Is it fashionable to dislike NPR?

And don't even get me started on television.

Anyway, to answer the question, I doubt anything so insignificant to public affairs or national life as NPR is could ever be fully "fashionable" or "not fashionable" but more outrage and hatred would be a good place to start, no matter how seemingly ineffectual

I mean would it kill us to have ONE show, on either television or radio, that was an hour long and actually challenged its interviewees with difficult questions?

I actually have no problem w/NPR as long as it's seen as a kind of middlebrow arts network, which I think is actually how most people do see it (especially since most stations that carry NPR programming run classical music through most of the afternoon, and maybe on Fridays will air some challenging Sonny Stitt records)

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I must say I feel deeply ambivalent towards this culture. On the one hand, it's very much my culture: I'm an ageing metropolitan liberal. I like The Books, and I'd rather listen to NPR than 90% of US radio. (But I'd rather listen to selected highlights of Radio 4 than that, I agree with Tracer.) At the same time, NPR is aerosol valium. Its "moronic humanism" singlehandedly justifies the need for Vice magazine, its snotty adolescent provocative black sheep of a grandson. (Mentally Ill issue of Vice is sterling, by the way, and, weirdly, not a million miles from something I could imagine the MacArthur Foundation coughing up funds for.)

When I think of NPR I think of 'tasteful' bourgeois culture, open to Latin-flavored jazz (Barnes & Nobles world music comps) and indie-rock ala the Shins and semi-indie movies (I bet they loved Sideways), etc.. Altogether bland and banal, not speaking to my world or experiences at all.

I wish I could find something on radio in between listening to NPR and listening to ESPN Radio (right-wing talk is obviously out of the question).

Sure, NPR has a fair amount of the Starbucks-culture crap. Sure, it doesn't hold a candle to the BBC World Service (which my NPR station now broadcasts after Morning Edition). (Neither does the BBC itself, I'm told) Sure, the news shows are not what they were and bring back Bob Edwards and would Juan Williams shut the fuck up and die for crimes against journalism already? Sure, the pop-culture coverage is embarrasing and entirely devoid of a critical impulse.

But, please, while it could be a LOT better, it should be remembered that even as it slips it remains just about the only mainstream American non-print/non-web outlet for anything approximating serious journalism. The only way it will get better is with your support. And, while I don't listen to it much, I love A Prairie Home Companion and what it stands for. Car Talk and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me are fluff, but good fluff.

As for WNYC, ok, the daytime shows are decent. Brian Lehrer has great range and seems like a really smart guy until he tackles something you actually know a lot about (and enough with the cheesy jam-jazz band bumpers). Leonard Lopate is a great interviewer, but his interview subjects can also be found at Barnes & Noble at 7PM. Terri Gross can do interesting stuff, but I can take her or leave her. Bottom line - I'd often rather listen to Air America/Charlie Rose reruns/Hot 97, and I'm still offended, on behalf of my parents, that they wiped classical music off the daytime airwaves. There is no longer a serious classical music radio station in the greatest city in the world, unless you want to listen during dinner or late at night. Instead, we have some unnecessary talk shows and a mostly pointless local news department in the event that they have to provide some unique service to the public when a dirty bomb goes off in midtown. And, while I don't completely hate him anymore, I can think of a few dozen better ideas for weekend programming than Jonathan Schwartz. He should listen to WKCR and cry.

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Icons/AllergistsWifeLogo.gif

Acknowledging (hoping) the bit of sarcasm behind this, I'd say you're much closer to the mark on why NPR sucks.

(I sympathize with this kind of nostalgia. You know, it's like that Modern Lovers song - "Old World.")

2. I like the show--I forget its name--that comes on, on Sunday mornings (in Philadelphia anyway), that provides a little biography of various jazz artists, usually with lots of interviews with other artists or others who knew the artist under question.

"Jazz Profiles," I believe.

Not only that, but the Chicago affiliate offered the Sideways soundtrack as a pledge drive gift!!

It's a tricky one, isn't it? How do you make intelligent and rational analysis of a stupid and irrational war? The best attempt I've seen is deliberately childlike: Eliot Weinberger's What I Heard About Iraq in the London Review of Books.

Fashionable or not, Terry Gross just surprised me by asking a really good question in an interview. On the show from 3/30, she's interviewing Seymour Hersh, and brings up his recent allegation that Cheney was in charge of an "assassination ring," that he was in command of US Special Forces that were given a list of people that we're all better off without, and then walkied in, killed them in a dutiful and expedient manner, and moved to the next name, all while reporting directly to Cheney. So her question was, "Isn't that part of what the Special Forces do? Assassinate people?"

Never mind what the answer was, because it was very long and rambly. And never mind that Gross, true to form, nearly apologized before asking the question, and never really pressed him for a real answer. The question itself is perfect. It deflates the claim by making the counter-claim that it's not really outrageous at all. It questions the underlying assumptions of the premise. It flips the script. It's a second- or third-level question, from someone who I would ordinarily expect to ask something completely useless like, "How did we get to the point in this country where that could happen?"

Anyway, it's not earth shaking or anything, but I thought I'd mention it, because It really did surprise me.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314256024/npr-to-end-tell-me-more-lay-off-28-people?live=1

After seven years on the air, the program was carried by just 136 of the more than 800 noncommercial stations affiliated with NPR.

