An Unforeseen Twist! | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

Just as a reminder if you’ve yet to see it, I recently put out a submissions post for my next Q&A. There’s some great questions already but, if you’ve got anything you’d like to add, then do drop it in the comments to either that post or this one. I’m planning on filming it towards the end of this week.

What have I been up to this week?

This week, work has continued on the writing of my upcoming video about how right-wing “think tanks” shape the news. And it’s been a week of interesting twists and turns in my research!

At the beginning of the week, I thought I was pretty close to finishing the first draft of the script. I had a couple of sections in the bag. The first section discussed a report by a British think tank called the Adam Smith Institute (an organisation which is deeply secretive about who funds it) and their release of a report advocating for establishing a system of private property rights on the moon, thereby making it possible for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and other, less high-profile space entrepreneurs) to turn a profit on the moon. The second section looked at the history of these organisations, primarily through the lens of the founding of American think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute.

My plan for the third part of the video was simply to sum up how these organisations use their media-savviness to promote various libertarian and conservative causes, how they adopt the language and aesthetic of academia to present themselves as “legitimate” and how the media tends to fail to call-out these groups for the bad actors that they are. I was intending to do all of this through using the “moon report” as a bit of a case study.

Nevertheless, as I was doing a bit of fact-checking on Tuesday, I began to notice a connection between right-wing think tanks in the United States and the present conservative moral panic surrounding “Critical Race Theory”. The more I pulled on this thread, the more it became clear that the manufactured outrage surround “CRT” was almost entirely the product of think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Discovery Institute.

For the remainder of the week, then, my attention turned to further researching this sequence of events. My goal is now to use this as a case study of how think tanks operate. I think this is going to work really well as it’s a topic that feels a bit more “urgent” than the slightly more abstract notion of moon ownership!

This twist in the research process obviously felt a little like a step backwards as it definitely added some  time onto the process. Nevertheless, I’m hoping I might be able to get the script finished by the end of the coming week and to film it soon after!

And outside of work?

This perhaps doesn’t really count as “outside of work” as it was definitely work related but, this Friday, I took some time away from reading and writing to be interviewed for a documentary. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say (and it’s worth saying that it is in a very, very early stage of development) but it involved being a “talking head” and being asked questions about all kinds of post-war history and politics.

Given that I usually undertake all my filming on my own and have had to pick-up skills on-the-fly, it was really interesting to suddenly be working with professionals with formal training! I picked up all kinds of little tips whilst doing it that I’m going to be able to incorporate into my own filming process. A really fun day!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

This week, I began listening to the audiobook of Call for the Dead, the first book in John le Carré series of books following George Smiley (and which eventually lead up to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I’d wanted to read these books for quite some time but never got round to it and recently thought I’d try-out the audio books.

After a bit of looking around, I eventually decided to get a new library card from my local council library (my old account had apparently been knocked off the system whilst I was able to rely on the university library) and have now had my eyes opened to the possibilities of both “Libby” and “BorrowBox”, both apps which you can login to through a library account and borrow audio books and e-books.

It took me a little while to get hooked by the book but now I am totally absorbed by it. It’s been one of those that I’m constantly looking forward to getting back to, which is always a great feeling to have with a novel! So, a hardy recommendation for both Borrow Box and Call for the Dead from me.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Fridayish Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!