WORLD Radio Rewind

PAUL BUTLER: This is WORLD Radio Rewind: a 10-minute review of some of our news coverage and features from the past week on WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

All this week we’ve been celebrating 10 years of The World and Everything in It. We return now to Monday’s episode as program creators Nick Eicher and Joseph Slife told the story of how the program began. Here’s a highlight...

SLIFE: It was very, very difficult to get that first program out the door. But by the grace of God, somehow we did. And it wasn't bad. And then the next week, we did another one, and it got a little bit better. And the next week a little bit better, and the next week a little bit better.

AUDIO clips of a few weekend program segments

SLIFE: And so we continued with that weekend program for quite some time.

EICHER: It didn't take us long to figure out there wasn't much of an audience. So we thought, well, maybe maybe the audience is, is is weekday. So maybe we better find a way to get there.

SLIFE: And the day came when Nick said, Alright, we want to do a daily program now.

AUDIO of first weekday program, followed by montage of segments

Our next story today comes from Tuesday’s program. Rural internet tends to be pretty spotty. The current infrastructure bill working its way through Congress includes $65 billion dollars earmarked to bring broadband internet access to those who don’t currently have it. Much of that money is likely to go toward installing a physical network: electric lines and underground cables. But as WORLD’S Sarah Schweinsberg reported, sometimes, that’s not very practical.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Jason Leininger thought living near a city meant having fast internet. His home is six miles outside Springfield, Missouri.

LEININGER: Being that close to a city of 160,000, you'd think that you'd have pretty good internet. But when we arrived here… it was like going back to dial up.

Millions of Americans and 3 billion people around the world have a similar story. They all lack access to high-speed internet or broadband of any kind. That increasingly hinders economic development, education, and communication.

But some companies are coming up with creative solutions. That has consumers like Jason Leininger excited.

LEININGER: Yeah, so like, isn't Elon Musk putting up all those little satellites?

Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial project is called Starlink. It’s made up of thousands of satellites hovering close to the earth...beaming the internet to homes. Eventually, Starlink plans to launch 42,000 LEOs…or Low Earth Orbiting satellites.

Traditional communication satellites travel about 22,000 miles above the earth’s surface. LEOs hover as low as 300 miles.

Jeffrey Westling studies technology and innovation at the R-Street Institute. He says bringing satellites closer to the earth could eliminate major issues with current satellite internet: time delays and signal interference.

WESTLING: The tricky thing for satellites has always been latency, right. The low Earth orbital side of it tries to fix that by shortening the signal length.

But right now the service can cost more than many people pay for wired internet.

WESTLING: The materials are expensive, the technology is expensive for development. … So it's like they cost a lot to recoup the costs of just manufacturing them.

Westlink expects those costs will come down … eventually.

WESTLING: I've talked to satellite folks who think they're going to continue to be able to lower those prices and are optimistic about it.

PB: Our third story today comes from our weekly Washington Wednesday segment.

The 2020 election revealed that Democrats are gaining ground in historically Republican suburban districts. What might that changing political landscape mean for the GOP going forward?

Host Mary Reichard spoke with Sean Trende to find out. He’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Here’s Mary.

MR: You write that “for years, Republicans thought of their party as a three-legged stool, joining social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives.” But you say there’s another way to look at it. How’s that?

TRENDE: We can look at party coalitions in a variety of ways, the kind of ideological one that you just described is one of them, perhaps the most commonplace of them. But another way of looking at them, and kind of how I tend to look at them in my work, is geographic or demographic coalitions. You'll hear people talk about it, you know, African Americans are in the Democratic Party. And tradition, traditionally, college educated white voters were in the Republican Party. But you can also think of it in geographic terms, which is how I tend to look at it in this paper.

MR: You make the point in that paper that Bill Clinton really began pushing suburbanites into the Democratic Party … and that created a new dynamic in American politics. Elaborate on that, if you would.

TRENDE: Yeah, Bill Clinton is kind of, in a lot of ways and overlooked. President, especially during his presidency, he was kind of dismissed, he never won a majority of the popular vote though a lot of that's due to Ross Perot's presence. But he really played a big role in bringing over these suburban voters who—or starting to bring over these suburban voters who had been a foundation of the Republican Party throughout the post-war years, you know, the Republicans had won seven of 10 presidential elections from 1952 to 1988, and had won six of those in landslides — in large part because of their strength in suburbs. And Bill Clinton's formula, of kind of moderation, on economic issues and, you know, taking some of the sharper edges off of the the Democrats position on social issues, really played a big role in bringing those suburbanites over, especially in the north and remade the politics of this country in many ways in the process.

PB: And finally, this month marks the 1 year anniversary of the devastating explosion in Beirut that killed more than 200 people and injured thousands of others.

Lebanon was already struggling to manage the pandemic and the economic fallout from that. So where do things stand in Beirut today? Host Mary Reichard spoke with WORLD Senior Editor Mindy Belz on Thursday.

MR: Mindy: how have Christians and ministries responded over the past year to this disaster?

BELZ: That really is a powerful part of the story. Many of the churches and Christian ministries were located near the port because that's where the old Christian neighborhoods of Beirut are. And they had to get busy, first of all, repairing their churches and rebuilding their own neighborhoods, but then they just continued. And keep in mind these churches have been a very important part of helping to support Iraqi refugees and Syrian refugees who have been in the country inside Lebanon, more than a million of them, for the past decade. And so now they've turned their attention to helping fellow Lebanese and they're doing amazing work. One group that I know is working with 1200 Lebanese families to help repair their homes to help give them food parcels and the kinds of things they need to get by. One group told me overall, when you look at the big picture, things have gotten worse. But when you focus on the opportunities God is presenting to reach new people with good news, things are incredible right now.

MR: WORLD Senior Editor Mindy Belz has been our guest. Mindy, always a pleasure!

BELZ: Thank you, Mary.

PB: That’s it for this edition of WORLD Radio Rewind.

If you’d like to hear the full versions of any of these features, we’ve included links in our transcript at wng.org/podcasts.

For the latest news, features, and commentary from WORLD Newsgroup, visit wng.org. For WORLD Radio, I’m Paul Butler. Have a great Father’s Day weekend.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.