GroundTruth
The GroundTruth Project
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At the height of the Vietnam War, a government insider named Daniel Ellsberg leaked 7,000 pages of classified documents to American newspapers. The Pentagon Papers revealed that Americans had been lied to for decades about the war. Fifty years later, Ellsberg reveals his evolution from Cold Warrior to Whistleblower in the GroundTruth Podcast series The Whistleblower: Truth, Dissent and the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg.
Based at GBH in Boston, the award-winning GroundTruth Podcast has covered global affairs from the War in Afghanistan to rising populist nationalism through shoe-leather, on-the-ground reporting.
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Top 10 GroundTruth Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best GroundTruth episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to GroundTruth for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite GroundTruth episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
04/15/21 • 53 min
In the series premiere, we pick up on Ellsberg’s first day at the Pentagon, the day he became acquainted with what he came to call the “lying machine.” It was August 4, 1964. Contradicting accounts of an attack in The Gulf of Tonkin would give President Johnson the green light to lead the country into war in Vietnam based on a lie. We follow this thread, and the deception, through his time in the field in Vietnam, where he saw how the lies on the ground made their way back to Washington. Back home, Ellsberg observes the power of leaking government lies: His very first leak to The New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan helped to end a presidency.
This podcast series is part of a wider collaboration with UMass Amherst and GBH, including a two-day conference presented by GroundTruth and UMass Amherst on “Truth, Dissent and the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg” featuring a conversation between the Pentagon Papers whistleblower himself and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Learn more: https://www.ellsbergpapers.org/conference/
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
As we look ahead to the next season of the GroundTruth Podcast, we want to feedback from listeners like you: How do we keep going and finding new ways to be there on the ground, telling audio stories that matter in undercovered corners of the world?
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04/30/21 • 39 min
Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press knowing he could face the rest of his life in prison. But what turned this Cold War hawk into an anti-war dove? What were the motivating events and people who influenced his transformation? At 15, a tragic car accident would shape his sense of responsibility to the wider world. His time in the Marine Corps strengthened his dedication to serving his country. But in 1968 he would begin an unlikely encounter with another faction, the anti-war movement. Their dedication to serving the truth would lead Ellsberg to a massive act of dissent.
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
As we look ahead to the next season of the GroundTruth Podcast, we want to feedback from listeners like you: How do we keep going and finding new ways to be there on the ground, telling audio stories that matter in undercovered corners of the world?
2 Listeners
06/23/21 • 40 min
Before he was helping plan the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was working at Rand Corporation as a nuclear war planner. In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, he came across a classified policy document that called for killing a fifth of the human population. “This, to me, was pure evil.” When he was facing trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers, he held another trove of secret documents on the Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war. His plan was to release these, most likely from prison. But in a strange twist, a natural disaster interrupted his plans.
In the series finale, the whistleblower leaks documents on U.S. nuclear policy in the Taiwan Straits written by his colleague Morton Halperin at the height of the Cold War. The documents, embedded below, are still considered classified, and could put him at risk of prison time.
This podcast series is part of a wider collaboration with UMass Amherst and GBH, including a two-day conference presented by GroundTruth and UMass Amherst on “Truth, Dissent and the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg,” featuring a conversation between the Pentagon Papers whistleblower himself and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Learn more here: http://umass.edu/ellsberg
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
As we look ahead to the next season of the GroundTruth Podcast, we want to feedback from listeners like you: How do we keep going and finding new ways to be there on the ground, telling audio stories that matter in undercovered corners of the world?
1 Listener
07/02/20 • 11 min
July 3, 2018. It was almost Independence Day.
Lee Eric Evans straightened a flag pole on his aunt’s front porch. He carefully unfurled an American flag so that it hung properly, making sure it didn’t touch the ground.
Lee, who is 26 years old, was fussing over the flag for the 4th of July celebrations in the Farish Street Historic District which would happen the next day.
I was working on a story about the importance of the District as a hub of black-owned businesses in the 1920’s and 1930s. I wanted to understand how this once-thriving economy had descended into neglect and how the city had become seized by violence.
I told Lee Eric why I thought the story was important, and asked if I could talk with him about the neighborhood.
Within days, Lee Eric Evans would be shot dead: https://thegroundtruthproject.org/portrait-struggle-violence-mississippi/
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
1 Listener
05/18/21 • 44 min
On September 30, 1969, Daniel Ellsberg opened his newspaper to a story out of Vietnam that would act as the trigger for copying the Pentagon Papers. We pick up on this wild ride when he offers the papers to members of Congress, who shrugged him off. He then went to the New York Times, the first publication of the papers landed on the front page on June 13th, 1971. Over the next 13 days, an FBI manhunt swept the Boston area for Ellsberg and his wife Patricia. Upon turning himself in, Ellsberg had sent copies of the papers to 17 newspapers around the country.
This podcast series is part of a wider collaboration with UMass Amherst and GBH, including a two-day conference presented by GroundTruth and UMass Amherst on “Truth, Dissent and the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg,” featuring a conversation between the Pentagon Papers whistleblower himself and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Learn more here: http://umass.edu/ellsberg
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
As we look ahead to the next season of the GroundTruth Podcast, we want to feedback from listeners like you: How do we keep going and finding new ways to be there on the ground, telling audio stories that matter in undercovered corners of the world?
