Adel Al Salman: They're not depicting death or blood or anything that the viewer might go like, "Oh, no, this is too much for me." No, it's a child looking back at you.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, images of starving Palestinian children blanketed the media. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. A New York Times story about starvation in Gaza, with a photo of an emaciated child, was attacked for failing to say that the child also had a pre-existing condition.

Oren Persico: This is one child when hundreds of thousands of children are in different stages of malnutrition. You focus on mistakes to blur the main image that you don't want anyone to see.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the all but forgotten inventor of the first family sitcom.

Emily Nussbaum: Gertrude Berg was the first showrunner. There was a national survey where she came in the second most respected woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. After two years of unrelentingly bad news coming out of Gaza, the coverage has suddenly taken on a new urgency.

News clip: A summer storm of hunger has gripped Gaza in what humanitarian groups call "mass starvation." The World Food Programme said, this week, a third of Gaza's population of two million now must live for days without food.

Anthony Aguilar: I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces firing a main gun tank round from the Merkava tank into a crowd of people, destroying a car of civilians that were simply driving away from the site.

Micah Loewinger: Former US Green Beret Anthony Aguilar speaking with the BBC last Friday about what he calls war crimes perpetrated by the IDF at aid distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a newly formed group backed by the US and Israel.

Anthony Aguilar: In my entire career, have I never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed starving population.

Micah Loewinger: This week, more voices joined the chorus, using a word that is still largely taboo in American media and politics.

News clip: In a new report published by respected medical journal, The Lancet, a group of health professionals said it was time to break the silence on genocide.

News clip: Israeli human rights groups also raising alarms. For the first time, two prominent organizations joined international human rights groups in designating Israel's actions in Gaza a "genocide."

News clip: Marjorie Taylor Greene just became the first Republican lawmaker in Congress to call the crisis in Gaza a "genocide."

News clip: Mr. President, Prime Minister Netanyahu said there's no starvation in Gaza. Do you agree with that assessment?

Micah Loewinger: A reporter addressing Donald Trump on Monday.

President Donald Trump: I don't know. Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children looked very hungry.

Micah Loewinger: Even our president, who's floated the idea of an American occupation of Gaza, apparently can't ignore the grim truth revealed by the footage and stories. One recent headline in the Associated Press reads, "The latest child to starve to death in Gaza weighed less than when she was born." News media across the world have run pictures of tiny skeletal bodies.

Adel Al Salman: Some images will leave you breathless and silent because it captured a moment that anybody can see without any language.

Micah Loewinger: Adel Al Salman is a photo editor based in Cyprus working with the Agence France-Presse, the AFP. He coordinates with Palestinian photographers documenting the starvation around them and selects their pictures for the wire service. Adel believes their recent images are responsible for bringing a new wave of attention to the war.

Adel Al Salman: They're not depicting death or blood or anything that the viewer might go, "Oh, no, this is too much for me." No, it's a child looking back at you, so you have to react in a different way.

Micah Loewinger: Can you describe some of the photos that you chose and why you decided to use them?

Adel Al Salman: We got the first group of pictures from our photographer, Omar Al-Qattaa, of a woman and her two-year-old son living in their damaged home in Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City. You can see his ribcage. You can see his shoulder blades from the back. You can see his spinal cord. He looks months old instead of years old. Does he know life outside of war? It takes from you as well, but you have to see those images. You have to put these stories out so people across the world know what's happening.

Micah Loewinger: Last week, the AFP released a rare and frankly disturbing statement about the conditions faced by your reporters and photographers living in Gaza.

News clip: AFP says its journalists in Gaza are among the people there at risk of starving to death.

Micah Loewinger: The statement quoted a man named Bashar, who's AFP's lead photographer, that, "I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin, and I can't work anymore."

Adel Al Salman: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Another of your reporters, Ahlam, has said that, "Every time I leave the tent to cover an event, do an interview, or document a story, I don't know if I'll come back alive."

Adel Al Salman: That is correct. He might become the story, or he might come back to a house that has been bombed. It's been an uphill struggle to move around, to eat, to get food for their families. They are tired. Their equipment is tired. The people in Gaza are tired of having their pictures taken in their worst moments, so there's a pushback from there. There's always the hope that nobody gets injured as he's out doing what he needs to do.

Micah Loewinger: In May, Reporters Without Borders named Gaza the most dangerous place on Earth for journalists, pointing to nearly 200 Palestinian news professionals killed by Israeli forces over the past 21 months. Then there's the information war waged in the international media. Take the recent controversy over the viral images of a starving boy named Mohammad Al-Motawaq held in his mother's arms.

