Season 12, Episode Four July 20, 2025

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This is the listening tube.

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Hello, and thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we'll hear about speed and temperature records and how to speak Italian. I have no guests this week, so it's just all me.

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He's a nutshell, but he's still sharp.

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But first, not the headlines.

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The reason I started this podcast three and a half years ago now was because I didn't like the transformation that our media had undergone. It was no longer a source of information in the way it once was. Much of it had become one-sided tools of ideology, and we were summoned by the ones who had the same ideals as we have. After all, it's much more satisfying to read or hear something that confirms what you already believe, rather than having to process a viewpoint that may make you question your allegiances. While most of the legacy media leans to the left of the political spectrum, newer types of media have emerged on both television and most certainly radio. As well as digital platforms that only recently became easily discoverable have mostly leaned right, and it's beginning to level the playing field of influence. Fox News Channel is the exception, leading all news stations as well as many network programs in ratings. CNN and MSNBC audiences are dwarfed by Fox News, and it's safe to say not all of their viewers are right wing. Could it be that Fox News is more centrist than their critics claim? Probably not. But more people get their news from Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined. The real question isn't which one is better, the question is which one is news? And your definition of news might be different from the next guy's. A Pew Research Survey concludes that Americans have different ways of deciding what news is, or at least that's what the headline of the story about the results of the survey wanted you to believe. The story had eight contributing authors and goes on in great detail about all the minutia they could come up with when it comes to how news is consumed. It examined our perspective of sources and origins of what we consider news. It broke down how news makes us feel and how we rate the importance of news, not just as it relates to society, but also how it relates to our personal psyche. Almost 10,000 people had input on the results of the survey, including 13 journalists and 57 adults who took part in discussions about the question, what is news? The results of the survey were recorded and tabulated and examined in every possible way to gather as much insight as is possible. Eight researchers were needed to describe, in layman's terms, what all the research tells us. It's everything you never wanted to know about news. Because none of it is news. In fact, the story even confirms that people still have a definition of news that is simple, despite the media trying to make it more complicated than it needs to be. I said on the pilot episode of The Listening Tube what the definition of news is, and the Pew Survey agreed that news is information about current events the public wants or needs to know. The only modification to that definition is that people insist the information be accurate. We used to assume the information we got from the media was accurate, but now we have to remind them that they should make sure the information they give us is accurate. That's a sad commentary right there. But the Pew survey made it sound so much more complicated than it is. News isn't rocket surgery. You learn what happened, and then you tell the rest of us what happened. That's the media's job. That's what news is. Anything else is the equivalent of the results of the survey about news. It's all opinion. The Pure Research Story about News is a compilation of our opinions about the news. All they did was tell us how we feel. That's not news. And it seems most Americans know it isn't news. We know that news is accurate information about current events we want or need to know. That doesn't include predictions or opinions about what the worst-case scenario might bring. None of that is news. Neither is a Pew Research story about what we feel news is. Because the definition of news hasn't changed. What's changed is what the media passes off as news. Surveys like this one from the Pew Research Center aims to put doubt into people's minds by suggesting there are many different definitions of news simply by the questions they ask. They make it all right to create your own definition of news so that you can disqualify anything with which you disagree as not newsworthy. If we all have our own definition of news, as Pugh suggests, then news loses its identity altogether. Without a common understanding of what news is, life becomes a simple matter of data being fired at us from every direction by anyone, without justification or relevance. We, the public, will be the final arbiters of what we need or want to know, because we can't trust the so-called news to help us navigate through the fog. But in order to do that, we need to have the same definition of what news is. Most of us believe the definition of news is accurate information about current events the public wants or needs to know. If everybody had the same definition of news, the consumer would have more influence over what the media tells us. As it stands right now, they tell us what they want us to hear and omit the rest. Or they tell a story in a manipulative way to promote viewpoints or advance agendas. Agenda. Whatever the plural of agenda is. Look, I'm not telling you you can't trust the media. All I'm saying is that there's a difference between news and what were being told by news organizations. Most of the stories they tell us are based on actual events, but we have to be able to recognize where the actual and the maybe diverge. Most so-called news today is conjecture. A lot of talking heads on TV and radio are keen to predict what might happen. Modern day soothsayers, disguised as experts and consultants. The modern media has gone from telling us what happened to what might happen, and depending upon who you watch or hear, you might be too concerned with the future instead of looking at where you are right now. The media has become very good at making us ignore what's actually happening in our neighborhoods, where