The decision was another setback for NPR’s efforts to diversify its audience and provide alternative perspectives. NPR has struggled to produce programming for and about minority listeners for more than a decade. “News and Notes,” a magazine-style program that was tailored to African Americans, was canceled in 2009 during a budget-cutting cycle. Tavis Smiley, who was an African American host of an NPR program, abruptly left the organization in 2004 after a dispute with managers over promoting his show.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/npr-to-end-tell-me-more-program-aimed-at-minorities-eliminate-28-positions/2014/05/20/0593cc3a-e04f-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html

Since I had no idea what a 'ramp' is in the food world, the npr piece about people eating 'ramps' this morning was surreal. I pictured people harvesting and eating these little wedge shaped things. It was as if someone did an autoreplace on the npr audio. It could have been a piece about people harvesting and eating hatcats from my perspective.

Ever since NPR took over 88.5 here in Atlanta I've been listening to it now and then, and it almost always ends up making me IA. The non-music parts are just the most vapid milquetoast programming you could imagine. And occasionally it is flat-out offensively stupid. Yesterday there was an hour where they were playing all these stories about the economic crises. It started off with a feel-good story about homeless people having their own choir, and they talked about this one guy for a second, quickly describing the situation around his ending up homeless, and letting him speak a sentence or two. Then they went back into the choir. Then they shifted to another story about an economic out of France who has a theory that the financial crisis actually hurt the rich a lot more than you would think. So suddenly we they are talking about how after the '08 crash lots of rich lost their stock money, and the post-crash big increase in wealth was actually them making up for money they lost, so it doesn't count! Then the interviewer talked about how also the rich don't have access to free programs like food stamps, unemployment, etc. So that this point I am playing the smallest violin and about to change the channel. But before I do, guess what? They go back to the singing homeless people.

Almost not sure what is worse, this pandering corporate lefist schlock or its right-wing equivalent.

i would go with "mushy Democrat" rather than "leftist"

"corporate leftist" is a perfect phrase for our time tho, sell it to Hillary16.

she's an "inclusive capitalist" dontchaknow

as if the poors problem is that they just aren't being included in capitalism. if only there was some way to integrate poor people into this awesome system.

i think it's fair to say that for all its middlebrow nothing-ness, NPR is still miles better than PBS :(

i mean, their idea of Culture is a little more advanced than "it's british, so it's good"

(which is in turn possibly a bit better, or at least different, than the local PBS affiliate which programs lawrence welk during sweeps week)

What shocked me was the raw an unabashed crassness of padding your story about this one French economist who says the rich suffered too with the singing poor. Well we are all just trying to get by in this world! Poor folks gather together in a shelter and sing, rich folks buy public media that pumps out pity stories about their stock losses.

Just the little things that help. I'm sure the Koch bros. don't mind hearing the poor sing for them every now and then.

http://www.npr.org/assets/music/sxsw2015gif/StreetShred.gif

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2015/03/23/394809841/sxsw-2015-in-10-gifs

LOL some of these are pretty bad. Like the Waxahatchee one where the only thing animated is the ceiling fan in the next room!

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/podcast-out/

The NPR podcast approach to addressing the problems they create would go like this: Begin by exploring how a steady media diet of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychological changes affects cognitive processes. The podcasts’ invited guests would then socialize the effects by adding up all affected individuals and imagining what it would be like to constantly encounter them at work or at a party. In short, they would misunderstand their own impact on the world the way they misunderstand just about everything else. They’d still leave out the political valence of these effects, as well as the benefits realized by middle-income liberals in thinking this way. They would also leave out a proper understanding of how affect and emotion (and their seeming absence) do political work.

Circulating among an NPR podcast’s audience is a sense of obnoxious explainerism. Experiences are not to be trusted even though they’re the only things individuals can control. These podcasts trade-in an illusion of understanding, offering bits of data to support preconceived notions about who is broken, wrong, or just annoying. The behavior they encourage–if they do that at all–is in the register of the heroic, but it can only be displayed by well-resourced individuals who seek to make dramatic moves because most others cannot, supposedly, see the whole picture. The others, it seems, must wait until next week.

Well that's interesting; they don't talk about "Code Switch" in that one

Was a heavy listener for years but the most useful non-podcast thing I've gotten from NPR lately is their music offering, like some Tiny Desk shows or that they'll stream albums I'll really want to hear asap, like this one today:

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/19/510416955/first-listen-japandroids-near-to-the-wild-heart-of-life

Please forgive if I'm way off-base as I don't have the time right now to read that whole essay at the moment, but it seems like the central conceit is that NPR shouldn't be treated as one's sole source of information about the world? Which...duh?

The NPR podcast approach to addressing the problems they create would go like this: Begin by exploring how a steady media diet of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychological changes affects cognitive processes. The podcasts’ invited guests would then socialize the effects by adding up all affected individuals and imagining what it would be like to constantly encounter them at work or at a party. In short, they would misunderstand their own impact on the world the way they misunderstand just about everything else. They’d still leave out the political valence of these effects, as well as the benefits realized by middle-income liberals in thinking this way. They would also leave out a proper understanding of how affect and emotion (and their seeming absence) do political work.

does any of this actually mean anything bc it sounds like gibberish to me; i've never heard an npr podcast this inane.

it's always fashionable to dislike npr.

I remember some holiday-themed radio plays or maybe they just play them on holidays to take up space? Idk. They’re unbearable.