NPR - stuffy or sexy?

But then again it looks like they do at least one per week, so I guess I can't totally fault them for not having 50+ good artists per year.

lol there was a recent one by a band called The Oh Hellos. Perfect.

Blind Pilot
October 21, 2016 • The band's shimmery folk-pop sound, with its vibraphone and overarching vibrancy, is perfectly suited to the space behind Bob Boilen's desk.

The Secret Sisters
September 12, 2016 • The Alabama sibling duo's music can be hymn-like: plain but powerful, heartsick and hopeful. Watch The Secret Sisters perform a river ballad, a hymn and a song capturing some old-fashioned loneliness.

Oh god please no

car talk is actually good though

i kinda don't mind steve inskeep. when he was temporarily replaced by mary whatever i really hated that bc her voice is so annoying like really bad annoying and i don't like how she says the letter S

mary louise kelly, hate her

NPR repeatedly referred to Ocasio-Cortez as wanting to abolish the "Federal Immigration Agency" this morning, instead of abolishing ICE. There is no such agency as the Federal Immigration Agency, there are like six different agencies that deal with immigration. ICE is just the police state wing.

keep thinking that, sheeple

"Coming up, the puzzle with Will Shortz and an interview with Cathy Guisewhite!" I don't think I've ever turned anything off so fast.

If you take the name of Cathy's boyfriend and rearrange the letters, you end up with this word that perfectly describes Will Shortz. What is it?

I can't help but be a little fascinated by Will because of his association with the world's greatest sport (table tennis). But it's almost comical how reluctant and low energy a presence he is on air

he might be the most npr person on npr

i was going to come to this thread to complain about on being with krista tippett. now that farmers' market season has returned i'm driving at 7:30 a.m. on sundays and she makes me want to drive into a wall mmm yeah

i've seen people mock her by calling her 'christian tidbit' lol

weekend NPR is the absolute worst with car talk being the only exception

wait wait dont tell me is p good but theres a show called "ask me another" and it might be worse than prarie home companion, yikes

oh god that one is horrible. it has that particular self-satisfied npr sense of humor. you know the people they play around fundraising time, regular people they have recorded talking about how they love npr. so proud of themselves, for nothing.

onnnnn beinggggg

wait wait don't tell me is awful, the panelists think they're 10x funnier than they actually are

When I graduated many, many years ago, my sweet mother gifted me a multi-volume CD box set of many, many hours of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. She knew I listened to NPR, and I guess I must've mentioned that I sometimes listened to Wait Wait on Saturday mornings, but I guess I didn't make it clear that my listening was entirely passive and my appreciation of it mostly ironic. Anyway, it was very sweet of her and so that's why I waited a few months before placing it directly into the trash can. I like to think that a few days later a 75 year old white liberal dumpster diver's day had been made.

man I listened to All Things Considered this evening and almost turned it off, the reporters were so terrible (this was after suffering through fucking kai ryssdal's marketplace, why is this still on?). There was a back and forth between host and reporter and the reporter was clearly reading written responses in a completely flat, inflectionless tone, and also sounded like she was in junior high. Asking someone I know who works with NPR what the deal is he simply said "you get what you pay for"

I get irritated at NPR more than I used to but i haven’t been able to tell if it’s worse than it used to be or I just have less patience with middlebrow milquetoast journalism than I used to.

i'd welcome middlebrow milquetoast journalism, it's the barely coherent junior-high level reading of something prewritten and pretending it's an off the cuff conversation that made me cringe.

I stopped listening after they became a PR machine for Iraq War II in 2003, and it seems like I haven’t missed anything.

i'd welcome middlebrow milquetoast journalism, it's the barely coherent junior-high level reading of something prewritten and pretending it's an off the cuff conversation that made me cringe.

xxxxp years ago when my wife and i were listening to npr and marketplace started and it got to that part where kai does his "this... is marketplace" intro and she just says "there is no way that guy doesn't have skeletons in his closet."

ATL has a strong NPR station, there is tons of very relevant and well-done local programming.

But yeah, the national stuff is mostly shit.

i'm here for On the Media and basically nothing else; you can read my scathing criticisms on the other thread

...where it appears we all had a version of this same conversation

Is it fashionable to dislike NPR?

I got very attached to WNYC when I lived in New York and I still listen to some of their daytime programming, Brian Lehrer etc. And On the Media is still good, it survived its tumult. But yeah the actual NPR stuff feels pretty flimsy.

when is somebody going to finally take Scott Simon off to the glue factory??

why, is there a major labor law violation taking place at the-- ohhhhhhhhhh

Idk anything about that actually, just listening to him this morning and can’t believe how bad he is

Yeah I stopped listening on Saturdays years ago. Can’t take him.

omfg his laugh
it's criminally annoying
i also can't stand the way he thinks it's funny to refer to bj liederman
or the way he refers to Ayesha Rascoe as Ayesha

she has a surname, sir!!

he needs to go. i dislike almost all the lighthearted NPR content but i do listen for loca news bc there is nowhere else that does investigative local journalism to that depth.

HA! HA! HA! HA!

--Scott Simon

*LOCAL news

oh also i heard him "interview" a guy from slowdive and he asked the most asinine questions like

"what is it like to make an album today?"
"what is shoegaze?"

someone please retire this man

Wordle-playing!!

Senior NPR editor claims public broadcaster lacks ‘viewpoint diversity’
In the piece on Free Press, a site run by Bari Weiss, a former opinion editor at the New York Times, Berliner noted that in 2011 the public broadcaster’s audience identified as 26% conservative, 23% as middle of the road and 37% liberal. Last year it identified as 11% very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% very or somewhat liberal.

“We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals,” Berliner wrote, and described a new listener stereotype: “EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite.”

I thought NPR's own coverage of that was pretty good: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity

NPR is in that funny category with the NYT where conservatives think they're woke commies and leftists think they're squishy-lib corporate apologists.

'Wait Wait' openly mocks Trump nearly every week

The horror! I'd call On the Media pretty left-leaning overall too. But obv Berliner was talking about NPR's core news coverage, not those kinds of shows.

I blame the end of Car Talk for the exodus of libertarians & neocons from the NPR listening base.

they need to get Robert Davi or Jim Caveziel on The Treatment

I would think all traditional news organizations have lost a lot of conservative viewership/listenership/readership since 2011, it’s hard to look at this as an NPR phenomenon. It’s all part of the conservative think tank playbook- paint the traditional media as liberal/woke, driving conservatives to stop following it, then sit back and watch as the media outlets fall all over themselves to shift rightward to get them back. Thus shifting the national discourse and eventually public opinion toward the right.

Four words: Kid Rock Tiny Desk

It's all been down hill since the Gene Simmons Fresh Air ep

This has been a slowly brewing local scandal:

https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2024/02/07/wlrn-latino-sundial-host-carlos-frias-discrimination

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust

The original piece. I had mixed feelings about it. I feel like these kinds of pieces surface every so often. I have also sometimes felt like NPR has changed - I wouldn't necessarily say further left, but a lot of the reporting feels squishier and less fact-driven. I rolled my eyes a little bit when I got to the Hunter Biden laptop point, but OTOH I do think the lab leak theory is something that was weirdly and prematurely dismissed for political reasons.

This part did actually concern me some:

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite.

lol, what a clown. stuff like this goes here FYI

"croissant-munching, latte-sipping": instances of misconceived media-class self-loathing ITT