Listen to the Top 5 ‘FRONTLINE Dispatch’ Podcast Episodes of 2023
From the use of spyware on human rights activists and journalists to a surge in deadly crashes involving large trucks, The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast shone a spotlight on some of 2023’s most compelling investigative reporting through in-depth, thought-provoking conversations with leading journalists and documentary filmmakers.
As the year draws to a close, we’ve collected the five most-downloaded new episodes released on The FRONTLINE Dispatch feed in 2023, based on total downloads across all podcast players as of press time.
Listen to the episodes that made the list below — and if you haven’t already, subscribe to The FRONTLINE Dispatch on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For more audio journalism, subscribe to our FRONTLINE Film Audio Tracks and explore our other award-winning podcast series, I’m Not a Monster and Un(re)solved.
5. Age of Easy Money (Full Audio Track)
FRONTLINE Film Audio Tracks are FRONTLINE documentaries, in audio form. In May, we released the Film Audio Track for Age of Easy Money, FRONTLINE’s April investigation into the Federal Reserve’s “easy money” policies, on our FRONTLINE Dispatch feed. From the award-winning team behind The Facebook Dilemma and Amazon Empire, the investigation explores how the Fed’s “easy money” policies changed the American economy and what it means that the era may now be over, including the ramifications of the Fed’s decision last year to start hiking interest rates at a historic pace in an effort to fight inflation. For context on the continued climate of economic uncertainty, listen to the audio version of the documentary now.
Related Documentary: Age of Easy Money (our most-streamed new documentary of 2023) is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
4. A.C. Thompson on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism
As FRONTLINE marked 40 years on the air, editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath hosted conversations with the journalists and filmmakers behind some of FRONTLINE’s most groundbreaking work. Among them is A.C. Thompson, a reporter for ProPublica who has been a correspondent with FRONTLINE since 2010. In this February episode, Thompson joined The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss his years of reporting on right-wing extremism for award-winning films like American Insurrection and the series Documenting Hate in light of high-profile incidents of antisemitism.
“Over time, if you were following the key sort of white nationalist and right-wing extremist talking points, you saw more and more antisemitism coming through,” Thompson told Aronson-Rath. “What I think you’ve seen since then is sort of a quiet but steady uptick in antisemitism and now it’s bursting onto the scene.”
Related Documentary: Watch American Insurrection and the series Documenting Hate on FRONTLINE’s website, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
3. Documenting the Siege of Mariupol
Ukrainian-born director and journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues from The Associated Press were the last international journalists to report from Mariupol as Russian troops attacked. 20 Days in Mariupol, an award-winning documentary from FRONTLINE and the AP that released this year, draws on Chernov’s news dispatches and his reflections as he documented the devastation of his home country for the world to see.
Chernov sat down with Raney Aronson-Rath and editor and producer Michelle Mizner, recounting his decision to go to Mariupol, how he and Mizner created a documentary feature from his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, and what he hopes people will take away from the film — today, and in years to come.
“I know that we form our understanding of the current events of the world around us by watching news and consuming news,” Chernov says in the episode. “But [we] form our understanding of our past with documentary films … Film is a medium which carries meaning across time, for generations to come.”
Related Documentary: Stream 20 Days in Mariupol on FRONTLINE’s website, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
2. Behind the Explosive Investigation Into Pegasus Spyware
When a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers came to the attention of Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories, along with Amnesty International, they suspected the list contained phone numbers potentially targeted for surveillance using the powerful spyware known as Pegasus, which gives its operators access to targets’ mobile devices.
Richard and Rigaud teamed up with journalists from sixteen other outlets, including FRONTLINE, to investigate. What the reporting consortium found, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, was explosive: Pegasus had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others around the world.
The investigation was chronicled in Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, a two-part series from FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films that goes inside the team’s reporting, and chronicles the responses from governments and institutions seeking to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry.
In this January episode, Richard and Rigaud, two of the series’ producers, joined Raney Aronson-Rath to discuss the investigation, what’s happened since, and the threat spyware like Pegasus poses.
Pegasus is “like a person over your shoulder who will read everything that you are reading, even your encrypted messages,” Richard says. “It’s a military weapon used against civilians.”
Related Documentary: Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is now streaming at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
1. ‘Dangerous Trucks’ on America’s Roads
In this July episode, correspondent A.C. Thompson joined The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss America’s Dangerous Trucks, an investigation in partnership with ProPublica.
The documentary examines a particularly devastating type of traffic accident involving trucks — underride crashes — and how for decades, federal regulators inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) failed to enact new safety measures to prevent them.
“In the 1960s, the federal safety regulators, they start looking at this issue and they’re saying, this is a problem,” Thompson says on The FRONTLINE Dispatch. “They do studies, and it then takes them more than 30 years to do anything. And that was shocking to me.”
Related Documentary: Stream America’s Dangerous Trucks on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and in the PBS App.
Subscribe to The FRONTLINE Dispatch on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
