Bush vs. Zombies: fun with press conference tape

This American Life ran a piece 10 years ago that made me fall in love with radio. OK, that’s probably an overstatement I was obviously listening to radio at the time, or I never would have heard the story. But at the time I was a college student immersed in media criticism, and something in this particular piece just spoke to me.

Here’s the premise. Peter Jennings is Canadian. So far, completely true. But then the narrator dissected hour after hour of Jennings’ nightly newscast to show his pro-Canada bias and how it was affecting American culture. It was brilliant, because it was an obvious distortion of things that were actually said taken out of context.

Sort of like this clip.