Adel Al Salman: I look at a child that I can see is his skeletal bones screaming.

Micah Loewinger: CNN acknowledged that, in addition to severe malnutrition, the child suffered from a pre-existing muscular condition. The New York Times did not and ended up issuing a correction after a pro-Israel journalist kicked up a storm on X. A Wall Street Journal op-ed this week claimed that this omission from The Times and other outlets was part of a deliberate campaign to lie about starvation in Gaza.

Adel Al Salman: If one case out of 10 turns out that he has a medical condition, what about the other nine? People are starving.

Micah Loewinger: How does this work affect you? What toll does it take looking through these photos every day and--

Adel Al Salman: Immense.

Micah Loewinger: Immense?

Adel Al Salman: Yes, I've lost 15, 20 kilos in two years. Seeing people queuing for soup, you can't eat them after that. You cannot eat. You go like, "Yes," but I can order anything I want, and I can cook whatever I want. They're trying to get flour and soup with some bits of rice in it. It kills your appetite, changes your perspective. Your priorities about life become different because you've seen the extremes of the human condition, and you go like, "Nobody's moving. Nobody's doing anything."

Now, after two years, children are being seen in this way, and the world is waking up again, but until when? Now, we're going to see more children like this, and then the world might be like, "Yes, all right. We've seen one, we've seen them all," and they will forget it until something worse happen, and then we wake up again. It takes a toll on the editors a lot, but it's nowhere comparable to the toll it takes on the photographers on the ground.

Micah Loewinger: Adel, thank you so much for the work that you do, and thanks for talking to us.

Adel Al Salman: You're welcome. Thank you so much, Micah. It's been a pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Adel Al Saman is a photo editor at Agence France-Presse covering the Middle East.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Diana Buttu is another person on the outside looking in. She's a human rights lawyer who writes about her experience as a Palestinian living in Haifa, Israel, in a column for Zeteo, the online independent news outlet. She speaks frequently with her many friends in Gaza, whom she met while working there as a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, in the early 2000s.

Diana Buttu: Because of the job that I had many moons ago, I actually lived in Gaza, and so I'm one of the very few Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship who's had that privilege. I've lived in the West Bank, I've lived in Jerusalem, I've lived in Haifa, and I lived in Gaza. The time that I lived in Gaza, which was about 20 years ago, I made a lot of friends. I've stayed in touch with all of these friends. The tragedy, of course, is that because of Israel's policy of separation, my connection has been primarily via telephone.

The Gaza that I remember when I lived there was beautiful, very vibrant, with people who had the best senses of humor, who were very proud of the culture, of history, of Palestinian cuisine and attachment to land and of food. There was never a time when I lived in Gaza where I was ever alone. People went out of their way to make sure that I was always surrounded by love and by them because I was living in Gaza alone. I never had a meal alone either because that was so much part of the culture of Palestinians and, in particular, of Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: This week, Canada, where you grew up, along with Britain and France, all major allies of the US said they would recognize a Palestinian state. You were a peace negotiator for the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the early 2000s. Do you think that this has the potential to help end the blockade on aid or bring about a ceasefire or create a new future for Palestinians?

Diana Buttu: This is a great question, and I like the way that you premised it because you said, "Do you see that this is going to lead to an end to the blockade?" That's the whole issue here in terms of my response. I would have much rather that Canada, the UK, and France recognize that Israel is committing genocide and put into place measures to end that genocide, rather than trying to go and do this through a roundabout, circuitous way, which is what they've done.

Micah Loewinger: I'm curious to hear what you're hearing from other Palestinians living in Israel about this new focus on statehood by Western nations. Are your peers drawing similar conclusions?

Diana Buttu: People come at it from different perspectives. Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, some of them are happy. They're saying, "Well, at least if the recognition of a state is going to end the genocide of them, by all means." That's for some people, including some politicians. The reason I don't see it this way is because I've had a little bit more experience on the diplomatic front than most people.

The experience that I had diplomatically was that for as long as I've been alive and for as long as at least I've been living in Palestine, there has always been a sense on the part of the diplomatic community of effectively do nothing. They say a lot of things. They express their outrage, but then it's not matched by actual deeds. For me, I would much rather see the deeds being done rather than just the words. Now, for many who live there, they're happy because they think that this is going to lead to the end of the settlement project and so on. I just don't see it like that.

