Reveal

This episode originally was broadcast July 1, 2017.

Picture an American farmer. Chances are, the farmer you’re imagining is white – more than 9 out of 10 American farmers today are. But historically, African Americans played a huge role in agriculture. The nation’s economy was built largely on black farm labor: in bondage for hundreds of years, followed by a century of sharecropping and tenant farming.

Ever since police used genetic genealogy to crack the famous Golden State Killer case, this new crime fighting tool has solved dozens of murders and rapes that had gone cold for decades. Our show looks at the promise and perils of this powerful tool that combines DNA science with genealogy.

We start with the murder of a young couple in Canada more than 30 years ago. This was the first case after the Golden State Killer to employ genetic genealogy, and the person who identified the suspect walks us through how she did it.

When President Trump tweets, the news cycle listens. Whether it’s the trade war, immigration police, vague threats of war or racist language, what the commander-in-tweet has to say often becomes a top story. But is it driving us to distraction? On today’s show, we’ll dig into the details of one story that may have been obscured by furor over Trump tweets: U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen. Then, we'll explore the contours of a conspiracy theory that's developed around the President.

This episode comes to us from Marketplace’s wealth and poverty team and their show, The Uncertain Hour.

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush did his first televised broadcast, speaking directly to the nation about an issue he believed was the gravest domestic threat to America: drugs. Specifically, crack cocaine. In the speech, Bush pulled a baggie of crack out of his desk as a prop, saying it had been seized from Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House. 

Today’s show looks at the Trump administration’s pattern of pushing expert scientists out of policy discussions. \

In a tweet last month, President Trump urged  Israel to bar two Democratic Congresswomen from visiting that country. The women support a movement against Israel called B.D.S., which stands for Boycott, Divest, Sanction. Trump said Israel would show weakness by allowing them to enter. 

For the 2019 Fall fundraising season, here are three of our favorite Reveal stories from the past year.

The herbicide dicamba is causing a civil war in farm country. Plus, honeybee rustling in California’s almond groves. Lastly, sulfur and its link to asthma in children.  

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Four hundred years ago this month, English pirates brought enslaved Africans to America’s shores. We reflect on how the legacy of slavery has reverberated through the generations to the present.

Dominique Martin was thrilled to get a state-funded voucher to send her daughter to private school. We go to Louisiana to investigate the cost of school choice. 

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A bombing in rural Nevada you’ve probably never heard of. A plot to blow up a government building.  Reveal teams up with the podcast series, Bundyville, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and Longreads, to see what happened to rancher Cliven Bundy’s supporters since his original armed standoff with the government. 

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As smart devices become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, we look at how Facebook and other companies gather information about their users and turn it into profits. 

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In Oregon, the concussion protocols that were supposed to keep high school athletes safe end up falling short for a star quarterback. 

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President Donald Trump says he doubts humans have much of a role in climate change. His administration has downplayed the science of climate change and sought to silence scientists working for the federal government.

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President Donald Trump has brought presidential pardons into the news by granting clemency to several controversial people, including Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona who targeted immigrants at traffic stops, and a serviceman who killed a suspected terrorist in the Iraqi desert. In this episode, we go beyond the headlines and tell the story of a pardons system that’s completely broken down. 

On a freezing January morning in 2014, a fire broke out in the cabin of a MH-53E Navy Sea Dragon helicopter on a training mission over the Atlantic. Seconds later it slammed into the ocean. Only two sailors survived. 

This week, Reveal partners with Investigative Studios, the production arm of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to find out what caused that crash, and why the 53 is the military's deadliest aircraft.

They belonged to an elite police task force charged with getting guns off Baltimore’s streets. Instead, the plainclothes cops roamed the city, robbing people on the street, breaking into homes to steal money and drugs, and planting evidence on their victims.

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In the second part of Reveal’s series about hate, we look at how racism and white supremacy are institutionalized in America. We start with Reveal’s Will Carless, who over the past year has been tracking police officers’ activity on Facebook, finding that hundreds of them belong to racist groups connected to the Confederacy, Islamophobic groups, misogynistic groups and groups connected to violent anti-government militias. He takes us inside this online world where officers share racist memes, and jokes and share conspiracy theories.

The mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue and the killing of activist Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, are reminders that hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. This episode surveys the state of the hate movement in America, tracing how it has evolved since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and looking ahead to 2020. The first segment includes a discussion with Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University who’s been studying efforts to de-platform hate sites on the web.

In our first story, we take listeners to a place where no human has been before. Reporter Carolyn Beeler boards an icebreaker to sail along the face of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. If Thwaites collapses, it could cause 2 feet of global sea level rise. But glaciologists fear the consequences could also be much worse: Thwaites may be holding back the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, almost like a cork in a wine bottle. If it crumbles into the ocean, the results could be catastrophic.

This episode originally aired Dec. 22, 2018. This episode tells the story of a mysterious illegal dump in a Chicago neighborhood that grew to be six stories high and spanned an area equal to 13 football fields. It took years for the dump to be cleaned up. Even then, neighborhood residents were angry and felt used when it was revealed that the dump was cover for a federal investigation into political corruption in the city.

As the population of Americans over 65 rises, families increasingly are choosing to place loved ones in long-term assisted care facilities called residential care homes. With around-the-clock caregivers and individualized attention in a single-family-home setting, these smaller, more intimate alternatives to the traditional nursing home seem like the perfect place for Mom or Grandpa. They're more affordable, too. But that affordability masks an ugly truth: Workers doing the day-to-day work of caring for America's older adults are being exploited.

Tasers are on the duty belt of nearly every American police officer. Their manufacturer, Axon Enterprise Inc., has long promoted the device as extremely effective at helping police resolve dangerous situations without using their guns. But a yearlong investigation by APM Reports shows Tasers are often less effective than the company has claimed. And just as Tasers can save lives when they subdue suspects, when they don’t, the outcome can be deadly. In Vermont we explore what happened when police using Tasers failed to subdue a mentally ill man.

This show originally was broadcast on December 8, 2018. The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, but the Confederacy didn't completely die with it. Monuments, shrines and museums are found throughout the South. We teamed up with Type Investigations to visit dozens of them and found that for devoted followers they inspire a disturbing – and distorted – view of history: Confederate generals as heroes. Slaves who were happy to work for them. That twisted history is also shared with schoolchildren on class trips. And you won't believe who's funding these sites to keep them running.

This episode comes to us from Marketplace’s wealth and poverty team and their show, The Uncertain Hour. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush did his first televised broadcast, speaking directly to the nation about an issue he believed was the gravest domestic threat to America: drugs. Specifically, crack cocaine. In the speech, Bush pulled a baggie of crack out of his desk as a prop, saying it had been seized from Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House.

American soybean farmers call pigweed “Satan’s weed” because it’s so hard to get rid of. Many of them are excited about the herbicide dicamba, which is good at killing off pigweed. There’s just one problem, and it’s igniting a civil war in farm country. Plus, each year, beekeepers from all over the country ship thousands of hives to California in time for almond pollination season. In recent years, the valuable hives have become a high-stakes target for theft. Lastly, asthma is just as common in rural areas as it is in cities.

This episode originally was broadcast on Sept. 1, 2018. Some people who live along the Mississippi River are willing to do anything to keep their homes and farms safe from flooding – even if it means inundating their own neighbors. This week, we team up with ProPublica to investigate how rising waters have set off a race to build the highest levee. We meet two farmers, one who’s willing to break the rules to protect his farm and the other who thinks that makes her farm more vulnerable. We explore the science behind levees and learn why policymakers sometimes ignore it.

We examine the record of one of the toughest immigration judges in the country, including the surprising way her decisions benefited transgender asylum seekers. Then we follow one transgender woman who flees El Salvador for the United States to try to claim asylum. Our final story takes us to Turkey, and focuses on a small but growing group of refugees seeking a new life: young Afghan women fleeing abuse, forced marriage and persecution in their homeland.

Support for boycotts of Israel has been growing in recent years, along with an increase in legislation seeking to curb this kind of boycott. Our story is about a contractor in Texas who feels they have no choice but to turn down a job when they realize the state requires they agree not to boycott Israel. We look at where this Israel boycott clause in employment contracts comes from, and weigh it against the First Amendment right to free speech.