News Source: Times Radio

In case you missed it, we are in a different era now. We're past seething over the latest outrageous sound bite from Cheeto Jesus, and solidly in World War III, only the players this time are tiny children, like Lil' Archie comics.

There's a venal toddler in the White House who's cowed Congressional playground kids with his feckless tantrums and the drug-addled manic weird kid enforcer he's unleashed. Russia's destroyed its fifth-rate economy under a delusional hoodlum who styles himself a brilliant strategist even after largely wrecking his army—grinding to dust nearly 100 times more Russian soldiers than were lost in Afghanistan, plus virtually all of his twelve jillion scary Russian tanks. Baby Xi whines and whines about the big island he wants to add to his collection, and North Korea's xerox-of-a-xerox-of-a-xerox Kim sends his peeps to Ukraine to be run through the meat grinder for LOLs.

It's more Keystone Kops than Axis of Evil. But, that said, Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini seemed like hilarious, pathetic deviants before they got their grasping hands around everyone's spleen (never forget The Strong Drunk). So it could go either way.

At this point, media-wise, I'm long done with the centrist pockets of MSNBC (which served it's purpose of confirming that I was really seeing what I was seeing circa 2017) and, mostly, with Lincoln Project (taunting and ruing feel so 2022). My frame has widened, and I need a global perspective, ideally shorn of extreme liberal or conservative ideology or any other flamboyant doctrinal bullshit or entrenched point of view besides exasperated sanity.

I've found it. Check out the Times Radio channel on YouTube.

Super famous in UK, less so elsewhere, they fling out a hailstorm of 5-20 minute one-on-one interviews with knowledgable types nothing like the pundits on American cable news. There's lots of Bill Browder (I love me some Bill Browder) plus a bunch of veteran UK, Canadian, and European journalists, generals, and diplomats. Their American guests are a bit random (Richard Grenell mined for insights as if he were some real person), but you'll get more straight talk from a few minutes here than from hours of CNN.

Problems:

1. The headlines are clickbait.
Don't blame the channel or the hosts. There's one beleaguered dude coming up with this crap, he apparently doesn't have time to even watch the videos (they are churned out prodigiously), and it's all about feeding the algorithm. So ignore the headline and just play the clip. The first 30 secs or so is always the key point from the subsequent interview, so just scan those to decide whether to dig deeper

2. A Few Twit-ish Hosts
The.....deeper truth is...that....a...a…a...tortured means of, uh, elocution does not signify an, uh, uh, weighty uh, or, uh, august mind at work, necessarily.

A few hosts are, per long British tradition, inarticulate tools feigning weightiness as they struggle to compose minimally coherent sentences. You'll learn to avoid these.

3. Shit Production Values
A sea otter apparently makes the directoral choices of which camera to choose in a given moment. Lots of shots of sidekicks checking their phones, hosts gesturing at engineers while guests reply, etc. They make C-Span look like HBO.


By the way, YouTube Prime (ad-less) is well worth paying up for. Try it and you won't go back.