NPR - stuffy or sexy?

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.

How many hand-wringing editorials have you seen worrying about the diversity of voices on Newsmax?

I know, like basically everyone just tacitly agrees upfront that right-wing media is nothing but ridiculous bias and ideologically slanted commentary. But the "MSM" must be held to account!

Andy what are your favorite Bay Area AM stations? I haven’t explored the band too much, but there used to be a great oldies AM station that played serious lit r&b and cool fifth dimension songs and stuff

the Bay Area AM dial has been pretty gutted.. KGO is essentially gone and turned into a sports-betting station called "The Spread" where they just play sports podcasts

I don't listen to as much AM as I once did.. there's an interesting conspiracy theory about new car makers completely dropping AM radios, which is where all the conservatives get their yelling-at-clouds stations, because they don't want us to hear the truth or something like that

but the slow demise of noisy commercial AM has opened up bandwidth for various ethnic language programming which is a cool development

I listen to the radio a lot — usually local NPR station unless:
It’s wait wait (unbearable)
It’s the insipid local daytime show
It’s a holiday and they’re playing the most unlistenable shit ever: a radio play

Still prefer PBS newshour, Amna & Lisa for president, Lisa’s cat in charge of homeland security

We also recently had some major cuts to Chi Public Media that ended the sister station that played local music and was p much the only place to hear it. :(

the most unlistenable shit ever: a radio play

Lol.. I listen to all ghostly & supernatural radio plays on BBC Sounds

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was already an oddly anachronistic format by the 1970's.. just the eerie opening music makes me super nostalgic, I used to listen to it on a old tube Philco in bed... free episodes here: https://www.cbsrmt.com/

I used to fall asleep to those as a kid!

The only good thing our local npr does is host a two hour old timey radio show with things like gun smoke.

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...

― scott seward, Wednesday, April 10, 2024 2:51 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is exactly how I used to feel about Prairie Home Companion. Except it would require me taking the wheel, because I was usually in the backseat with my parents playing it.

sexy or stuffy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/business/media/npr-suspends-business-editor.html

A longtime (now former) NPR staffer responds to the Berliner piece:
https://slate.com/business/2024/04/npr-diversity-public-broadcasting-radio.html

She acknowledges that NPR is an "organizational shit show," but not because of wokeness:

"And that’s what the core editorial problem at NPR is and, frankly, has long been: an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity."

i just read this linked on the political thread about PBS's Buckley doc.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-17-an-implausible-mr-buckley/

"caution that often crossed the border to cowardice" is a good description of that doc apparently. though i haven't seen it because ugh i was just glad when he finally died i don't need to watch a doc about him.

one of my closest friends worked at WHYY for several years (and for many more years before that at KQED) and that slate article could have been written by him, it absolutely tracks a lot of the complaints he had about working in public media.

the final paragraph is the kicker: "I guess that’s why I think Uri is most wrong about NPR’s relationship with the rest of the country. It’s a very accurate reflection of America right now, a place where people won’t admit that good intentions don’t always yield good results, and would rather hide behind the myth of its excellence than do the hard work of making it a reality."

looks like that dude resigned

yes he'll be whining about being cancelled on podcasts along with Taibbi and other dummies soon

Berliner seems like basically a newsroom crank, which every newsroom I've worked in had at least one of and often more.