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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.
2018-The GroundTruth Project
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.
2018-The GroundTruth Project
Once ISIS took over, a lot of times they implemented their own curriculum, so this entire generation of kids has lost a big chunk of their education in the years they could have been going to school because instead of ‘one apple, two apple, three apples,’ ISIS would say ‘one bullet, two guns, 3 tanks,’ things like this.
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"In War, Truth is the first casualty." –Aeschylus
A class of college students at the UMass Amherst, becomes the first group of researchers to take on Daniel Ellsberg's vast archive. For two students, it's more than a history project: It's a family story.
"Ok, what I'm about to say…. could put me in prison if I live long enough...by the way, you're recording it, I presume?"
It's not the Pentagon Papers themselves that brought down Nixon... what brought down Nixon was his massive overreaction to the Pentagon Papers.
Every time I read it I’d come across a Top Secret stamp. So I’d been reluctant to get them to a copy shop. But now, Patricia was saying you gotta do it. And I would be going through page by page and scissoring off “Top Secret”
I have to say, here, it gets personal. Avert disaster? Yes, I am focused more than other people, more than my wife or others on the possibility of catastrophe. And yes, that can be related to my experience of catastrophe when I was 15.
I just spent a year studying nuclear crises with high level access, higher than top secret... I had come across a great deal of lying... The difference here was I was seeing it in real time as it was happening.
There's never gonna be many whistleblowers because the price is just too great. But if you ask what catastrophes could have been avoided by a whistleblower? All of them...none of them were unforeseen.
A round-up of reports on voting rights across the country.
Two Candidates for KY State House: 1. My background in yoga teaches that the real practice is mindfulness and meditation. 2. I practice personal injury, family law as well as criminal defense.
I grew up on this plantation in the 50’s and 60’s and they would say a famous blues guy, but they wouldn’t call his name because they felt like he was affiliated with the devil, played the devil’s music.
"Climate change had gone from something I was reporting on to something I was living in that moment. It became personal."
Barbers do more than just cut hair...they record history.
In August 2018, well before any thought of a pandemic sweeping the country, Mississippi’s prison system saw a spike in inmate deaths. Correctional officials attributed many of these to “natural causes.”
Native American communities--and traditions like Bird Singing--have been under threat since the arrival of the first Europeans, carrying diseases which wiped out millions. although these tribes may have believed such devastation was a dark period relegated to history, today, the spread of COVID-19 threatens their survival, once again.
Nashville Police Officer Andrew Delke: All I was doing was following my training which is, you shoot until the threat is neutralized.
It was July 3, 2018. Photographer Eric Shelton with was working on a story about the historic Farish Street District in Jackson, MS when he came across Lee Eric Evans hanging an American flag. Lee would be dead within days of their meeting.
LA Protester: As Malcolm X said, the chickens are coming home to roost.
A nation already crippled by a deadly virus, would now face something just as devastating. It’s quite a time to be driving across America.
An audio road trip from coast to coast with Report for America corps members
"If you have information that we are being lied into a wrongful war or a violation of the Constitution, don't wait, as I did, to go to the press and Congress with documents. Put those out at whatever personal cost. The cost will likely be very severe. But a war's worth of lives may be at stake."
Trump’s daily dissemination of demonstrable falsehoods, misleading statements, or what we used to call lies has defined the trump era. From his own lips, and in his relentless tweets, the president has cultivated an alternate reality that some Americans have accepted as their source of truth.
This is the sound of an attempt to erase an identity. This nationalist youth group is, to use their words, scrubbing “the gay” off of the streets.
To many observers, PM Narendra Modi literally unleashed the forces of Hindu nationalism that Gandhi feared, and that motivated his assassin.
In the past four years, the number of pro-government news outlets in Hungary has jumped from 30 to over 500. Prime Minister Viktor Orban's created a media empire that distributes his Fidesz party's nationalist narrative.
Former Colombian President Santos, standing before a hopeful crowd dressed in white, delivered an overture to the members of FARC, cosigners of the 2016 landmark peace deal: "Welcome to democracy!" Over three years later, FARC along with the rest of the nation, are still waiting for the peace plan's promises to materialize.
In Pontida, Italy, the far-right Lega party's annual festival is called Christmas Day, a time to come together and celebrate their accomplishments. But really it's a love-fest for the party's nationalist leader, Matteo Salvini.
President Jair Bolsonaro has promised to rule Brazil with an iron fist. He's kept his promise.
Across the world, populist movements are threatening democracy. These movements are not taking power by force, they are being given power by the popular vote.
"We get portrayed as kind of a little bit more 'hillbilly' than what we would like to be."
American teenagers reconnect with their family's legacy in verse, and for one, via telephone to Somalia
Tracing the scars from the War to End All Wars
Follow the Money: "I want you to obey God and give what he told you to give." ~ "We don't have too many Jewish Chinese people." ~ "Over the last 20 years, a handful of [Christian Zionist] nonprofits has raised over 2 billion dollars in support of Israel."
Detailed visions of Armageddon; Micah is cast from the Garden; and a cameo performance by the one and only Pat Boone!
Episode 1: The King is Coming - The Rise of Christian Zionism
100 Years Later, The Great War continues to destabilize
"This is CDC 101. If you don't test, how are you going to know who is infected?"
It’s very top secret, covert movements we’re gonna make today. They don’t realize they got a mass grave in their backyard.
