On the Media

On the Media (OTM) is a public radio show and podcast from WNYC Studios that primarily covers the media. Since relaunching in 2001 with Brooke Gladstone as host, the show has received at least 10 awards, including two Peabody Awards.

OTM explores how the news and other media influence the public’s world view. Many stories center on events of the previous week and critique how they were covered in the news. These segments often consist of interviews with reporters about the challenges they face in covering controversial issues, as well as media scholars and analysts.

OTM has covered topics such as the use of video news releases, net neutrality, digital broadcast flags, media consolidation, censorship, freedom of the press, disinformation, the influence of 24-hour cable news television coverage, media bias, and how technology is changing the media.

The show addresses questions about how the media are influenced or spun by politicians,^[1] corporations and interest groups with the intent to shape public opinion. This includes an OTM feature that covers the media’s use of terminology that may engender biased points of view, such as the use of hot-button issues and code words such as “Michael Moore,” “torture,” “evangelical” and “islamofascist“.^[2]

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, OTM shifted its editorial focus somewhat to give more time to reporting under-covered stories.^[3] Since then, OTM has produced a 2016 series on poverty, a 2019 series on eviction,^[4] a 2022–25 series on right-wing talk radio, shortwave broadcasting in the United States and Stuart Epperson,^[5] as well as a 2018 investigative series, in partnership with The Guardian, on what the media get wrong in coverage of white supremacists.^[6]

OTM’s ongoing “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” series^[7] advises the public on how to tell good reporting from bad during the early hours and days of coverage of “a big, tragic story”, such as coverage of hurricanes.