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06/10/21 • 34 min
Now facing a possible 115 years in prison, Daniel Ellsberg awaits his federal espionage trial. Meanwhile, Nixon unleashes his Plumbers in an attempt to silence Ellsberg, and Barbra Streisand sings for the defense! In this episode we trace the series of events that tied Daniel Ellsberg’s espionage trial to the fate of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
This podcast series is part of a wider collaboration with UMass Amherst and GBH, including a two-day conference presented by GroundTruth and UMass Amherst on “Truth, Dissent and the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg,” featuring a conversation between the Pentagon Papers whistleblower himself and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Learn more here: http://umass.edu/ellsberg
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
As we look ahead to the next season of the GroundTruth Podcast, we want to feedback from listeners like you: How do we keep going and finding new ways to be there on the ground, telling audio stories that matter in undercovered corners of the world?
1 Listener
06/19/20 • 22 min
Report for America corps member Chris Ehrmann embarked on a road trip across America, literally, from Times Square to Los Angeles, California. He traced the new landscape of COVID-19 across time zones and state lines. He spoke to those whose loved ones have been directly impacted by the virus, squaring off against those impacted by a devastated economy. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, his journey to witness a nation under lockdown was suddenly layered with thousands of protestors pouring into the streets demanding justice.
https://thegroundtruthproject.org/on-the-ground-with-report-for-america-pandemic-and-protest/
We’d like to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Call us and leave a voice message with your feedback at *(339) 365-3754*. We listen to everything you send us and we might even share some of them on this podcast.
1 Listener
Unheard in Appalachia
GroundTruth
08/15/19 • 31 min
Crossing the Divide is a collaboration with WGBH that brought together a team of five reporters from red states and blue states to travel across the country in a van, exploring issues that divide us and stories that unite us.
In this episode, Unheard in Appalachia, we take you through beautiful, mountainous Eastern Kentucky, where local economies are struggling, coal jobs continue to disappear, and people are frustrated by decades of failed government programs that have done little to help with problems connected to poverty, hazardous work conditions and poor nutrition. During our reporting road trip across America, we heard from those who feel unheard.
12/15/19 • 35 min
In August, 1947, British colonial rule officially ended in India. Within 6 months, Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence movement, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist who rejected Gandhi’s
openness to India’s Muslims. For more than 70 years, India more or less remained a constitutional democracy granting religious equality to all.
In 2014, Narendra Modi was elected prime minister. In May of 2019, Modi and his BJP party swept the elections with an overwhelming majority. This mandate gave Modi the power to reforge India in the mold of a Hindu nationalist ideology. To many observers, Modi literally unleashed the forces of Hindu nationalism that Gandhi feared, and that motivated his assassin.
Ever since 2013, candidate Modi has made three campaign promises:
He would cancel a provision in the Indian constitution that granted the troubled region of Kashmir its autonomy. He would weed out “illegal immigrants” from the country through a process called the NRC or National Register of Citizens. And third, he would enable construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque used by Muslims for centuries.
GroundTruth Global Reporting Fellow Soumya Shankar tracked Modi’s progress on each of these campaign promises. She begins in Kashmir, where she witnesses the upheaval of Modi’s latest policy shift on the only Muslim majority state in the country.
It’s early August. Day 5 of the lockdown in Kashmir...
ABOUT THE SERIES
In a six-month reporting project titled Democracy Undone: The Authoritarian’s Playbook, GroundTruth reporting fellows in India, Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United States chronicled how seven nationalist leaders in each of these countries seem to be working from the same playbook. It is a playbook that can be pieced together from the speeches and techniques in use by an interconnected web of populist leaders and their strategists as a way to gain power, impose their values and implement their agenda. Scholars on democracy say they seem eager to join China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other leading authoritarian states in stamping out democratic protections and reshaping the global order.
Democracy Undone: The Authoritarian’s Playbook, A GroundTruth Podcast/Atlantic Magazine Collaboration
Making Music In The Syrian Diaspora
GroundTruth
07/27/17 • 27 min
Ahmad Naffory fell in love with the guitar in a Syrian grocery store, but he didn't know that his music would cause him to flee his home for another continent. Strangers in a strange land, Ahmad and his bandmates — the bandit poets of Assa'aleek — use their music to remember the homes they left behind as they make their lives in a new world. Explore the reporting
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FAQ
How many episodes does GroundTruth have?
GroundTruth currently has 68 episodes available.
What topics does GroundTruth cover?
The podcast is about Podcasts and News.
What is the most popular episode on GroundTruth?
The episode title 'The Whistleblower - Episode 1: The Lying Machine' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on GroundTruth?
The average episode length on GroundTruth is 24 minutes.
How often are episodes of GroundTruth released?
Episodes of GroundTruth are typically released every 14 days.
When was the first episode of GroundTruth?
The first episode of GroundTruth was released on Sep 10, 2015.
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