SLOW BURN PODCAST SERIAL
SLOW BURN PODCAST SERIES

One of the most befuddling aspects of the Iraq War was its popularity among liberal elites, including Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek. Throughout its catalogue of the Bush administration’s personal obsessions and the choices that went with them, the podcast highlights the immense power of narrative to sway national decisions and dictate global histories. He put on the flight suit, he took credit.” Along the way, the usual suspects-Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, and even New York Times national security reporter Judith Miller-get their day and their say in the sun, as the podcast reflects on their respective roles in the run up to the war.

He might not have brainstormed it, or mastered the details of it, but he decided on it. Bush and “one important truth: this was Bush’s war. Though she emphasizes that it is complicated, Malone begins the 8-episode arc with Ahmed Chalabi, the aristocratic exile who founded the Iraqi National Congress in the 1990s and once declared Saddam Hussain “an insult to being” and “an insult to country.” Chalabi’s ranking of these insults, the personal first and political second, is telling. Yet Malone-a veteran journalist and, for Roth, a “fantastic storyteller”-tells listeners a story most of us have heard before.įrom start to finish, it is primarily a story about individual responsibility.

SLOW BURN PODCAST SERIES

The story of recent history is in fact Slow Burn’s brand the podcast series is “built on great storytellers with the ability to make the biggest stories of our time feel unfamiliar and surprising,” as Gabriel Roth, the editorial director for Slate’s podcasts, puts it. And, while it organizes a collection of new interviews and archival tape into neatly marshalled facts, it also leans into narrative as a form of storytelling. The Road to the Iraq War crafts a particularly American narrative about American identity in direct relation to the post-9/11 narratives Americans told themselves about who we were in the leadup to Iraq. Research indicates that roughly 25% of Americans, or approximately 68 million people, listened to weekly podcasts in 2020, and the American-style podcast is asserting marked global influence in contrast to the European style’s immersive soundscape, which is considered the more artistic but also the more difficult of the two continents’ podcasting narrative forms. A distinctly American podcasting style has emerged that foregrounds the spoon-feeding of complex information and deliberately cultivates listeners’ feelings of intimacy via anecdote and personal experiences, delivered in a relaxed and even chatty manner. Or perhaps I should say the American podcast has become a narrative about how we make narratives. And particularly since 2014’s wildly popular Serial, the podcast has become a narrative about how we make narratives rather than about how narratives resolve. It seamlessly blends the art of storytelling with the communication of facts. Podcast journalism is unabashed narrative journalism. Its episodic segments create meaning by selecting, spotlighting, and ordering particular subplots and their myriad characters, prodding listeners to acknowledge both the multiplicity of connections and the informational gaps across the segmented narrative while refusing to wrap it all up with a tidy ending. In fact, the podcast form denies closure as much as the war itself does.

SLOW BURN PODCAST SERIAL

It is of its time, a serial literary form that encapsulates post-9/11 life in a particularly post-9/11 narrative style. As with forever war, a podcast is an unwieldy beast, an aural deluge of information that if poorly managed threatens to overwhelm. The podcast, a form of narration born in 2004, just one year after the initial burst of American post-9/11 fervour fuelled the invasion of Iraq, is a fitting form to hold the complex, myriad details of the decisions leading to the Iraq War. It is a lot of story-maybe even a forever story-not only because it must communicate an overwhelming amount of information about an event that has not yet ended, but also because it is the story about ourselves that Americans must compulsively return to, retelling it again and again in an effort to make sense of the imbroglio that has defined the United States for the last twenty years. Everyone did it.” Telling the story of forever wars requires a long cast list. “At some point,” host Noreen Malone muses in episode four of Slate’s 2021 Slow Burn season on The Road to the Iraq War, “I started to think war in Iraq was like Murder on the Orient Express.

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