Week 31: THIS IS FRRRRRRRESH AIR.
edit: Comments were disabled on this post, apparently. This wasn't intentional. Fixed now. Please flame away at will.
edit 2: By "popular" "request," I have significantly shortened this entry (prior to the final posting deadline, of course).
(The original full-length post is still available here, but I think the below will be enough for most folks to get the cut of my jib.)
My topic of choice: Why I "hate" National Public Radio, and why you should too.
Look, before we start: I don't really hate NPR, as non-mouth-breathing readers could reasonably surmise from the quotation marks above. I listen to it sometimes, and can still enjoy it with multiple grains of salt. But I do have some rather strenuous objections.
Most of these objections stem from NPR underhandedly marketing itself as something which it is not. Seemingly every smart, well-read / educated person I know is a big, outspoken fan of NPR. They wear their NPR listenership like a badge of intellectual-leftie honor. I seriously question the strength and validity of such associations.
Many NPR listeners clearly seem to be suffering under the delusion that their chosen information source is the "intellectual's choice." In the relative scheme of things, it's true that NPR is somewhat more cerebral than most other news / media sources available in the US. But calling NPR the "intellectual's choice" on such a dismal playing field is like saying that a McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder is the "health-nut's choice" because it may have 300 less calories than, say, the KFC Double Down.
NPR does seem to take some pains to occasionally report news in somewhat more detail, with somewhat more clarity, than most of our current media sources in the United States. But that doesn't mean their stories actually tell you any more than what you might manage to absorb through the atrocity currently known as CNN.
Longer stories do not automatically equal better or more well-balanced stories (hey, them's words to live by, the_day_setup). We all know that there are plenty of international stories which merit much more attention than they receive from the US media. But very rarely does an actual news story make it onto, say, All Things Considered that isn't also a talking point of the day on the multiple media sources for "dumber" people.
And just as your embarrassingly-coifed local news team can't seem to make it through a single broadcast without a News of the Weird-type digression, or a "story" on LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT, All Things Considered and Morning Edition eschew those potentially-missed important stories in favor of lengthy puff pieces that have little to do with the significant breaking news of the world. The main thing differentiating such an NPR oh-isn't-this-random-thing-interesting "news" story and LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT is about nine minutes of airtime, and possibly the NPR journalist's "exotic" accent.
I used to wake up to NPR every morning on the clock radio, enjoying the news coverage on Morning Edition, which was pretty much my only source of news each day. Where it started to smell funny to me was during the ramp-up to Gulf War II in 2002-2003. For well over six months, NPR dutifully reported on Bush's paper-thin justifications in unquestioning, matter-of-fact tones. At no point was an alternative perspective ever considered or covered. I thought the whole fucking country must have just gone insane.
It's not the job of the news to try and sway listeners to one side or another, or to questionably present opinion as fact, of course. I'm happy to leave that bullshit to Fox News (although I'd secretly be a lot happier if someone took it upon themselves to drop a few bombs on their studio from time to time, and/or if some confused, deluded, psychotic assassin "just happened" to put a bullet into Rupert Murdoch's head in order to impress Kim Kardashian or something).
Here's the thing, though: When the war finally started, and the nationwide protests began, I was legitimately shocked at the fact that any Americans gave a shit. Not only had NPR reported Bush's talking points with the utmost, unswerving faithfulness for many moons, at no point had NPR even hinted at a cultural stream of dissent within our borders. In retrospect, given the size of the objecting populace, it was obvious that there ought to have been a story or two on such objectors during the ramp-up. But I sure as hell never heard one.
NPR was barely better than Fox, ultimately, in this particular situation. They were as much of a culpable media lackey for Bush's ruinous, pointless war as any other US media source I could name. So much for the "intellectual's choice."
Not too long thereafter, I switched to an R&B station on the clock radio (because nothing gets me up faster than laughing at the overuse of Autotune and/or the rhyming of "thighs" to "hypnotized"), and started getting my news from the Guardian UK's website.
Outside of the flagship news programs All Things Considered and Morning Edition, NPR programming is absolutely full of sheer fluff presented in oh-so-soothing vocal tones. The precise nature of the fluff you end up with, of course, depends on the the syndicated programming selected by your local NPR affiliate, which in turn is established largely by local-demographic factors.
Nearly everybody carries This American Life-- usually little more than a weekly venture to follow a given journalist down a Wikipedia-esque rabbit-hole of pointless (if admittedly fun) information-gathering-- and Fresh Air, a regular opportunity to learn absolutely nothing about your favorite celebrities, Terry Gross tossing softball after pandering softball at her guests while smearing everything in her trademark brand of vocal marmalade.
Talk of the Nation features pointless call-ins that may or may not be slightly smarter than the average call-in guest on Limbaugh. Whaddaya Know? is maddeningly gentle trivia-comedy and/or mindless small talk that you don't have to listen to particularly closely. Car Talk is a cult of personality wherein middle-class white people too "educated" to know anything about their cars call in to have twenty-second questions answered in seven minutes, six minutes of which are formulaic OH MY CRAZY BROTHER jokes and characteristic guffawing.