Micah Loewinger: Diana, I know you have to go soon. I have one more question.

Diana Buttu: Please.

Micah Loewinger: Is there anything your friends in Gaza have told you this week or recently that you think our listeners should know?

Diana Buttu: My friends in Gaza overwhelmingly are telling me how they've gone for days and days without food. I think that what people don't understand is that you don't just sit back when you're being starved. All of your energy goes into trying to find food, because that's what the human spirit is about. It's about trying to stay alive. My friends spend from morning until night doing everything to either find a source of food to try to get some money so that they can buy what little supplies there are left in Gaza because, remember, nothing has come into Gaza for nearly three months.

Because Gaza's completely blockaded, it's entirely dependent upon food aid coming in. They're not allowed to go out and fish. The Israelis have blockaded the sea. There's no food that's allowed in from Egypt. That's all entirely controlled by Israel. Their every waking moment is spent trying to look for food, trying to look for fuel, because that's another item that's been cut off, trying to find what little food supplies are available in the market. My friends are even debating whether they should be going down to these death trap sites.

These are the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. There's nothing humanitarian about it, but that's what the name of it. These are the food distribution sites that the US and Israel have set up. There are only four in the Gaza Strip. These four distribution sites are entirely linked to where it is that Israel wants Palestinians in Gaza to be. It's part of an ethnic cleansing program as well. My friends were even talking about considering going down to these sites, even though they know that these are death traps.

One of my friends, she has a daughter who is 12 years old. She's such a wonderful young girl. I've never met her in person, but she tries to practice her English with me. In one of our conversations a couple of months ago, she turned to me and she said, "My mother is too proud to tell you this, but we're hungry. We haven't eaten in days." Then she said, "Diana, what if the death that we're so desperately trying to avoid is better than the life that we're actually living?" This is a sentence that no 12-year-old should ever be uttering.

Micah Loewinger: What did you say in response to that?

Diana Buttu: In response, I spent the next 15 to 20 minutes trying to lift up her spirits, to tell her that things are going to get better, to tell her that the world is outraged, to tell her that her life will get better, to tell her that the war is going to end, that her life will be put back together.

Micah Loewinger: Do you believe those things?

Diana Buttu: No, I was lying to her, and I know I was. I know I was. I had to lie to her, because what else do you tell a 12-year-old? I was lying to her because I knew that it's not going to get better, that it might be the case that Gaza's never reconstructed, that nobody seems to be stopping this war. I knew that I wanted to make things better for her.

At the same time, I genuinely know that I was lying. Every waking moment for my friends in Gaza is all about just trying to stay alive. For me, it's like receiving messages or speaking to somebody who has been drowning now for 22 months. They just can't continue to paddle any longer to stay afloat. I feel as though I'm watching them drown, and I feel so helpless in the process.

Micah Loewinger: [sighs] Thank you so much for making time for us. We really appreciate it.

Diana Buttu: My pleasure.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Diana Buttu is a human rights lawyer and former Palestinian peace negotiator based in Haifa. She's also a regular contributor to the online outlet Zeteo. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. What we know about the events on the ground in Gaza comes to us, for the most part, via the Palestinian journalists who live there. Access for international journalists has been severely restricted by Israel. On the rare occasion they are allowed in, they're accompanied by minders. When airdrops of food for Gaza were scheduled this week, some reporters were invited to ride along if they followed the rules.

Reporter 7: Israelis have said we're not allowed to film any shots of Gaza from the air, and that if we do, these airdrop flights could either be cancelled or delayed.

Micah Loewinger: Keeping tight control of the narrative is a priority of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who appeared on the American right-wing podcast hosted by the Nelk Boys, where he spoke unchallenged for over an hour.

Kyle Forgeard: This is so crazy. We are so not qualified to do this.

Aaron Steinberg: Yes, I know.

Micah Loewinger: The Israeli Prime Minister was pretty open about what he wanted to get out of the conversation.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: I'm concerned that the young people in America, some of them, are getting the wrong picture of Israel. Vilification, demonization. I'm doing this podcast, among other things, to reach young people.

Aaron Steinberg: Of course.

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't the only podcast the Israeli PM wanted to appear on.

News clip: Now, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu's eldest son, we've learned that Rogan allegedly refused to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his podcast.

Micah Loewinger: Joe Rogan, America's most-listened-to podcaster, who's called Israel's assault on Gaza a "genocide." While Israeli officials struggle to shape perception in the US, they're fighting and mostly winning an information war at home.