people mostly live in harmony, regardless of skin color or religion, and pay attention to the issues that they use to try to divide us. If they can get us to disagree on the definition of news itself, then their work is done. They will have devoured themselves by diluting their own credibility through diluting the very definition of news. Luckily, as I pointed out earlier, most Americans have a very basic and relevant definition of news, and the thirst for an honest and trustworthy platform from which they can get news by definition and not opinion. Then maybe we can get back to being able to trust the news in a way that we haven't been able to do since the fake moon landing. Sincerely, that listening to There's been a lot of hollering about the Jeffrey Epstein files lately. A majority of the files have been hidden from the public for years now, and there was a lot of hope that the Trump administration would make what the government knows about the case public. A lot of people want to know what happened inside the Epstein criminal enterprise that supplied young girls, and I assume boys as well, to perverts who would pay a lot of money to have sex with them. I probably could have used the word allegedly in there somewhere, but I think we're beyond that now. Obviously, something happened, otherwise Chislaine Maxwell wouldn't be sitting in prison right now, and Epstein himself would probably still be alive. But there's an appetite by the American public for more people to be held accountable for sustaining this criminal enterprise. After all, without customers, what business could survive? And when it comes to sex, prostitution is said to be the oldest profession, so it only stands to reason that people are still willing to pay for sex and the privilege of choosing with whom. There must be a list of customers who had access to the inner circle of those providing the service. There has to be an accounting of who was willing to pay for the services of Jeffrey Epstein. The American public demands to know who was supporting this depraved criminal enterprise. There was once another depraved criminal enterprise based in the city of Chicago. Its leader was a man named Al Capone. He was the head honcho of all head honchos. His mob ruled Chicago in a way that makes today's gangs look like amateurs. Ever hear the St. Valentine's Day Massacre? Yeah, that was him. Ever heard of Geraldo Rivera opening a safe on live TV only to find it empty? That was Al Capone's safe. Al Capone was responsible for murders, bribery, shakedowns, smuggling, extortion, and more. He claimed his occupation was plumbing supplies. He was never convicted of any kind of violence or damage. He was only ever convicted of tax evasion. He was sentenced to prison, and that ended his career as a mobster. Upon his release, he retired to Florida and died of syphilis. Now you might be thinking, Bob, what the hell are you talking about? Well here's the thing. Knowing that the most famous mobster of all time was brought down by good record keeping, why would we expect there to be an Epstein client list? Sure, there might be a trail of money transactions that could be traced, or some other record of payments being made, but they certainly wouldn't be listed by name. Maybe by anonymous Swiss bank account numbers, but certainly not anything traceable. It's the same reason hookers don't ask for ID. To assume there ever was such a thing as a client list is underestimating the thought put into the operation. Maybe Epstein wasn't stupid enough to make a list. But we know there were victims. Only one of them has publicly identified someone as a customer. I couldn't find a list of names of victims or even how many there were, only that there were many. Most, if not all of them, should be legal adults now. I haven't seen anyone come forward and tell their story of what happened. Perhaps if more of them did that, it would help pull the lid off of anything the government might have been hiding for many years. Fear of retaliation is one reason why victims don't speak out. The media often show pictures of Jeffrey Epstein with influential people. Who knows what threats a young victim may have been told? Some are ashamed of what they tolerated, whether it be from fear or otherwise. Some think they can't afford the legal obligations required to seek justice. Regardless of what hurdles may have been present, they're gone now. The American public is behind you all the way. If you have anything to contribute to the mystery of what happened behind closed doors on Epstein Island or anywhere else he operated, now's the time to tell the world. Don't leave it up to the government to spill the beans when the can is right there in your hand. Look, the only reason Epstein would have kept a list is if he planned to blackmail people. The fact that he killed himself in prison is indicative of him not having any leverage at all over anybody. Which means there probably wasn't a list. He had nothing he could use to hold anyone hostage. It's a risk you take when you don't want to get caught because of record keeping. The same thing happened to the Nazis after World War II. Because of the meticulous record keeping of the Third Reich, the Allies were able to track down war criminals and account for the millions of lives lost in concentration camps. There may be a way to eventually determine who paid Epstein for what, and maybe they're still working on it, and that's why they're being tight-lipped about it. We don't know. What we do know is that there's a lot more information than the general public has been told, or that the general public is expecting more information than there actually is. The current sentiment is that the Trump administration isn't releasing anything because Trump's name is in there somewhere. If that was the case, the Biden administration would have plastered it on every billboard in the nation prior to the election. People seem to forget that the Epstein files have existed for a long time before Donald Trump became president. Imagine being Attorney General Pam Bondi and having the Epstein files dropped on your desk. You already have assumptions about what's in there. But when you go through it, your first thought is, where's the list? There's supposed to be a client list in here. I said there was a list. Now what? Well, she probably shouldn't have assumed there was a list in there. History has shown that good record keeping is a weakness when it comes to evading the law. History has also shown that you should always follow the money.