Don't even get me started on Garrison fucking Keillor.
And then you have the music that some NPR stations use to kill time, particularly on the weekends. Not a whole lot of NPR stations specializing in intellectually stimulating music of the now or ever, never mind their ostensibly "intellectual" audience. More likely, you'll get an endless stream of beaten-to-death pre-1880 classical warhorses for bluehairs, or perhaps "smooth" jazz that is half a notch over on the treacle-dial from full-on Muzak.
Rest assured, though, that if you have an NPR affiliate that kills hours of its time with musical filler, said filler will be a) something that makes for completely inoffensive and unchallenging listening, b) something that gives a casual listener a false and completely unjustified sense of being a "smart" cultural outlier just for having the radio on while it's playing.
Around the time that the Gulf War was beginning-- the same time that NPR seemed to be brushing the dissenter's movement completely under the rug in their coverage-- I had my hat in the ring for a well-paid job as a music director at a local NPR affiliate. I made it to the finalist stage.
In the end, I was not selected. And, in retrospect, I think this was a good thing.
The NPR affiliate in question is a station that plays smooth jazz on the weekdays, horrible watered-down / unconfrontational Budweiser blues for Numb White Suburban Dad on the weekends. I was asked (for the twentieth time) what I could bring to the job as music director, and what vision I saw for the station's musical future.
I answered that not only had I run two college radio stations as the general manager (thusly having some *slight* inkling of how real radio stations work), I also had a deep background as a musician, including years of experience playing jazz piano in various combos and big bands (however badly).
Naively, I also answered that I saw room for "real" jazz on-air at the station, stuff beyond the horrible contemporary smooth jazz they were currently playing (although I was at least smart enough to avoid calling it "horrible" mid-interview).
I thought they ought to consider reaching a bit into the canon of classic real jazz, what with them being a university-affiliated station and an oft-overstated "service" within the community. It wasn't like anyone else was playing that stuff on-air in the region. It certainly had an audience, and/or deserved to be heard and remembered.
I was politely but solidly rebuffed on this response by a committee of my would-be coworkers. The station, it was explained, had in fact played "harder" jazz thirty years ago. But what they found was this: When the jazz got tamer, the contributions got bigger. Year by year, the jazz selections on-air got tamer and tamer, and the contributions got bigger and bigger.
Just like a commercial radio station, this particular NPR station-- ostensibly a not-for-profit operation-- had no interest in actually challenging its listeners in even the slightest of ways. Bluehairs with money don't want a challenge, and/or to be faced with music they have to actually listen to when it's on.
No, if this station's experiences were any indication, NPR donors want nothing more than musical wallpaper, just the same as any mouth-breathin' Joe Six-Pack. They just want their wallpaper to be different enough from Joe Six-Pack's wallpaper so as to give the false sense that their wallpaper is more culturally informed.
And the station was not so interested in cultural history or art; they were far more interested in picking their middle-minded listeners' pockets as deeply as they could. That was made abundantly clear to me in the precise phrasing of the responses from staff and management. Fuck real music; we like money, so aural wallpaper it is, and forever shall be. "Well, uh, smooth jazz is just fine by me!", I heard my disembodied mouth say in context of the mid-interview rebuffery.
We as smart people have an unwritten obligation to society (not that I'm saying I'm exactly successful at satisfying that obligation). It's nothing to do with being comfortable, surrounding ourselves with pleasant things that seem to validate our smartness without ever really challenging us on any level. It's nothing to do with congratulating ourselves for loving learning for learning's sake. As a dude who has been in the college classroom for over a decade, I've discovered that absolutely everyone loves learning, no matter how demonstrably smart they are.
Being smart in this utterly-fucked world means that, through the process of reason and rational thought, we should be pissed off basically all of the time. We should be out there doing something about the shit that is broken by any standard of real logic, the shit that rightfully pisses us off.
As we get older, it gets harder to be pissed off all the time-- not that I've personally had many problems in that department as of yet. Still, I know it's easy to fall for "intellectual" sedatives like the oh-so-reserved NPR, to say nothing of real-world sedatives that often fall into the laps of smarter folks, like earning a livable and/or comfortable income (if you're one of the dwindling few who still has that luxury).
We as smart people, though, really ought to be demanding more from our usual media sources. NPR is admittedly one of the closest readily-accessible things we've got, at least stateside. It could be a helluva lot better. We ought to be demanding-- through withholding of our contributions, through letter-writing campaigns, or at least through a refusal to fall for the "NPR sticker on my back window makes me cool" self-image trap-myth-- that they step up their game, hit way the fuck harder, become what they currently only pretend to be.
News for smart, progressive people has got to be about more than extended remixes of mainstream-media stories interpolated with "Oh, huh, well, I guess that's kind of interesting" puff pieces. We should be too smart to confuse arbitrarily-chosen streams of trivial information with the legitimately "thought-provoking." The provocation of actual critical thought should, at least rationally, provoke action in turn. NPR's oh-so-smooth coverage and story choices seem to aim for exactly the opposite. They want you, oh-so-smart listener, to just sit there and passively listen... oh yeah, and donate, natch.