The business we’ve chosen

A note to my listeners and readers

There’s a memorable scene in The Godfather: Part II where Michael Corleone asks the sickly old mobster Hyman Roth about who gave the order to knock off Frank Pentangeli. Roth responded by bringing up his dead friend Moe Green.

“Someone put a bullet through his eye,” Roth says to Corleone’s face in a way that hints he must have known Michael had something to do with it. Yet Roth continued, “No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn’t angry. I knew Moe. I knew he was headstrong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go.”

And as Corleone stood deadpan, Roth delivered the words I’ve been thinking about all week: “I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen. I didn’t ask who gave the order because it had nothing to do with business!”

The business I’ve chosen

That these are tough times for the news business is an understatement of our age. Some newspapers and radio stations are shutting down. Others are laying off employees in a bid to survive this lousy landscape of shrinking and distracted audiences, a broken advertising model, and much else besides. So it should surprise no journalist when they learn that their job is being eliminated.

Last week, my boss at The Washington Times, the executive editor Christopher Dolan, told me the budget ax had fallen on History As It Happens. This week would be my last. Today I published my 384th and final podcast. But as I told my co-workers in a farewell email, I am neither angry nor in despair. This is the business we’ve chosen.

I will remain indebted to Mr. Dolan for hiring me in early 2021 and then leaving me alone to produce my show for the next four years. To have such editorial freedom was a gift, indeed. My audience grew to reach the top 2 percent of all podcasts globally, according to the podcast tracker Listen Notes. 

My guests made History As It Happens sing. As I would often joke, no one would listen if it were just me doing an extended monologue. This is only a partial list of the great historians and thinkers who frequently joined my program: Sean Wilentz, Jim Oakes, Annette Gordon-Reed, Joseph Ellis, Eric Foner, Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, Max Hastings, Antony Beevor, Mark Galeotti, Sergey Radchenko, Vladislav Zubok, Michael Kimmage, Jeremi Suri, Jeffrey Engel, Julia Young, Ken Hughes, David M. Kennedy, Nicole Hemmer, Kate Clarke Lemay, Randa Slim, Anatol Lieven, Trita Parsi, Peter Bergen, Roger Griffin, Cathal Nolan, Annelle Sheline, Lindsay Chervinsky, and many, many more. 

But I ain’t dead yet

Maybe I should have led with the good news: I am confident History As It Happens will have a new home soon. That’s about all I can share at the moment.

When I started as a reporter making minimum wage ($6.50/hour) at a small radio station in northern New Jersey in the late 1990s, it never occurred to me that a journalism job could hinge on how many people listened to (or clicked on?!?) individual reports. Sure, radio stations measured their audience sizes with ratings, but it was impossible to know how many ears might be listening when my story hit the airwaves at any given moment. Every story I filed was simply part of the larger product produced and broadcast by the radio station.

For most of my career, I didn’t have to worry about my “personal brand.” I always worked at traditional or legacy news organizations, including the Associated Press and Bloomberg Radio. Nowadays, however, as legacy media companies bleed money and personnel, unable to adequately monetize page views or podcast downloads, more and more journalists are working independently on platforms such as this one, Substack where, as “content creators,” they seek to monetize their audience “engagement.”

This is where I find myself as I seek a new home for History As It Happens. As mentioned, I expect to share some good news with you soon. In the meantime, please stay subscribed to this newsletter and continue to follow the podcast wherever you currently listen to it, whether it’s Apple, Spotify, or another platform. I will publish several “best of” episodes over the next few weeks.

Now, to this week’s episodes.

Israel at war

In Tuesday’s episode, George Washington University political scientist Nathan Brown kicked off my 2-part series about the consequences of the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing year of devastating war in the Middle East. Brown is an expert on Hamas. Among the topics we try to tackle is why? Why did Hamas send its gunmen breaking out of Gaza a year ago to commit murder and mayhem in southern Israel when the leadership had to know Israel would retaliate massively? This decision brought ruin to Gaza and a wider war to the region, as Israel is now invading Lebanon.

In Thursday’s episode, Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, delves into the Biden administration’s many difficulties in preventing events from careening out of control. We also discuss the causes of regional instability over the past quarter-century, and whether the U.S. military presence (and steadfast support of Israel) do more harm than good.  

Katulis has written several detailed reports of the Biden administration’s foreign policy record leading up to and after Oct. 7, 2023. His most recent work is America's Strategic Drift in the Middle East. 

Farewell, for now

Stay in touch at martinjdicaro@gmail.com. My Washington Times email address will no longer work come next week.