NPR - stuffy or sexy?

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

I think a lot of institutions in 2020 added or amplified various kinds of DEI/unconscious bias/anti-racist training, mostly for good reasons (and for PR reasons too, depending on the institution and how publicly they talked about it). Of course some of that was overly broad or simplistic or possibly had unintended consequences. There are good critiques of those kinds of efforts from people of color too, in terms of how superficial they could be. But Uri Berliner is of the exact vintage and demographic of people who whine about DEI initiatives the most — middle-aged white men — and it's a demographic whose thoughts on such things I'm least interested in. (Even though and/or because it's my own demographic too.)

Also the whole "I have a lesbian mom so my problem can't be any kind of bias" shtick is pretty tired.

I have no issue with DEI initiatives either, but the level of involvement in editorial decisions sounded a little concerning.

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth.

You just didn't notice when white people did it for your entire fuckin' life. Sit down and shut up.

the level of involvement in editorial decisions sounded a little concerning

Maybe. I'd want to hear from other voices there about what that actually looks like.

Agree it would be a more compelling point if he could actually point to some examples of where this actually factored into a decision and how

i stick to PBS. Amna Nawaz for President! John Yang for Vice President! Lisa Desjardins for Secretary of Health and Human Services! Judy Woodruff for the Supreme Court!

NPR is the stink. Peeyoooooo.

and before you ask yes i do pay 5 bucks a month to PBS so that i get PBS Passport and can watch every episode of Nova if i want.

I listen to the PBS New Hour... on NPR!

It's the R that's the stumbling block for me. People listen to the radio? In 2024? Really?

its the only listenable thing i get in my car but i often turn it off anyway in favor of one of the THREE bad country stations near me. so, they are turning THIS Trumper off as well. Hello, Hank Jr.

every time i hear the beginning of wait wait don't tell me i almost drive into a tree. on purpose. because it fills me with dread. its all so terrible...

Bluetoothing internet radio from my phone to my car is the strongest argument for having a smartphone I'll ever have. I love cruising around the middle of nowhere listening to WFMU and pretending it's a local station.

Why do we always fall for right-wingers (claiming to be liberals) pretending to be worried about how liberal the Times or NPR are? How many hand-wringing editorials have you seen worrying about the diversity of voices on Newsmax?

NPR gets nearly nothing anymore from the government anyway, and they basically have ads now (like PBS).

People listen to the radio? In 2024? Really?

every day, all day... but I've always been radio person, since childhood

yeah i just like FM and AM. always will. it just all sucks so bad now. the robo stations are horrible.

maria started doing a show again on the local public access fm station and i can barely get it in my car! its right here in town! but cars don't bother with good radio anymore. this is maria's 4th radio station she has had a show on. she loves the whole thing.

AM around the Bay Area still has some rad ethnic stations.. we also have public jazz & classical station on FM, and college radio

I have a KLH Model Twenty-One kitchen table radio, designed by the great Henry Kloss... with the optional satellite speaker

For another thread Andy, but I have questions about my KLH model 27.