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Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

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This week in 1904, Louis Rigoli, a Frenchman, becomes the first man to break the 100 mile per hour barrier on land. He drove a 15-liter Gabron Brilla in Ostend, Belgium. Twin years later, in 1925, this week, Sir Malcolm Campbell becomes the first man to break the 150 mile per hour land barrier at Pendine Sands in Wales. He drove a sunbeam at a two-way average speed of 150.33 miles per hour. I wonder what the record is now. I'm going to look that up.

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He's gonna look it up. He's really gonna do it.

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Today, race cars routinely reach speeds of 200 miles an hour. The current land speed record was achieved by Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green in 1997. He was driving, for lack of a better term, a car called Thrust SSC. The SSC stands for Supersonic Car, and that it was. Powered by two Rolls-Royce engines, the same kind that power the British version of the F-4 Phantom jet, the car registered a speed of 763 miles per hour, or 1,228 kilometers an hour. The Thrust SEC did two passes, both of which exceeded 760 miles per hour, becoming the only land vehicle to break the speed of sound. This week in 1929, the fascist government in Italy bans the use of foreign words. A lot of words have Roman origins, and Rome is in Italy, so that probably leaves a lot of words you can still use. But words with Greek origins might not be allowed. I wasn't there, so I'm just imagining what it might have been like. Certainly no German or English words were allowed, nor French, Belgian, or Dutch. If that were the case now, you couldn't say something like, Pardon my French, but that law is just a bunch of shizer. There'll be a protest later where we'll be serving hors d'oeuvres. It's no wonder the Italians talk with their hands. As long as your hands are moving, you're using Italian words.

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You can text the listening tube from the homepage. If he says something stupid.

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This week in 1962, Telstar relays the first publicly transmitted live transatlantic television program featuring Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, along with Huntley and Brinkley, were the standard bearers of television journalism. Cronkite would eventually outshine Huntley and Brinkley with his emotional sharing of the Kennedy assassination with the rest of the country. He would later be called the most trusted man in America. American media doesn't have anybody like that right now. Someone with the ability to attract half of the population on a nightly basis. We had a lot fewer options back then, but there's no questioning the credibility of Walter Cronkite every night on CBS. There was no bias, there was no agenda, it was just the news, and ended with Walter driving the point home with his coda, and that's the way it is. And people could believe him.

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You can hang your hat on that.

