Ethan Knox

Journalist uncovers forgotten voices and hidden histories through audio storytelling, driven by a passion for truth, historical context and the belief that understanding the past fuels present-day change

By Ethan Knox ’20 on JULY 15, 2025 @BingUNews

Talking to octo- and nonagenarians may not sound like your idea of a party, but for Mycah Hazel, it’s a Monday morning — and a path to unwritten histories. 

“A lot of my day is tracking down people who’ve lived through historic events. The other half of my day is a lot of research, a lot of reading,” she said. “There’s just something about real events and how they actively affect people’s lives generations later that has always appealed to me.”

Hazel is a journalist and associate producer at the Peabody Award-winning podcast Radio Diaries and a producer of audio documentaries for public radio. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Hazel received her bachelor’s degree in history and creative writing from Binghamton University and her master’s degree in journalism with a concentration in literary/audio reportage at New York University. But she hadn’t always known she was going to follow that path. 

Upon arriving at Binghamton, Hazel says the first thing she recognized was how driven the student body was, and how open and eager other students were to talk about what they were learning. Seeing the paths of other people helped her discover her own.

“I always wanted to write. But by talking to others about their careers, I realized I needed to broaden my options a little,” Hazel said. “By junior year, I had taken a lot of history courses. By senior year, I was leaning toward law schools, because of my work with the mock trial team and the Thurgood Marshall Law Society. But I realized that everyone there felt the way about law that I felt about writing, and during grad school, I really locked in on journalism.”

She went on to intern at a local paper in the East Village, where she began to take audio reporting classes because it was a trending medium. She realized she was more suited for that field, since it had opportunities involving her interests in history, arts and culture. Then, she applied to intern with WNYC and finally was offered a fellowship at Radio Diaries, which she filled for a year before being offered a permanent position.

Her time at Binghamton pursuing history, she said, was what ultimately trained her for her role. 

“I took a lot of war history classes, around politics and the U.S. government,” Hazel said. “Now, a lot of the things that I find I’m most interested in are stories about hidden chapters of those topics: different initiatives and short-lived laws. There’s always something new to learn about, and the past is always being used in different ways. And the country is in a strange space; it’s a good time to look back at what we’ve done historically.”

Forgotten stories

As part of the team pitching stories for Radio Diaries, Hazel has a hand in many of the narratives that are told on the show, but she has some favorites. One of her favorite projects was called “Making Waves,” their first three-part mini-series of 2025, which told the stories of three controversial broadcasters in American history. 

Two of these individuals, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux and Dorothy Thompson, made choices that would remove their names from common knowledge.

Michaux was a preacher whose Sunday services were broadcast to more than 25 million listeners on CBS radio at the height of his fame in 1934. Black America saw him as a leader for racial harmony and progress. But decades later, his reputation took an unlikely turn when it was discovered that he served as an FBI informant.

Dorothy Thompson, on the other hand, was a foreign correspondent leading up to World War II and one of the first woman expelled by Hitler from Germany. She became well known for her commentaries on Hitler’s rise and her advocacy for Jewish refugees, but by the end of the war, those strong opinions put her career in jeopardy when she visited Palestine and became a pro-Palestinian activist.

“They were cool stories for me to explore how someone could be so influential and then completely disappear from the history books,” Hazel said. “I find it interesting when there are these people who clearly did good things for Americans but made a choice that wasn’t popular. Does that act cancel out all the good that they’ve done?”

Most recently, Hazel has been working on a story about a veteran named Isaac Woodard, who was arrested, beaten and blinded while still in uniform by Batesburg, S.C., police for requesting to use a bus station restroom. This occurred only hours after his honorable discharge from the U.St. Army and eventually led Orson Welles, with investigative help from the NAACP, to host a radio show to identify the perpetrators.

“It was essentially one of the earliest examples of people using a media documentary to find a criminal,” Hazel said. “The show led to Truman desegregating the military. But in addition to that, it’s an example of a refrain we are seeing commonly these days: if you don’t share your story, nobody will know these injustices are happening, as well as the power of the public in these cases.” 

Even with these interesting narratives under her belt, Hazel is constantly searching for new stories. She hopes to center her next project around the migrant crisis and climate change. After four years at Radio Diaries, she’s also interested in pursuing a longer form angle as a documentarian.

She’s attracted to these types of stories for many reasons, but a big one is that she believes history can protect those who understand it from being misled, and that changing the world happens a lot more than people think, whether for good or bad.

“I think it’s important for people to have context of what’s going on in the world. If there’s one thing I’ve realized from being in journalism, it’s that attention is very short-lived, and there’s so many things that can happen that people think are new or have never been done before,” she added. “I hear a lot, ‘We can’t change things because it’s never been done.’ And when you have all these history stories that prove the opposite, it’s important for people to see that.”