with Brooke Gladstone & Micah Loewinger
On the Media is a weekly show that uses the media as a lens to understand our world.
FEMA is the federal agency that prepares for America’s worst case scenarios. Think: floods that swallow up towns. Wildfires that devour centuries of forest and miles of homes. Hurricanes that turn cities upside down. Amid the climate crisis, disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable. Last year, the US suffered a billion-dollar disaster every 10 days.
But as pleas for disaster relief skyrocket, the president is threatening to kill FEMA. In this series, OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.
Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it?