Jung Gwang-il: a 56-year-old North Korean defector works to undermine the Kim Jong-un regime, and remixes Korean ballads in his spare time
"If you understand the language, then you understand the community...you make friends if you understand, because understanding IS friendship." --Ashiqullah Safi, refugee and translator
"When they talk about anger at being forgotten, it's because they have been."
The next season of GroundTruth takes you on the ground in Mosul, Rwanda, the Marshall Islands...and a haunted railroad bed in Pennsylvania
For Omar Naré, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, mariachi is in his blood. But he realized that to make mariachi that felt honest to his Californian experience, he had to break the rules. But if you break the rules of mariachi, is it still "mariachi"?
It’s no easy feat to prove that you can make an extraordinary contribution to music in America. We follow a percussionist from Cyprus on a journey to follow in the footsteps of American jazz masters.
HMI stands for Haitian Music Industry, but its artists and fans are spread around the globe. A Haitian rapper in Boston, who goes by Masterbrain, knows that to make it big in the HMI, he'll need to make a journey back to where he's from.
Two young Somali-American women in Boston are drawn together by poetry, and use it to connect with their grandmothers or ‘ayeeyo’ in Somalia.
A Cambodian genocide survivor in Lowell, Mass., is trying to make sure Cambodia’s music traditions live on. Across town, a 9-year-old boy seems uniquely gifted to do just that.
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.
On Long Island, the rate of death from opioid overdose is rising the fastest in all of New York. Here, providers are being trained in basic communication and learning to treat substance abuse like any other chronic disease. It starts with a conversation that many doctors still don't know how to have.
In the South Bronx, healthcare providers here are pioneering an approach that is way ahead of the rest of the country. This system, where all of the patients' needs are met in once place, allows them to live high-quality lives, despite a world of stigma outside of the clinic walls.
To deal with the crisis on Staten Island, health officials and law enforcement are pioneering new kinds of treatment options. But residents are largely in denial about the problem, and those wanting to get clean are more likely to go far away for rehab – making them more vulnerable to relapse when they return.
Rampant prescriptions for painkillers laid the foundation for a deadly heroin epidemic in the mostly white, blue-collar community of Staten Island. Now, the old and new epidemics exist just a few miles apart. But the stigma of addiction has stopped these suburban neighborhoods from confronting the crisis.
The South Bronx, New York's poorest neighborhood, has been dealing with a deadly heroin epidemic for generations. We look at the origins of the epidemic, residents' efforts to handle the crisis and the birth of a stigma that continues to kill, as opioid abuse spreads to the suburbs and beyond.
Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election sent shockwaves around the world, but particularly at U.N. climate conference in Marrakech. GroundTruth's Justine Calma and Chris Bentley share voices from the global gathering.
A mental health crisis is taking root in Arctic Scandinavia among the indigenous Sami, as a changing climate threatens wildlife and ways of life. GroundTruth's Melody Schreiber reports from Sweden and Norway.
After covering the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, GroundTruth's Aurora Almendral investigates how typhoons are driving waves of human trafficking in the Philippines. This is a coproduction with KCRW's UnFictional.
Zika virus is now in dozens of countries, including the United States. GroundTruth's Beth Murphy documents the epidemic in Puerto Rico, exploring how climate change is affecting mosquito-borne diseases, here and around the world.
The rising seas and increased storms that come with climate change pose a threat to many coastal cities. GroundTruth's Chris Bentley goes to Indonesia’s capital to investigate how even projects done in the name of defending the city’s most vulnerable residents could actually leave them worse off.
For 25 years, drought and war have reinforced each other in a deadly cycle in Somalia. GroundTruth's Laura Heaton reports on how the underlying causes of Somalia's long-running civil war are being worsened by climate change.
Are young people being shut out of the world's response to climate change? GroundTruth climate fellows Justine Calma and Chris Bentley kick off our new series of reports on global warming with this dispatch from the historic COP21 conference in Paris.
The epic journey of a group of Syrian refugees brought together by a famous sweets shop called Salloura. Syrian-American correspondent Dalia Mortada tells the story.
What do you learn from seeing the world collapse? In this report from our friends at the CBC podcast "Back Story," veteran reporter David Gutnik looks back on his harrowing journey to cover the aftermath of Haiti's 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 230,000 people.
How do you convince the conservative men of Afghanistan to get behind girls' education? This is the story of one determined, Afghan woman from Massachusetts who seems to have found a way.
Conflict reporter Tracey Shelton has been willing to risk her life to tell the stories of ordinary people in war zones. But now that she's found love, is her work still worth the risk? GroundTruth Producer Nathan Tobey tells the story.
Where is Afghanistan heading? GroundTruth correspondent Jean MacKenzie assesses the fall of Kunduz, and Charlie Sennott travels along the country's "Ring Road" with Iraq War veteran and photojournalist Ben Brody to investigate the legacy of the US invasion and occupation.
Correspondent Charles Sennott follows the roots of the war in Afghanistan from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He then returns to the scene of a harrowing prison uprising where the first American was killed in a war that seems to go on forever.
War Children
November 22, 201825min 36sec
A year after the city of Mosul was liberated from ISIS rule, kids across Iraq are not alright. The most vulnerable are often overlooked: orphans, the wounded, the kidnapped and returned, and those who fought for ISIS — whether by force or by choice. Boys are most at risk for future violence and recruitment to extremist groups.