknowledges Radiolab’s mis-takes and explained in the interest of transparency, he “included the lengthy and painful exchange with Kao Kalia Yang, even though it may not have been flattering to us” (Abumrad 2012). Similarly, Krulwich admits that his tone “was oddly angry” and that it was unacceptable, “especially when talking to a man who has suffered through a nightmare in Southeast Asia that was beyond horrific” (Krulwich 2012). They both express their sympathies about the unpleasant exchange. However, they dismiss K. Yang’s position that her and her uncle were ambushed. Krulwich ex-plains that the Yangs “were informed about what we were looking for: our goal was to find out if President Reagan’s statement was true or false” (Krulwich, 2012). Radiolab then reasserts their standpoint that their inquiry into yellow rain is im-portant because
the label ‘chemical weapon’ is not just semantics. The United States almost used yellow rain as an excuse to begin manufacturing its own chemical weapons, which would have invariably led to other countries doing the same, which would have invariably led to many more people dying they were notified the nature of their story (Abumrad, 2012).
To refocus the critical discussion on yellow and assuage the audiences concerns Abumrad “inserted a line in the story that puts our ending conversation in a bit more context” (Abumrad, 2012). Accompanying this statement, Radiolab upload-ed a revised “Yellow Rain,” with two significant changes.
First, Abumrad added a new transition to the concluding stage of the criti-cal discussion. In the initial episode between the radio silence and Abumrad, Krulwich, and Walters’s soul searching, Abumrad tells listeners, “we were all really troubled by the interview, we talked about it for weeks, we had arguments about it for weeks. What does it mean for the story? What does it mean for us personally? So at a certain point we decided to have this conversation on tape.” However, this transition is very different in the amended version:
Now, um, now…that was not the end of the interview…they kept on talking, Robert and Pat explained to K. Yang that, ya know, we are reporters and we are just trying to figure out what happened…one thing I do want to make clear…we informed the Yangs in advance that we wanted to talk about the controversy surrounding yellow rain. We were very clear about that. We did not intend to am-bush them. But this interview troubled us…[and then it fades back to Abumrad’s original transition.]
This revision explicitly tells listeners that the Yangs were given proper notification of the topic of and thus responds to K. Yang’s objection that she and her uncle were unwilling to participate in a critical discussion. If Radiolab informed the Yangs about the nature of the conversation, then K. Yang’s accusation of derailment loses credibility.
Abumrad’s new transition was not designed to persuade people who have al-ready listened to the episode, but for the vast potential audience that will down-load and listen to the podcast later. A notable feature of podcasts is they rely on the audience to select the proper time and place to listen to content. Unlike real-time broadcasts, podcasts can allow arguers to gain feedback on argumentative moves and use that information to persuade future audiences. The revision allows Radiolab to implement this criticism to better advocate their standpoint. Abumrad, in other words, is exploiting the podcast’s “on demand” broadcast model to tweak “Yellow Rain” and strategically maneuver around audience expectation. If an audi-ence reacts strongly enough, then Radiolab can change the critical discussion to better accommodate future audiences. This allows Radiolab to strengthen their arguments over time as they acquire more feedback. If a standpoint is negatively received, then the podcast producer can go back into the critical discussion and change it to accommodate audience expectation. Hence, the podcast context cre-ates a recursive relationship with audiences, where earlier audience criticism can be incorporated into improve strategic maneuvers for future audiences.
This revision also works for those who have already heard “Yellow Rain.” The podcast’s immaterial nature makes it difficult for listeners to register these revi-sions. Unlike print magazines that leave material traces, sound “exists only when it is going out of existence” (Ong 1989: 32). While some sonorous inscriptions are intelligible (such as sheet music), most are not. Record grooves, indented foil, and magnetic tape are all illegible and require technical instruments (record player, gramophone, Walkman) to render them meaningful. Podcasts differ from these analogic formats because they rely on MP3s, which reduce sound into “binary information, into data, which tells a sound producing system how to reconstruct, rather than reproduce it”(Cutter 2010: 149). For many, this language is impossible to discern. Even for those with the proper training, accounting for a change is still difficult. A revision on an older format, like a cassette tape, may announce itself in a skip or a mark. A digital file, however, is silent. This grants editors the power to make alterations without having to account for the change.
