Making NewsHour Weekend: Tuning into bigger conversations through music

Thursday, January 2, 2020 - 2:15pm

This year, NewsHour Weekend’s Christopher Booker and Tom Casciato reported on the notion of masculinity through the lens of music and also profiled musician Carlos Santana. They joined Hari Sreenivasan to discuss their mutual love for music and how it informs their reporting — and why some of those stories are “unconventional” for television. "I had become obsessed with this British punk band called Idles. And of the many reasons I like them is that they were actually singing about things you wouldn't necessarily associate with British punk bands, namely, they were holding a mirror to traditional ideas of masculinity," said Booker. Just as Idles was releasing an album, the American Psychological Association (APA), for the first time ever, released a landmark paper that looked at the traditional ways that we socialize boys and men and how this may be connected to some rather unhealthy outcomes. Booker spoke to psychologist Christopher Liang of Lehigh University's College of Education and  a co-author of the APA guidelines. "When boys are not allowed to express their sadness, their hurts, when they're growing up, they're essentially taught that they shouldn't have pain. And what that does over time is it creates a condition where boys who are becoming men stuff their pain," said Liang.