Oren Persico: On the far-right, Channel 14, which is the second most-watched channel in Israel, there still is no hunger in Gaza. There is no real famine. It's just Hamas propaganda machine.

Micah Loewinger: Oren Persico is a media critic and staff writer for the Israeli outlet, The Seventh Eye. I asked him if he thought that any of this new coverage was changing anything.

Oren Persico: In mainstream Israeli media, you started to hear about, yes, there's actually people going hungry in Gaza. They were starting to show reports about people just explaining, the prices have gone so much up that distribution is a catastrophe, and we can't manage to find enough food to feed ourselves and our children. After one of those segments, Yonit Levi, the main presenter of the Israeli Channel 12 TV news show, which is the most-watched TV news program in Israel, said 11 words.

Yonit Levi: [foreign language]

Oren Persico: "Perhaps we have a moral problem with what's going on in the Gaza Strip," and she moved on, but that was enough.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about what the reaction was to that clip.

Oren Persico: She is considered now by the fans of Prime Minister Netanyahu as a traitor, as someone who cooperates with the false narrative that Hamas pushes around the world in order to put pressure on Israel not to force it out of its control of what's left of Gaza. She is now cooperating with the enemy.

Micah Loewinger: When you saw Yonit Levi make this comment, what did it mean for you?

Oren Persico: I thought it was very much too little too late. I thought the bigger problem is the professional problem of Channel 12 and Yonit Levi, not moral problem of the state of Israel. First of all, look at what you have been showing and what you have not been showing for almost two years now, right? If you have done your job, if you have showed the Israeli public what's going on in Gaza, perhaps we wouldn't have reached this low moral ground where we stand right now.

There was actually another incident on Channel 12, a leaked chat inside WhatsApp group. A few journalists said, "Listen, even if we don't feel empathy for the people of Gaza, we have to show what's going on. We're journalists." Then other people said, "Why should we care?" A commentator called Mohammad Magadli, which you can understand from his name, is Israeli-Palestinian. He hasn't appeared that much on Channel 12 since the war began, but they still haven't kicked him out of the WhatsApp group.

He said, "Listen, I have a cousin in Gaza. Why don't you allow me to connect you with her? She'll tell you how difficult it is to just supply yourself and your family with enough food to survive." Then Amit Segal, the most influential journalist on Channel 12 and probably in Israel, said, "No, it's just like Dresden. It's just like Tehran, meaning they are all Nazis, they are all complete evil, and we have no place connecting with them or thinking about them. From my opinion, they should all either die or get out of Gaza."

Micah Loewinger: Amit Segal, he recently wrote a piece in The Free Press, the American outlet, with the headline, The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Crisis in Gaza, and attempted, I think, to walk a strange line where he said that there have been lies about the war and how the IDF has conducted itself, but that doesn't mean the threat of starvation isn't real. Is he just telling different stories to different audiences? I don't really understand.

Oren Persico: I don't know what Amit Segal was trying to do in that specific column that he wrote. Most of the time in Hebrew and in English, he looks for lies about what Israel has been doing in Gaza, or mistakes in order to concentrate on the very insignificant incidents where there have been mistakes or lies, so you won't see the main picture. For example, just this last couple of days with the picture of the Palestinian child on the front page of The New York Times. It was later revealed that he is not only very much malnutrition, but also suffered from a previous medical condition.

This really got huge headlines in Israel by Amit Segal and others claiming, "You see, this is just part of the Hamas propaganda lying machine." Now, apparently, he did have a medical condition. It was not clear when it was first published by The New York Times, but this is one child. We're talking about a war where dozens of thousands of children have died, and a situation right now when hundreds of thousands of children are in different stages of malnutrition. You focus on specific mistakes in order to blur the main image that you don't want anyone to see.

Micah Loewinger: Two Israeli human rights groups recently called Israel's actions in Gaza a "genocide" this week. How has that been reported? How has it been received? Is there any evidence that this has maybe shifted public opinion or changed a media narrative within Israeli news?

Oren Persico: No, not at all. The international courts have said that we're approaching genocide amnesty. The UN said this looks like genocide. It doesn't matter. It always ends up with a big headline in Haaretz and complete denial, or just looking away in other news outlets in Israel. It hasn't changed anything at all, I'm afraid.

Micah Loewinger: Between March and May, Israel blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza. After international pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to allow some aid in saying, "We must not reach a point of starvation, both as a matter of fact, but also as a diplomatic issue." Meanwhile, far-right ministers within the government have repeatedly advocated for no aid at all. How has Israeli media covered the question of allowing aid in?

