Breaking Eggshells

Silencing unpopular ideas, famous individuals with a large platform, and entire thought processes has been on the rise. Last week, forty-two episodes went missing from a well-known podcast’s archive leaving several listeners wondering why the episodes were removed.

Popular podcasts are a media form that carry a lot of weight. They can be used as a soapbox that echos out opinions and ideas to a worldwide audience made up of anyone with Internet access. It is important to understand the angle of a particular speaker, the ideology a person is representing, and knowing that a particular guest is not creating negative hate speech. In order to fully understand an issue, it is important to hear both sides of an argument, especially from perspectives that challenge the set beliefs that have been reenforced and learned. Long-form podcasts are a great medium to listen to a conversation on topics that are centered around controversy because it is a direct focus on an individual’s words without a middle person twisting a story.

In a world where public relations exist, most famous people need to monitor, edit, and know what to say during interviews in order to stay on the good side of social graces. It is understandable, but what has been happening lately is that words or actions from a decade ago are brought up to the chopping block as grounds for dismissing an individual in the present day based on what they did in the past.

Not only are individuals having to be careful what they say today, but with a vast record of articles on social media, there is an endless supply of quotations that can be scoured through and used to defame a person’s character.

The most concerning part about silencing voices from individuals with a platform is that it treads very close to editing words and images from historical documents to fall more in line with the current mainstream thought.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” -Winston Smith

There is a need for more challenging conversations than critics.



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