In the PureOS app store, I ran in to a few different podcast apps. After installing two of these apps to my Librem 5, I started thinking about podcast content. On any Apple or Android phone, you’re going to find only a very specific kind of mainstream primarily American news and other approved media, even when exploring news content about other countries. Typically just to get access to any podcast, they want to identify you by your Google or Apple login, or if not they want you to create a login for their website as a requirement to listen to their content. What I am really looking for though (ideally), would be more akin to anonymous listening to shortwave radio. No one knows you’re listening. Ideally if you’re listening to a Russian or Chinese brodcast (for example) in English, you want to get the news from the Russian or Chinese perspective. Of course even on your Librem 5, intelligent people know that there is no internet anonymity. But we can do better by not signing-up to give away our privacy and by not joining in to the group-think with hundreds of millions of other people.
Although I consider myself to be a loyal American, the news coverage I receive always creates the same charictures of the same players on the world stage. It doesn’t matter which American network I listen to, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, some things are not debated much here in the US when it comes to how America fits in to the world community. Some countries and their leaders are always bad. If we are at war with a country or if we are supplying weapons to their enemies, then these countries aren’t just bad, they are evil. In fact they are so evil that they don’t even have any arguements to explain their evil side of the dispute (really?). If they do have their own positions, you won’t hear many of those arguements in mainstream American news brodcasts. The enemy is just evil and in need of defeat (not that I blindly believe that). The news reporting tends to end right there. All other world events, whether about war or about peace, are equally decisive and contain clear conclusions that are drawn by the “experts”. Even as Americans “we the people” are just supposed to get in line with what the experts tell us.
So as someone with a relatively free client device, capable of listening to any voice of my own choosing on the internet, where would I find brodcasts from other parts of the world, with which to educate myself? The ideal information source would include:
1.) News brodcasts in English from foreign sources.
2.) Multiple different sources so as to avoid listening to only one biased source.
3.) Hopefully I won’t be forced to log-in to gain access.
4.) Ideally the brodcast will be streamed. I might be able to string a hundred foot antenna, buy a shortwave radio, and listen to very poor radio reception, as a means to find maybe one or two good news sources. But that’s probably doing it the hard way.