Oren Persico: Well, again, you have the far-right media, which is simply against letting any humanitarian aid into Gaza because in their opinion, it will postpone the end of the war. It will postpone the complete surrender of Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza. Then you have the mainstream media, which has become much more right-wing since the beginning of the war and is afraid of losing viewers to the right-wing media, and really has forgotten basic rules of what journalism is.

You see a lot of discussion inside mainstream Israeli media about, what does it mean for the image of Israel abroad? What will it mean for the soldiers inside Gaza, our troops, right? You don't see a lot of discussion on humanitarian aid regarding those who actually need it in Gaza. They are not part of the equation usually. It's more how people will see us and how it will affect us.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think the Israeli public is aware of a change in how Americans perceive Israel right now?

Oren Persico: Yes, I think they do, because that's a way that the Israeli media is able to present to the Israeli public, the reality in Gaza. We won't tell you that people are starving to death, but we'll show you headlines from the world about how they perceive the situation in Gaza. Now, it comes to some absurdities sometimes. For example, on Channel 13, they showed the Daily Express front page with a very skinny child all over the front page, but they blurred the picture.

They said, "This is the front page that shocked the world," but the viewers couldn't see it because they, I guess, didn't want to hurt the feelings of the viewers. That's just absurd, or if you look at the right-wing channel, Channel 14, they showed an image from a CNN report about a mother and a child. The child, four years old, died of hunger. They said, "Look at the mother. She doesn't look skinny. Actually, she looks obese." They started joking about the situation, saying maybe the mother ate all of her child's food. That would explain why she's so obese.

By the way, she wasn't obese. Her child died of hunger. Maybe she just ate a complete goat. Then one of the pundits said, "Maybe she ate her daughter." These awful rhetorics, you can imagine hearing them in a beer cellar between drunken troops after they came back from the front lines. You hear it on a television studio in the second most-watched commercial channel in Israel. You understand, this is the atmosphere in which a lot of Israelis now pass their lives. It's complete denial and even a celebration of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: As a critic of the government, as someone I would imagine is at odds politically with many of your neighbors, how do you find the motivation to keep doing this work?

Oren Persico: Well, I find it very fulfilling. I feel like I really make a difference. I am in the front lines of fighting this information and seeing all the horrible stuff that's going on in Israeli media, but I feel like it matters. That makes me keep going.

Micah Loewinger: Oren Persico is a media critic and staff writer for the Israeli outlet, The Seventh Eye. Oren, thank you very much.

Oren Persico: Thank you, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Over the past few weeks or months, the news runneth over with reports of media moguls reduced to squirming in their seats. Take Shari Redstone, who, among other things, is the non-executive chairwoman of Paramount Global and, therefore, owner of its $16 million settlement with President Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, which Paramount followed up later this month with canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

CBS, part of Paramount, said it was a budget call. Meanwhile, amidst these and likewise stories of media capitulation, New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum was digging into a story about a monumental figure in the early development of television, who's almost entirely forgotten, the inventor of the family sitcom. Now, that twisty tale occurred in a time of similar precarity for our media, mid-20th-century America. Emily, welcome back.

Emily Nussbaum: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: You opened the article by taking us to May 9th, 1954, on the set of the CBS game show What's My Line?

John Charles Daly: Time now for everybody's favorite guessing game What's My Line? brought to you by new Stopette, America's leading spray deodorant.

Brooke Gladstone: Where judges are supposed to guess the identity of guests, the well-known ones are often mystery guests, where the judges are blindfolded.

John Charles Daly: Are they all in place, panel?

Panel: Yes, sir.

John Charles Daly: Good. Will you come in, mystery challenger, and sign in, please?

[applause]

Emily Nussbaum: She wrote her name as Gertrude Berg. Underneath it, it said Molly Goldberg, which was the name that she was known by.

Brooke Gladstone: She used a funny voice.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, because she's in disguise. She spoke in this high-flown, fancy pants accent.

Brooke Gladstone: It's kind of like the queen.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, exactly.

Faye Emerson: That was very extended applause. Are you someone very much in the public eye?

Molly Goldberg: [in high-pitch voice] Rather.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: What's My Line? ran from 1950 to 1967. Among its guests were virtually all the leading lights of the mid-century. Elizabeth Taylor, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, Lena Horne, Walt Disney, Jackie Robinson, Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Yves Saint Laurent, Wilt Chamberlain, Judy Garland, Edward R. Murrow, Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, every field, everywhere. Depending on how old you are, you're likely to know at least some, if not all of those names. It's even likelier that you wouldn't recall the name of Gertrude Berg.