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This week in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. I can still remember watching the moon landing on television that night. I was at my grandparents' house because my mom and dad went out on a date to celebrate my dad's birthday. So I got to stay up late as a seven-year-old kid who was about to see something on television that we thought would change the course of mankind. It kind of did, but not as much as we thought it would. We haven't even had a person on the moon since the 1970s, and believe it or not, NASA is having a harder time doing it again than they did the first time. The computing power on the Apollo mission spacecraft were the equivalent of a pocket calculator. All the math that got us to the moon was done with slide rules and protractors. Decades later, a man would personally confront Buzz Aldrin and accuse him of faking the moon landing. Buzz punched him in the face. This week in 1983, the world's lowest temperature is recorded at Vostok Station, Antarctica, at minus 89.2 degrees Celsius. That's negative 128 Fahrenheit without the windchill factor, or what today they call real feel. The coldest I can recall is the winter of 1982 in Indianapolis, Indiana, when we had wind chill factor temperatures down to 70 below zero. I was at Fort Benjamin Harrison for broadcasting school, and we were told to just stay home instead of risking our lives. To get to school. I still maintain that's why I didn't become the next Dick Clark. Oh well. What are you gonna do? This week in 1984, Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine. That was a shame what happened to Miss Williams. The remarkably beautiful and talented woman worked very hard to get where she was at the time, and it was a real dick move by Penthouse to publish those pictures when they did. The reaction of pageant officials and many in the general public was also a dick move. Sure, she posed in the nude. I'm sure she took a lot of chances in order to find the success she craved, and this one came back and bit her in the ass. She was undeterred, though. Vanessa Williams went on to have a successful singing career, releasing nine studio albums, one live album, 31 singles, including gold and platinum records. Her most recent album came out just under a year ago. This week in 2011, NASA's Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135. I was sad to see it go. I was a big Space Shuttle fan from the start. A space cadet, if you will, with space shuttle pins and t-shirts. I was in Air Force Basic Training for the second ever launch of a shuttle, and the whole of basic training stopped to watch. It was a proud moment for all of us. There was a mural of a space shuttle on the wall in the chow hall of BMTS-3723, and I suppose it had been there long before the space shuttle took off the first time, because even though it was a perfect image of the space shuttle, it didn't have a name painted on it. Not Atlantis, not Columbia. The space shuttle opened up a whole new world of near space exploration, experimentation, and maneuverability. After the shuttle program was shut down, we had to rely on a Russian rocket to get to the International Space Station. Fortunately, private industry in the United States stepped up and created ways for us to get up there without any help from the Russians. Now I'm guessing NASA is working on ways to get back to the moon and possibly set up a permanent station there. We'll see how that goes. Normally, this part of the program includes an interview or I'll bloviate on some subject that's been on my mind recently. But this time there are a variety of things on which I would like to touch. One of them is the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When the CPB was started, it was meant to be an unbiased source of everyday information that people could use. It was meant to inform in a meaningful way, and even in an entertaining way. After all, people are more willing to listen if they enjoy it. But what it's turned into is a medium that makes one political persuasion giddy and the other enraged. American tax dollars shouldn't be spent on something so divisive and influential. National Public Radio, which is partially funded by the CPB, is extremely biased, even though their leaders claim otherwise. They can say that all they want, but one only needs to listen to NPR or read articles they publish to understand that there is bias, even if they try to disguise it as journalism. Democrats claim that by defunding CPB, millions of Americans could lose access to emergency alerts, kids' education, and local news. The key word there is could. Another thing that's getting a lot of attention lately is our federal law enforcement people wearing masks as they do their jobs. Remember what it was like having to put on a mask during COVID? Every time you wanted to enter a building, go shopping, see your doctor, get some groceries, you had to put on a mask. I don't know about you, but I found it to be uncomfortable, constraining, and quite frankly, disgusting, knowing that I was breathing into that thing all day. I had trouble communicating with people because of my hearing loss. I couldn't see people's lips to try to figure out what they were saying. I hated it. I'll bet none of those ICE agents like it either. So why do they wear them? What do they have to hide? That's the question many on the left are asking. To the rest of America, it's obvious. They have to protect their identities because of the threat of being targeted by overzealous opponents of their mission. If you watch any reputable source of news at all, you would have seen ICE and Border Patrol agent vehicles being bombarded with bricks and boulders as they entered the marijuana farm in Camarillo, California. We've seen plenty of violence against the men and women who are charged with enforcing American laws by people who have taken it upon themselves to get in their way. With violence. They and their families would be in danger. Oh, wait. We don't have to imagine it. Multiple sources recently reported on the United States Congressman from California's 24th District, Salud Carbajal, who was born in Mexico and holds dual citizenship with the U.S., showed a business card to the media and a large gathering of protesters. Shortly thereafter, the person whose name was on the card, an immigration and customs enforcement officer, was attacked. Is it any wonder the agents want to keep their identities a secret? There are certain elements of the public who want to bring harm to the people who are literally cleaning up the mess made by the Biden administration's policy of ignoring our immigration laws for four years. It's no surprise that the Democrats want to stop the mess from being cleaned up, and they're willing to resort to violence to keep it from being cleaned up. The Democrats have become a party of un-American anti-society, anti-law and order behavior, and will stop at nothing to impose progressive ideals on a resistant public. Just to prove it, Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill to prevent law enforcement from wearing masks to protect their identity. Keep in mind that ICE and Border Patrol wear uniforms with identification on it, proclaiming that they are representing a federal agency. They have badges and of course a photo ID in their pockets. But that's not enough for the Democrats. They want to be able to get a good picture of the agents so they can post it on social media and try to bring harm or somehow ruin the lives of the men and women of those agencies and put their families in danger too. Not once, during all the pro Hamas events at college campuses and elsewhere, as protesters and rioters all wore face coverings, did I hear a single Democrat call for them to take off their masks. It's only when federal law enforcement wear masks that they suddenly have a problem. The Democrats might be fighting for something, but they're not fighting for American values. Many Democrats are no longer even representative of the people in their districts. They're not interested in representing the people as much as they are interested in representing a leftist agenda.

