Soledad O’Brien on Why ‘The New York Times’ Is Failing Us Under Trump
For Soledad O’Brien, life under lockdown has meant more time with her kids, negotiating a détente between her cat and dog, and spending several hours a day crouched down in a closet. “We had a little bump in the road when coronavirus happened, and I had to turn my husband’s closet into my podcast studio, which I think he’s still not thrilled about!” she says with a chuckle. “I have a nice microphone in there, a stool, great headphones, and a recording device.”
The former CNN anchor and current head of Starfish Media Group has expanded into the podcasting arena with Murder on the Towpath, a new true-crime miniseries that’s now available on Luminary. The pod explores the unsolved 1964 murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a D.C. socialite who was shot down in Georgetown, and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, the trailblazing civil-rights attorney who defended Ray Crump, the black man arrested for her murder. Meyer’s killing has attracted the attention of many a conspiracy theorist, given her late-night trysts with John F. Kennedy (she was murdered mere weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report) and the CIA chief’s confiscation of her diary following her death.
O’Brien was attracted to the deliberateness of podcasting—a sharp contrast to the sturm und drang of cable news. “They allow you to get into the backstory,” she says. “God is in the details, and in daily news, you miss those moments. You get a lot of information but no explainer about how and why things happened.”
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