Emily Nussbaum: Gertrude Berg was, for one thing, pretty much the first showrunner in the modern sense. She created a radio show called The Rise of the Goldbergs that ran for decades. Then she created the very first sitcom and very first family sitcom on television, starting in 1949, also called The Goldbergs. She created the show. She wrote the show. She directed a lot of the episodes. She starred in the show as this character, Molly Goldberg, who was hugely beloved, this larger-than-life Jewish mother on a show that was about a working-class immigrant family living in the Bronx.

Brooke Gladstone: Did she have a working-class background?

Emily Nussbaum: Her family was from an economically complex background. Her father owned a rundown hotel in the Catskills. Actually, her whole career began at the hotel because she would come out there as a teenager, and she was running the theater program during the summer. She was pretty different than the character she played, Molly Goldberg, but the thing they had in common was that they were both forces of nature who were at the center of the story.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, "From the start, the character of Molly Goldberg made some listeners nervous. Was the portrayal a form of minstrelsy, like the crude blackface dialect humor of Amos 'n' Andy, the only radio show that had higher ratings? But, if she was a trope, she was also a corrective to an earlier stereotype, that of the mournful, self-abnegating Yiddishe mama or the saintly shtetl survivor in the 1927 talkie The Jazz Singer."

Emily Nussbaum: The stereotype of the mother before Molly Goldberg was the idea of the traumatized, humble, self-sacrificing mother.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, sitting in the rain is nice.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, exactly, but Molly Goldberg was nothing like that. She was from the same background. She cooks and she cleans and all of this kind of stuff, but the show is about her. She is the source of the humor. It's a kind of dialect humor where she gets English wrong. Despite the fact that she doesn't seem sophisticated, she's actually incredibly canny and clever. She's kind of a trickster. She's always setting people up in romances. She's solving problems.

Brooke Gladstone: Interestingly, she was implicitly political.

Emily Nussbaum: Well, she became more political as time went on. The show ran from 1929, pretty quickly, became a hit, and got a big sponsor all the way through 1945. During the Depression, a lot of it was actually simply the portrayal of unemployed and poor people within this immigrant community in New York struggling to make a living. People found that incredibly moving and poignant.

The portrait of the plight of renters, the idea of unions. Certainly, New Deal stuff was in it. She talked about civil rights. She broke the color line in a way that other shows didn't. It wasn't didactic or explicit. It was woven into the fabric of the show. She also did really bold gestures, specifically about the Jewishness part. She had a Seder episode. She had a Yom Kippur episode. That was in 1933.

In 1939, they had an episode explicitly about Kristallnacht. In that episode, while they're doing the Seder, a thug throws a rock through the window. Molly delivers a speech to her family about the power of ideas and how they can blast through fascism. It's really stirring. Also, honestly, just having actual rabbi and cantor performing a Seder during that period. On the show, the characters talking about cousins of theirs in Europe trying to get out during the rise of Hitler.

Brooke Gladstone: Her sponsor, Pepsodent, agreed to air that particular show without ads. One telegram that she got read, "Just as Pepsodent acts as a disinfectant, so does your broadcasting to dispel hatred and bring humanity closer together."

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, I do think that people understood that this was a bold thing to do on radio. You have to understand, during that period, radio was the mass medium. Everybody listened. This show, because it was so highly rated and so accessible, was an incredible platform.

Brooke Gladstone: Even though Hitler's war hadn't yet begun in Europe, there was a kind of war at home. This was also a time when on the all-important radio, you had the demagogue, anti-Semite Father Coughlin, the so-called "radio priest," flooding the airwaves with hate speech.

Father Coughlin: We are Christians insofar as we believe in Christ's principle of love your neighbor as yourself. With that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it.

[applause]

Emily Nussbaum: This show, because of a positive, layered, humane portrait of a Jewish working-class New York family, was, by nature, counter-programming. People's attachment to these characters, to Molly, to Molly's husband Jake, and to their two teenage children who grew up on the show, made Jews feel like full Americans, which wasn't necessarily the way that people were thinking of them.

Brooke Gladstone: The radio show was canceled in 1945. CBS's public reason was low ratings, but you say Berg's family thought politics were at play. That sounds a little familiar, right?

Emily Nussbaum: The show had been on for several decades. It was still a successful show. Whether it was because they did not love that Gertrude Berg was a prominent New Dealer, or whether it was because she was getting older, the show was getting older, it's complicated.