The second revision involved replacing the hushed laughter in “Yellow Rain’s” first iteration with a one minute statement from Krulwich that explains and apol-ogizes for his actions. In the new conclusion, Krulwich announces that “this is where we stop” and indicates that the preceding content was part of “our original conversation and when the podcast went out a lot of people are upset by me in
particular, so if I could add a couple things here…” He clarifies that he “had no idea what they [the Yangs] were going to say and when they got angry, I was em-barrassed, and when I got angry in my conversation with Jad and Pat that was not right and for that I apologize to Kalia and Mr. Yang in particular.” In contrast to the other revisions, which were much more subtle, this last change announces itself. So, why are they so upfront with this revision, when a podcast’s format affords them the capacity to covertly make changes? I contend it is because announcing the revision allows him to strategically maneuver around the higher-order condi-tions of argumentation (Hicks and Eckstein 2012; Mitchell 2010).
Gordon Mitchell (2010) demonstrates that the second order condition of ar-gumentation — the risking of beliefs in an argumentative process — which he calls a “discussion minded attitude,” can be the locus of strategic maneuvering. The discussion minded attitude posits an arguer with too much conviction, a naked persuader, precludes argumentation because she or he refuses to ascent to the bet-ter reasons. Conversely, someone lacking convictions, or a neutralist, is not an ap-propriate interlocutor because she or he lacks the commitments to advance. In his study of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s actions preceding the 2003 inva-sion of Iraq, Mitchell highlights a tension between Bush’s public call for dialogue on Iraq and his private commitments to invade. Mitchell argues that the invitation for debate performed a “discussion minded attitude” that gave Bush’s declaration of war democratic legitimacy. In this way, Bush used the appearance of the discus-sion minded attitude to achieve his goals.
Similarly, the addition of Krulwich’s new conclusion allowed him to strate-gically maneuver around a discussion minded attitude. By accepting the Yangs’ and their supporters’ proposition that he acted improperly, he moves the critical discussion about transparency into the concluding phase. This allows Radiolab to pivot from the problem space raised by K. Yang, transparency, to their preferred topic yellow rain’s status as chemical weapons. If Krulwich accepted fault for act-ing inappropriately, then K. Yang’s arguments about his conduct appear unneces-sary. The announcement of revision is significant here because it demonstrates that Krulwich has taken the time to reflect on the arguments presented and adjust his conduct. He sonically embodies a reasoned interlocutor.
Perhaps more importantly, Krulwich’s self-aware revision covered up the hushed laughter at the end of the first “Yellow Rain’s” first iteration. The laughter plays a significant role in K. Yang’s argument because it demonstrates that Radiolab was not really interested in having a sincere discussion. Instead, the laugher evi-dences the narrative that Radiolab was more interested in sound bites to support pre-formulated opinions than a sincere dialogue. Indeed, the laughter happened in the studio after Krulwich, Abumrad, and Walters had time to reflect on the seriousness of the critical discussion. As such, their laugher represented a smug
callousness that is antithetical to being reasonable. However, deleting the laughter turns K. Yang’s argument into a contention about a localized interview. A moment of frustration is something an audience could excuse because Krulwich was in a heated moment.
These two maneuvers, (1) inserting new statements that help them meet audi-ence expectations; and (2) announcing some revisions while hiding others, won over the audience and the tide of the comments on the website changed from anger to praise. Perhaps the tenor of the audience response is best captured by J.S., who commented on the Radiolab blog, “This was a brutal interview, and Radiolab will deservedly lose listeners as a result. But then again, Radiolab truly benefits from Jad and Robert’s willingness to take risks and expose themselves. They ap-proach a question with a set of assumptions that are often naïve, and then they are willing to open themselves up and learn from their investigation” (“Yellow Rain” 2012). The “Yellow Rain” controversy thus demonstrates that podcasting provides a novel context for argumentation.
