{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Keen On America","title":"Episode 1988: How the Patty Hearst saga captured the paranoia of early 70's America","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2264,"description":"You couldn’t make up the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974. The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, America’s most divisive media baron, was kidnapped in Berkeley (of all places) by domestic terrorists who demand that Hearst feed the poor in exchange for the 19 year-old woman. That, in itself, was quite a story in an America still embroiled in both Vietnam and all the other aftershocks of the Sixties. But then Patty Hearst went rogue and appeared to join the SLA, participating in the heist of a San Francisco bank and changing her name to Tania, in honor of Che Guevara’s girlfriend. Such was the paranoid America of early 1974. And, according, Roger Rapoport, author of the new novel SEARCHING FOR PATTY HEARST, such is the paranoid America of early 2024. History doesn’t quite repeat itself, Rapoport explained to me. But it certainly rhymes, particularly when one compares the violent left wing cults of the early 1970’s with the violent right wing cults of the early 2020’s. Award winning film producer, publisher, author and investigative journalist, Roger Rapoport has covered the Patty Hearst story for half a century. From his front page story in the Wall Street Journal about life on a Ford Assembly line in his junior college summer of 1967 to his fascinating coverage of the aviation industry in Angle of Attack, Roger Rapoport has received many honors for his groundbreaking reporting over the past five decades. But perhaps the highest accolade of all is a comment made years ago by one of his first editors. “Roger’s problem is that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word no.” In 1974, Rapoport, a contributor to publications like the Atlantic, Esquire and Rolling Stone, went to work for New Times covering the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, a few blocks from his Berkeley home. His exclusive reporting focused on the life and times of Steve Weed , the fiance the Symbionese Liberation Army left behind as these...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/bCpvkYgrorWYCv4ujOodZ7o-xqCKvQH-YHlEI5E7zpw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83NDM2/MGJjOTYyNjBkYzJi/ZDVhMTUwZDgwMWE3/ZDk3OS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}