Brooke Gladstone: Then after four years in the wilderness, she got a TV show.

Emily Nussbaum: It's interesting because when television first started, it was done live. It was in New York. It was a new medium, exciting, and had potential, but it was also really chaotic and experimental. It had a kind of "anything goes" feeling. The show, as soon as it went on TV in 1949, was a tremendous hit. That first year, it got very high ratings. In the first Emmys, she was the first winner of the Best Actress award. From being a melodrama, she turned it into more of a sitcom, which would become the bedrock of television. She single-handedly created many of the central things about what a sitcom is.

Brooke Gladstone: She opened each episode by leaning out the window, looking at us, and delivering a message about Sanka.

Molly Goldberg: One, two, three. With a little boiling water, you have a delicious cup of Sanka. If a neighbor should happen to fall in without any extra trouble, you have two cups of instant Sanka. Oh, yes, and I want to tell you that if you're a person who shouldn't drink coffee with caffeine in it, you can still drink as much instant as you like and sleep. That was the important job--

Emily Nussbaum: When you watched it on TV, you were one of her neighbors. She was looking right out the window at you, welcoming you, being funny. Then when the ad ended, you would come into her living room. This intimate thing, where you're suddenly in somebody's family living room that everybody knows from having watched any sitcom, came really from The Goldbergs.

Brooke Gladstone: You were startled when you watched because The Goldbergs, though a foundational show in its day, stood apart from what we now think of as quintessential '50s TV.

Emily Nussbaum: The model of the '50s sitcom that it really differed from were things like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, the growing move toward-

Brooke Gladstone: Waspiness? [chuckles]

Emily Nussbaum: -a super white suburban family with a father wearing a suit, reading his newspaper, commuting to work. This particular image of a mother as thin, wearing pearls and a shirtwaist, a loving, bland mom who vacuums the carpet wearing heels, and all of that kind of thing. The episode that I talk about in this essay--

Brooke Gladstone: From September '49, you mean? The one about the neglectful landlord?

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, I knew that she'd put political stuff on her show woven in, but I was really startled by the episode because they get a new landlord, and he hasn't been fixing up the apartment building. The whole family falls into a debate. What is the technique that the renter should use to fight this neglectful landlord? The entire episode plays out as a political debate about radicalism versus moderates. I'm not saying every episode was like this, but that was definitely the vibe of the show. It very much came from the community in New York that show was part of, which was socialist, left-wing, union, pro-civil rights.

Brooke Gladstone: Jewish.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes. Importantly, Jewish creatives. That lasted for a year. [laughs] The show lasted for longer than that. For a year, she had free reign where the show was a huge hit and was able to express all of these new ideas and create the ideas of the sitcom.

Brooke Gladstone: You point out that Philip Loeb, who played Berg's husband on the TV show, their on-screen marriage was beloved by viewers. He was even voted best television father by the Boy Scouts. He also was critically the engine for the show's activism off camera, right? He was a central organizer involved in creating SAG-AFTRA. Because of that, he was an easy target for Joe McCarthy, who used the Red Scare to ride to power.

Emily Nussbaum: Yes, there were many people in their circle who had strong left-wing politics, but he had devoted his life to better conditions for working stage actors, including getting paid for rehearsal time, reasonable hours. He was also, I have to say, a tremendous performer. He was a really sexy, charismatic guy. He and Gertrude Berg on that show had wonderful chemistry.

There are many things that are tragic about what ended up happening, but one of them is the loss of this very powerful dynamic between them as a Jewish married couple on television. Something that didn't appear for many, many, many years after that. Yes, the Red Scare. There are many different stages of the Red Scare. In 1947, there had been the part that a lot of people know about having to do with the movies and the Hollywood Ten and the protests, where people refused to name names in front of Congress.

Because television was a little bit more off the radar, it hadn't really been attacked. Even though the show went on the air in 1949, they hadn't gotten a lot of pushback to Philip Loeb's politics until the summer of 1950. This document came out, a book called Red Channels. It was this amateurish, hand-done thing. It didn't come from the government. It was a group of ex-FBI agents and a bunch of passionate, demented anti-communists.

It was just a list of everybody in radio and TV that they were accusing of being a subversive. Not just communists. It was anybody involved with union-organizing who'd supported civil rights. I compare it in the piece to Libs of TikTok, and I actually think that's true. It was all dependent upon gossip and rumor. The minute it came out, everything changed in television.