8. Conclusion
Radiolab’s revision to respond to K. Yang’s strategic maneuver was a derailment because she was not afforded an opportunity to rebut. As van Eemeren (2010) ex-plains, the freedom rule stipulates that arguers “may not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from calling standpoints into question” (p. 7). Radiolab violated this rule by denying K. Yang access to the edited podcast and thus pre-venting her from advocating new standpoints. Instead, K. Yang is forced to main-tain her previous commitments while Radiolab manipulates the record of the criti-cal discussion to bolster their position. While this imbalance of power is inherent when only one party can edit, it becomes more pronounced through Radiolab’s revisions. If Abumrad and Krulwich were interested in continuing the critical dis-cussion, they could have revised by bringing her back and adding her most recent reflections to the new podcast. Or, they could have adhered to her wish to insert a statement from her uncle at the end of the episode (K. Yang 2012). If revision al-lowed Radiolab to put the conversation “into more context,” surely they could have accommodated a response. “Facts of the Matter’s” digital publication means that Radiolab would not even have to worry about externally imposed time constraints. It also means that the podcast is infinitely editable, making it very easy to ascend to K. Yang’s request. But, no such gesture was made. As a result, it is hard to hear the revisions any other way than a tactical derailment.
Radiolab’s revisions must be situated within “Facts of the Matter’s” broader ar-gument that the relationship between truth and facts are relative. “In the Valley of
the Shadow of Doubt” demonstrated that even something as “objective” as a photo can still be misinterpreted and fail to capture the entire scene. “Secret Skelly” cel-ebrated the fissures between truth and memory by suggesting that affinity and kinship do not require honesty. “Yellow Rain,” questioned the reliability of first-person accounts of traumatic events. Yet, K. Yang’s objection contradicted this narrative because her arguments provided reasons that truth should be introduced into politics. To declare all truth relative risks obscuring violence and marginal-izing voices. Indeed, Radiolab’s instructions to consider E. Yang’s claims as provi-sional enact a “hermeneutical injustice” which codifies structural prejudice against Hmong claims (Fricker 2008). If Radiolab teaches the audience to be skeptical to personal testimony, then it becomes difficult for subaltern voices to speak, argue, and advocate.
In response, Radiolab revised and thus reframed the importance of “Yellow Rain” to the larger arc of “Facts of the Matter.” While the first iteration uses “Yellow Rain” as a foil to trouble the existence of Truth, the revised podcast introduces the story by noting that sometimes getting to a fact of the matter can be “tricky” as sto-ries become complex, messy, and unexpected. If truths are often messy, then it is reasonable to expect investigation will yield emotional trauma. While investigat-ing such a thorny terrain, Radiolab’s revisions make them appear reasonable and accommodating: they have notified the Yangs of the nature of the conversation and they are willing to listen to another’s perspective. In contrast, K. Yang comes off as dogmatic, unwilling to engage Radiolab in a scientific debate. As a result, K. Yang’s concerns appear less about the way she was treated and more about her at-tachment to a belief.
So, what does “Yellow Rain” teach argumentation scholars about the demo-cratic potential of the podcast context? On the one hand, the podcast context pro-vides producers an asymmetric advantage. The podcast’s time-shifting capacity, infinite revisability, and sonority afforded Radiolab latitude to maneuver around the Yangs’ objections. Radiolab reorganized the exchange, omitted parts of the discussion, and revised their previous position to accommodate the Yangs’ argu-ments and appear more reasonable. On the other hand, the podcast context il-lustrates the way digital arguments refuse to be contained on one particular site. “Yellow Rain” spilled into the broader, networked public sphere and prompted debate via blog posts, podcasts, news articles, and comments. The little-discussed issue of the Hmong genocide gained increased audibility as commentators voiced their outrage or came to Radiolab’s defense. So, while Radiolab used the podcast context to derail the critical discussion, it also generated attention to a marginal-ized history.
Baker, Mathew. 2012. “Amateur Broadcasters Spread Message on Digital Podcast.” The News Tribune. July. Accessed August 12, 2012. http://newstrib.com/main.asp?SectionID = 2&SubSectionID = 27&ArticleID = 21229.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Cohen, Patrica. 2011. “Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds.” The New York Times. Collins, Bob. 2012. “Why the Radiolab Interview Went Wrong.” Minnesota Public Radio News.
September. Accessed October 20, 2012. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/spe-cial/columns/news_cut/archive/2012/09/why_the_radiolab_interview_wen.shtml.
Couldry, Nick. 2006. Listening Beyond the Echos. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.Crawford, Kate. 2009. “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media.” Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23: 525-35. DOI: 10.1080/10304310903003270Cutter, Chris. 2010. “Plunderphonia.” In Audio Culture: Reading in Modern Music, ed. by
Christoph Cox, and Daniel Warner, 138-156. New York: Continuum.Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press.van Eemeren, Frans H. 2010. Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI: 10.1075/aic.2van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 2001. “Managing Disagreement: Rhetorical
Analysis within a Dialectical Framework.” Argumentation & Advocacy 37: 15-157.van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The
Pragma-Dialectical Approach. London: Cambridge University Press.Ehningher, Douglas. 1970. “Argument as Method: Its Nature, Its Limitations, and Its Uses.”