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And if that wasn't enough.

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The Supreme Court decisions just keep falling Donald Trump's way, don't they? He was recently given the green light to cut the number of bureaucrats at the Department of Education. I see this as a huge win for the American taxpayer. To the tune of $800 billion a year. The amount of money that has been wasted by the Department of Education since 1980 is astronomical and inexcusable. Created by Jimmy Carter as a gift from the Democrats to the teachers' unions, the Department of Education has done less than nothing when it comes to improving education in America. I thank my lucky stars that I was in the last high school graduating class before the Department of Education was activated. While we still manage to produce people who are smart enough to stand out among their peers, the quality of education for most of us has deteriorated since the inception of the Department of Education. I've already mentioned on this program before that 20% of American adults can't read. That's pitiful. Math scores are way under standards. Harvard has a remedial math course. Harvard? Why would Harvard accept a student who needed a remedial math course? Since the Department of Education, even Harvard has had to lower the bar of what is an acceptable level of knowledge. $830 billion a year spent to make us less knowledgeable. I'm not saying that anyone younger than I is also dumber. People who are curious about a given subject will always find a way to learn more about it, and it's even easier now to be self-taught than it ever was. But we rely on our education systems to do a job. We pay taxes on our property in Pennsylvania to pay for the education of our children, whether you have them or not. We should be able to expect a minimum return on our investment. Some places do, some places don't. The Department of Education was supposed to fix that, among other things, but never did. The Department of Education needs to go, and teaching our children should be the responsibility of the local system, regulated by the state, not the federal government. There are some important responsibilities that will be passed on to the Department of Health and Human Services, so the entire mission isn't being abandoned. Functions that help children with learning disabilities and other programs will still exist. But clearly the American taxpayer wasn't getting our money's worth out of the bloated and worthless Department of Education, nor were America's students. Less than half of students perform at grade level in reading and math. Performances even worse in urban areas. Teachers' unions have had no interest in improving the performance of our children academically. They only fight for what benefits the teachers, not the students. The Supreme Court handed out another ruling recently that gave parents the right to opt out of classes that conflict with their religion or morals. Perhaps if educators concentrated on the basics of what we need to know as we progress through the learning process, instead of using valuable school time to indoctrinate progressive values, there would be no classes in which a parent might not want their child. Just saying. If parents object to what's being taught in public schools, then maybe the school should take another look at what they're teaching. It's just more of the progressive left trying to force feed a doctrine to children who just want to learn how to read and write and add and subtract. Or maybe they don't want to learn anything at all. Too bad. Not everybody likes school, but you do it anyway, because you know you have to eventually learn stuff because your dad's gonna kick you out of the house at some point and you're gonna have to figure out the rest on your own. You better have the basics down by then. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has done nothing to prepare our young people for life on their own, and the results show it. Once the Trump administration degrades it to an irrelevant entity, it will make it easier for Congress to officially do away with it once and for all. Perhaps then our kids can get back to learning in a way that will benefit them and in turn the rest of us as well. For those of you with time blindness, I want to thank you for the most wonderful three and a half days of my life. You really hung in there with me. The listening tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright 2025. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Listen next week when I'll chat with Dan Schaefer, a politician from the Show Me State. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou at Infinitum.