This is the part that's very unfortunate about my piece is I'd been working on it for a while. By the time I wrote it, it seemed unusually timely, because this is really a piece about the fact that when politics changes and people are accused of being dangerous subversives, institutions fold. That's what happened when Red Channels came out. Her previously amenable sponsor, General Foods, and CBS went to Gertrude Berg, and they said, "You have to fire him, and if you don't, the show will go off the air."

Brooke Gladstone: She fought back. She even threatened to lobby her fans to boycott General Foods, and it worked for a while.

Emily Nussbaum: Loeb did not want to be paid off. He wanted to fight back on principle. She did back him up. She basically said to CBS and General Foods, "I will tell everybody to boycott your product if you do not let me keep Loeb and keep The Goldbergs going." Ultimately, they dropped The Goldbergs.

Brooke Gladstone: Replaced with I Love Lucy.

Emily Nussbaum: Originally, it was going to be the first powerhouse block. The Goldbergs and I Love Lucy. I Love Lucy came out, and obviously became a spectacular hit. When you look at the history of television, most people remember that as the beginning of the family sitcom and Lucille Ball as the first lady of television.

Brooke Gladstone: At that point, the show moved to NBC, but no sponsor would sign up with Loeb in the cast. In '52, she gave Loeb a deal, 90% of his salary for the run of the show, but what happened to him?

Emily Nussbaum: It was a tragedy. It was a very hard period. This isn't only about Loeb. I became, while I was researching this, just really fascinated by the TV blacklist and the victimization of so many brave, talented people. He was one of them. It basically became impossible to get a job. He really, really needed the money because he was the single father of a son who was very ill, mentally disabled, or possibly had schizophrenia and was institutionalized.

He needed to pay for his son's care. In the aftermath, he, who had, for years, been part of that great artistic world downtown, this incredibly sparky, argumentative, funny, social guy, became bleakly depressed. A few years later, in 1955, he checked into a hotel, took an overdose of pills, and he committed suicide. This is a terrible tragedy of the blacklist and also, for obvious reasons, cast an enormous shadow over the show that he had been part of.

Brooke Gladstone: Over Berg, to survive, she, in the end, shifted. The show stayed on the air until 1956, but it became watered down. She did an interview that year in Commentary, saying, "You see, darling, I don't bring up anything that will bother people. That's very important. Unions, politics, fundraising, Zionism, socialism, intergroup relations. I don't stress them. After all, aren't all such things secondary to daily family living?"

Emily Nussbaum: In the wake of all the damage done by the Red Scare, yes, the way she talks is pretty striking. Clearly, the show was political. There's something very sad about that quote. On the other hand, I understand where it was coming from. Anybody who spoke out was in danger. She ended up dying 10 years later, and she did some cool stuff in the interim. She actually ended up winning a Tony on Broadway, but The Goldbergs was her life's work. The fact that it was blotted out of history is a sad thing.

I also think it's understandable. When people think about the blacklist and when they think about early television, they want to remember that as a period of cozy innocence, sweet experimentation, lovely little sitcoms, or they want to think about people as heroes. Murrow fighting against McCarthy, people refusing to name names. The truth is, when you look at that period, you see entire institutions dropping to their knees, flipping and firing people because of the slightest hint of rumor.

Brooke Gladstone: When you started working on this piece months ago, did you find your approach changing as the news changed?

Emily Nussbaum: Honestly, when I started it, I'm generally interested in the history of television and feminist TV creators, Jewish art in sitcoms. I was interested in the whole debate about representation about, like, should Jews play Jews? There was a whole conversation going on about that. By the time I actually started writing, I wasn't interested in that at all. I was interested much more in the politics of it and, right now, how prescient her story is, how meaningful it is, what a warning it is.

I have to say now, in the aftermath of the piece coming out, CBS's recent levels of cowardice, I was working on this piece when the head of 60 Minutes quit because they weren't able to do any more investigations of Trump. That was so alarming. Then obviously, Colbert's show was just canceled. They caught this deal with Trump. It's such a cliché to say this "obey in advance" thing, but this is terrifying stuff happening. It doesn't fix the problem to learn from history, but it is a meaningful thing.

Brooke Gladstone: Emily, thank you so much.

Emily Nussbaum: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Emily Nussbaum is staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the recent piece, The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom.

[MUSIC - Sophie Tucker: My Yiddishe Momme]

My yiddishe momme, I need her more than ever now

My yiddishe momme, I'd love to kiss that wrinkled brow

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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