Science. September. Accessed September 2012. http://informalscience.org/evaluation/show/262.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In The Essential Foucault, ed. by Paul Rabinow, and Nikolas Rose, 25-43. New York: The New Press.
Fricker, Miranda. 2008. “Forum on Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.” Theoria 61: 69-71.
George, William Lloyd. 2010. “The Secret Army Still Fighting the Vietnam War,” The Independent, 17 February. Accessed December 13, 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-secret-army-still-fighting-vietnam-war-1901755.html.
Gladstone, Brooke. 2011. The Influencing Machine. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Hamilton-Merritt, Jane. 1999. Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars
for Laos, 1942-1992. Bloomington: Indiana Press.Hicks, Darrin. 2007. “The New Citizen.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 93: 358-360. DOI:
10.1080/00335630701463499Hicks, Darrin, and Justin Eckstein. 2012. “Higher-Order Strategic Maneuvering by Shifting
Standards of Reasonableness in Cold-War Editorial Argumentation.” In Argumentation in
Context, ed. by Frans H. Van Eemeren, and Robert Grootendorst, 321-342. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.
Kamboj, Kiriti. 2012. “Deliberate Distorations: ‘Radiolab’ and the Hmong Story,” Hyphen, 10 October. Accessed October 20, 2012. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/ar-chive/2012/10/deliberate-distortions-radiolab-and-hmong-story.
Krulwich, Robert. 2012. “From Robert Krulwich on Yellow Rain,” Radiolab (blog), 30 September. Accessed December 20, 2012. http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/sep/30/robert-krulwich-yellow-rain/.
Lapin, Andrew. 2012. “Search for ‘Truth’ Results in Radiolab Apology,” Current Magazine, 24 October. Accessed December 21, 2012. http://www.current.org/2012/10/search-for-truth-results-in-radiolab-apology/.
LaVecchia, Olivia. 2012. “Behind Loas’s Yellow Rain and Tears,” City Pages, 14 November. Accessed December 13, 2012. http://www.citypages.com/2012-11-14/news/behind-laos-s-yellow-rain-and-tears/.
Lovink, Geert. 2010. “MyBrain.net: The Colonization of Real-Time and Other Trends in Web 2.0.” Eurozine. March. Accessed January 10, 2013. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-03-18-lovink-en.html.
Martin, Tom. 2012. “Marketing at the Speed of Sound,” Converse Digital, 20 December. Accessed May 5, 2012. http://www.conversedigital.com/digital-strategy/podcasting-statistics-trends-future.
Olmstead, Kenny, Amy Mitchell, and Tom Rosenstiel. 2011. “Audio: By the Numbers,” The State of the News Media 2011. Accessed September 5, 2012. http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/audio-essay/data-page/.
Olson, Kathryn M., and G. Thomas Goodnight. 1994. “Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy Over Fur.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80: 249-76. DOI: 10.1080/00335639409384072
Ong, Walter. 1989. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge.Salesses, Mathew. 2012. “Radiolab Update: Privilege in the Podcast, Hope in the Comments,”
The Good Men Project, 25 October. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/radiolab-update-privilege-in-the-podcast-hope-in-the-comments.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9780822395522
“The Facts of the matter,” Radiolab, 24 September. Accessed December 24, 2012. http://www.radiolab.org/2012/sep/24.
Tucker, Jonathan B. 2001. “The ‘Yellow Rain’ Controversy: Lessons for Arms Control Compliance.” The Nonproliferation Review 8: 25-42. DOI: 10.1080/10736700108436836
Walker, Rob. 2011. “On ‘Radiolab,’ the Sound of Science,” The New York Times, 7 April. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10Radiolab-t.html?pagewanted = all&_r=0.
Weinberger, David. 2009. “Transparency is the New Objectivity.” Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization 10. Accessed December 27, 2012. http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/jo-ho-aug18-09.html#transparency.
Yang, Kao Kalia. 2012. “The Science of Racism: Radiolab’s Treatment of Hmong Experience,” Hyphen, 22 October. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/10/science-racism-radiolabs-treatment-hmong-experience.
