Citations Needed

Soldiers from the US Cavalry defeat the Plains Indians, securing new territory for their burgeoning empire. A group of settlers fends off an armed Indigenous tribe on horseback in their intrepid effort to conquer new lands. A Civil War hero decides to head for the frontier in its waning days, forging an undying friendship with the Native people there. Each of these summaries describes a film made...

In this News Brief, we are joined by Real News' Mel Buer and Max Alvarez to discuss the media campaign to obscure Biden and Congressional Dems selling out rail workers. 

Five days before the midterm elections, the long-running NBC staple removed all subtlety and character work and explicitly lobbied against bail reform in a ham-fisted, boring slog of an episode. With guest Juwan J. Holmes.

"How The Left Created Trump," revealed Rob Hoffman in Politico in November 2016. "Blame liberals for the rise of Donald Trump," insisted S.E. Cupp in The Chicago Tribune the year before. "How the left enabled fascism," explained David Winner in The New Statesman in 2018. For decades, we've been fed a narrative that the rise of any right-wing tendency is the fault of leftists and liberal scolds. Th...

"Clinton Says He's Not Leaning Left but Taking a New 'Third Way,'" reported The New York Times in 1992. "It's not left. It's not right. It's forward!" proclaimed former presidential candidate Andrew Yang during a 2019 Democratic debate. "Neither left nor right," reads the slogan of far-right French political party Front National. Every few years we hear about a new, trailblazing political vision t...

"Yes, undocumented immigrants take jobs from working Americans. Here's the proof," an opinion piece in The Washington Post tells us. "Save our truckers, not affluent students seeking a free ride," pleads longtime Republican consultant Douglas MacKinnon in The Hill. "Biden's Student Debt Cancellation Robs Hard-Working Americans, Will Make Inflation Even Worse," proclaims a so-called Expert Statemen...

In this Halloween themed News Brief, we debunk the idea drug dealers are handing out fentanyl candy to our children. But we also examine why these copaganda panics are able to take hold: namely the failure of liberals to provide an alternative, non-carceral vision for how to handle the very real and urgent overdose crisis.

In this Live Show Beg-a-Thon, recorded 10/20, we discuss the morality politics of Star Trek and Pro Wrestling with guests are Robert Greene II and Brandi Collins-Dexter.

Citations Needed is now in its sixth season. Over the past five years, we've dropped 170 episodes and over 125 news briefs. We've been joined by hundreds of amazing guests. We've done live shows, AMAs, newsletters and special interviews. Our small team does all the research, writing, recording, editing, pre-production, production, post-production, transcription, promotion and distribution. We love...

In this public News Brief, "DC Media's 'Fare Evasion' Meltdown," we discuss local TV news, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal's breathless coverage of so-called "fare evasion" and how our media decides which theft to care about and which to ignore.

In this public News Brief, we discuss the nominally progressive news network's lies and omissions when covering efforts to reduce the US's unprecedented jail and prison population.

"Increasing Numbers of US Students Look for a 'Real' World," read a 1965 headline from the magazine Moderator . "Academics: Get Real!," the Harvard Business Review implored in 2009. "'Defund the police' runs into reality," the Washington Post warned in 2021. "As Latin America Shifts Left, Leaders Face a Short Honeymoon," the New York Times declared in 2022.   We're often reminded that anyone who e...

"Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?," inquires The New York Times . "Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?," The Atlantic wonders. "Gerontocracy Is Hurting Democracy," insists New York Magazine 's Intelligencer. "Too old to run again? Biden faces questions about his age as crises mount," The Guardian reports.   Though these headlines are framed as exploratory quest...

"Education... is a great equalizer of conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery," stated school reformer Horace Mann in 1848. "Math is the great equalizer," preached Jaime Escalante, Edward James Olmos' character, in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver . "The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education," announced Barack Obama during his 2010 State of the Union addres...

A white collar worker wrestles with whether to accept a promotion or help his co-workers organize. Salt miners stand up to the company that's taken over their town. A factory worker exposes her employer's union-busting tactics. Stories like these represent something we don't often see in Hollywood: Unions and labor organizers as the good guys. Not as egomaniacs or zealots, thugs or grifters—but as...

Chances are you've seen this storyline play out on either a big or small screen: An FBI agent investigates a prominent labor leader. Or maybe a union boss orders a hit on a recalcitrant member of the rank-and-file. Or perhaps a union president skims money off a pension fund to make an illegal loan.   Plotlines like these derive from one of Hollywood's longstanding and most favored tropes: the corr...

In this public News Brief, we detail the strange quadrennial tradition of acting like the US is "abandoning its principles" by reaffirming decades-long alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In this Live Interview from 7/8/22, we break down US media's inflation discourse that places the blame for rising food and gas prices squarely on the shoulders of greedy Burger King cashiers living high on the government hog. With J.W. Mason, Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

In this public News Brief we catch up with the latest far right attacks on the liberal state and Democratic Party leadership's pathological inability––or unwillingness––to meet the moment.

"John Roberts Passes Test: Politicization of Judicial Appointment is Disheartening," read a 2005 headline from Salisbury, Maryland's Daily Times. "Ignore the attacks on Neil Gorsuch. He's an intellectual giant — and a good man," Robert P. George pleaded in The Washington Post in 2017. Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination "is beyond politics," South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn to...

In this Live Interview from 5/20, we are joined by Layla A. Jones of the Philadelphia Inquirer whose report, "Lights. Camera. Crime," brilliantly documented the White Flight origins of the "action news" genre and how it dehumanized⁠—and thus helped lawmakers gut⁠—black communities throughout the country.

In this News Brief, we examine two New York Times articles—one about Chesa Boudin and one about Eric Adams—and how they serve as object lessons in how liberal outlets repackaging 1990s-era Tough on Crime dogma as sophisticated, sanitized, and progressive.

"Follow The Data" is the name of a Bloomberg Philanthropies podcast that debuted 2016. "How Data Analysis Is Driving Policing," a 2018 NPR headline read. "Data suggests that schools might be one of the least risky kinds of institutions to reopen," an opinion piece in The Washington Post told us in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the last 20 or so years, a trend of labeling concepts a...

In this public News Breif, we discuss the phoned-in, cynical response by Republicans to mass shooting and how they've devolved into a dark, meta self-parody.

After a white nationalist kills 10 in a racist mass shooting in Buffalo, those most responsible for mainstreaming white nationalist talking points try and evade responsibility.