The Topical is the daily news podcast from The Onion and Onion Public Radio. Journalism isn’t dead. It’s using its dying breath to beg you to listen to host Leslie Price as he holds your hand through the day’s top stories. New episodes published every weekday by 5 p.m. eastern time.
Host
Leslie Price is the host of OPR’s flagship daily news podcast, The Topical. Known for his unflinching interviews and insistence that the moon landing was a hoax, Price is widely considered one of his generation’s preeminent broadcast journalists.
Prior to working for Onion Public Radio, Price slaughtered cattle in the stockyards of Kansas City, MO. It was the sound of the livestock’s screams that inspired him to find his own voice and pursue a career in radio.
Price took his first position at OPR in 1995, covering the presidential semen beat. Though niche at the time, the position would eventually launch him and his work into the national limelight. Price won the Edward R. Murrow Award for his reporting on CIA interrogation techniques and their effects on tight-lipped sources, and he spent the Arab Spring in Acapulco.
Price worked in radio until the medium officially died out for good in 2014. Faced with the decision to either go back to the stockyards or join the burgeoning podcast movement, he chose the latter and has worked begrudgingly in podcasting for OPR ever since.
Credits
The Topical’s theme music was composed by Matthew Engers.