This is the age of the podcast!
They don’t come any better than Us & Them, the new series of documentary programs —“stories from the fault lines that separate Americans” —by multiple award-winning documentarian Trey Kay.
Kay is a local boy — these days: a Hudson Valley resident, in Red Hook. Originally Trey hails from West Virginia (it’s West Virginia Public Radio that hosts the Us & Them podcasts), and he has a ton of countrywide experience as a radio interviewer and program-maker. His radio broadcasts have been heard on all the leading public radio programs including This American Life. The breadth of his knowledge of America, plus a singular talent for listening, and for bringing out the best in divergent viewpoints, are the two consistent aspects of how Trey Kay has helped us to hear America at this time of so many acute and painful divisions. You want to hear both sides of the story? This is the podcast for you.
Us & Them addresses some of the most intriguing and thorny issues that divide Americans: class; race; education; sexuality — and sex education; religion and the American soul. Kay’s programs are broadcasting at its best: never lecturing, never partisan, open to hear the passion in all points of view, no matter how they might relate to his own upbringing in the South, or to his views as an adoptive Northeasterner.
A former Spencer Fellow at the prestigious Columbia Graduate School for Journalism, Trey Kay’s most celebrated program is The Great Textbook War, a 2009 investigation of the battle over school textbooks in his native state of West Virginia. It opened the ears of listeners at large and of the radio journalism profession to Kay’s exceptional skills as an even-handed reporter, and the program was honored with an exceptional trifecta: the George Foster Peabody Award, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, and a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton.
In Us & Them, Trey Kay’s new project, he deliberately sets out to expose the most painful conflicts that beset our embattled society, and enable us to hear a true dialog between different sides. In the best tradition of fair-minded journalism, Kay’s life mission is to address the world of ‘echo chambers’ in which we speak to, and hear from, only our own point of view. Happily for us, Trey not only knows America, but has an uncanny ability to enable his interviewees to feel safe and speak out; they sense Kay’s own natural openness, and know that they are not being ambushed but, on the contrary, allowed the full freedom of the microphone. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear a master journalist at work and, through his interviews, consider what may, almost certainly, be points of view contrary to your own, as well as points of view that match your own. America is a more rich and complex set of inter-connected worlds than most of realize. Meet them on Us & Them!
To hear Us & Them podcasts go here