He has a tendency to be heavy-handed with editorialising and I wouldn’t put faith in his historical research. He is fine with current affairs. But I’d put this in the infotainment category and I wouldn’t draw upon it to inform my opinions on matters of history.
I’ll listen to the two-parter on The Spanish Civil War but I can almost certainly guess what narrative he’s going to push.
True. I have noticed a quite few inaccuracies stemming from his bias and choice of emphasis. If it happens to be on a topic that I already know a lot about, or I’ve heard covered elsewhere, I usually notice details that get too much or too little attention compared with reality. But it’s still very entertaining.
I do agree with the current affairs angle, though. I first came across him through the “It could happen here” podcast, and while I don’t find the later stuff in that series as entertaining, as it’s now mostly news, I really did enjoy the hypothetical scenarios in the first “season”.
Aside from Evans’ questionable credentials working for the CIA cutout Bellingcat and openly admitting to collaborating with the feds, the other thing that I remember making me uncomfortable was how cosy Evans is with Jake Hanrahan, who is a guest star on Behind the Bastards some half a dozen times by this point.
Hanrahan works hand-in-glove with the defense establishment. If you listen to his podcast Popular Front, he does an episode on the Uyhurs with a guest whom he only introduces by their name, Nathan Ruser, and not by the fact that he works for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which basically sets war policy for Australia in a similar way to what the RAND corporation does for the US.
At no point does Hanrahan do any journalistic work of interrogating outrageous and contradictory claims made by Ruser, he just swallows the entire narrative uncritically.
At the very end of the episode there’s a brief mention of Ruser’s bona fides but at the point in the episode where the narrative has already been fully developed and it’s likely that people have already made up their minds, if not having stopped the episode to skip to something else before they even get to hear about Ruser working for the ASPI.
Hanrahan is either an opportunist or a fed imo. I don’t trust the guy one bit. Evans does OSINT. There’s no way that he wouldn’t be able to do some basic investigation into Hanrahan’s work to get a read on him.
The ones I listen to have already been mentioned, so I’ll just add:
I’d take Robert Evans’ work with a pinch of salt.
He has a tendency to be heavy-handed with editorialising and I wouldn’t put faith in his historical research. He is fine with current affairs. But I’d put this in the infotainment category and I wouldn’t draw upon it to inform my opinions on matters of history.
I’ll listen to the two-parter on The Spanish Civil War but I can almost certainly guess what narrative he’s going to push.
True. I have noticed a quite few inaccuracies stemming from his bias and choice of emphasis. If it happens to be on a topic that I already know a lot about, or I’ve heard covered elsewhere, I usually notice details that get too much or too little attention compared with reality. But it’s still very entertaining.
I do agree with the current affairs angle, though. I first came across him through the “It could happen here” podcast, and while I don’t find the later stuff in that series as entertaining, as it’s now mostly news, I really did enjoy the hypothetical scenarios in the first “season”.
Aside from Evans’ questionable credentials working for the CIA cutout Bellingcat and openly admitting to collaborating with the feds, the other thing that I remember making me uncomfortable was how cosy Evans is with Jake Hanrahan, who is a guest star on Behind the Bastards some half a dozen times by this point.
Hanrahan works hand-in-glove with the defense establishment. If you listen to his podcast Popular Front, he does an episode on the Uyhurs with a guest whom he only introduces by their name, Nathan Ruser, and not by the fact that he works for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which basically sets war policy for Australia in a similar way to what the RAND corporation does for the US.
At no point does Hanrahan do any journalistic work of interrogating outrageous and contradictory claims made by Ruser, he just swallows the entire narrative uncritically.
At the very end of the episode there’s a brief mention of Ruser’s bona fides but at the point in the episode where the narrative has already been fully developed and it’s likely that people have already made up their minds, if not having stopped the episode to skip to something else before they even get to hear about Ruser working for the ASPI.
Hanrahan is either an opportunist or a fed imo. I don’t trust the guy one bit. Evans does OSINT. There’s no way that he wouldn’t be able to do some basic investigation into Hanrahan’s work to get a read on him.
It’s all just a bit fishy for me.