Week 31: THIS IS FRRRRRRRESH AIR.

[the_day_setup]

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

Comments

[n3m3sis42]

This is one of the issues I have always had with NPR. It's, like, the default for smart people. And the "music" - ughhhhh.

[the_day_setup]

:)

The music varies from affiliate to affiliate. There are some affiliates that play no music at all. I note that NPR tries to throw hipper stuff in as segueway material on its news shows and particularly on shows like This American Life, but it's usually pretty gentle new stuff as well (even if it has a lot more edge than Ms. Schuur et al).

Then there are things like All Songs Considered, which as far as I know is just a podcast. I've given that a few goes and I've also found it unfortunately safe stuff. I have musician friends that dig it, but the few times I've tuned in it's only served to confirm my belief that rock, having become the domain of the middle-aged, is dead.

[the_day_setup]

Yeah, sorry. As always, I started out trying to keep this relatively short and it fought me / just kept coming. Before moving on past the halfway point, I actually deleted and completely rewrote the entire Curtis White section because that part was originally much longer

[the_day_setup]

(naturally, the interview I went through answered my last question, but I still think it's pretty lame; unless you're playing, say, nothing but Anthony Braxton and/or late-period Coltrane, I can't imagine you're *really* going to alienate bluehairs that deeply.)

[the_day_setup]

Posting a second reply here just to denote for *future* readers that you read / responded to the original version, not the new half-as-long edition that I dropped about three hours before the final deadline. To an extent, some of the commentary on NPR marketing that you replied to is gone.

[medleymisty]

Omg omg yay I can comment now!

I stopped listening to NPR the day I heard one of the hosts come straight out and say something approximating "But you don't want to educate the proles too much, do you?" It was a program about the arts in public schools, IIRC. And the guests didn't say "Umm, did you just really say that we don't want to educate the proles too much?" No, they went along with it.

I'd been noticing other hints of NPR just being the softer side of Fox News, but that was the tipping point.

I do still like Science Friday, though. :)

I guess this is another part of that working class/middle class thing, because I never knew that NPR had that fake smart status thing going on. Why do people pretend to be smart? And if they're going to pretend to be smart, couldn't they pick a better way than "Wooo, look at me, I listen to boring music and the slightly more civilized version of pro-corporatist propaganda!"? That does not lead me to believe that you are smart.

[the_day_setup]

It's (usually) unfair to judge an organization, be it a band or media source, on its fans. That being said, most of the people I personally know who love branding themselves with NPR gear *are* in fact super-sharp cookies-- often, sharper than myself. I'm not aware of some poser / hipster movement to affiliate oneself with NPR as a fake badge of intellectualism

[the_day_setup]

Since I keep getting comments about how this was overlong, I've shortened it by about half. No need to re-read, thanks for dealing with the original.

Some BBC programming ends up on our local NPR affiliate, usually the hours running up to All Things Considered at 5-7pm rush hour, and I agree that said news coverage tends to be more hard-hitting and globally relevant. But in general, whenever there's a big US story, I usually end up at the Guardian's site and I read things that no US media source is discussing. It's embarrassing that y'all Brits often do a better job of covering US news than *we* tend to do.

[beldarzfixon]

I've never felt an urge to listen to NPR. Though I like classical music, I don't get the urge to listen to it much. And I'm not one for smooth jazz, either. If "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me..." was on sometime other than Sunday morning, I'd probably listen, but I like trivia.

I had to do a "Wait-WHAT?" on the Gulf War coverage. NPR didn't present the anti-war side at all? I would have presumed the protests would have gotten at least token coverage. I'm sure if you had asked a conservative news-talk listener what NPR was airing at the time, they would have automatically assumed it was the most leftist anti-Bush broadcasts possible, so NPR didn't gain anything by rolling over and derelicting their journalistic duties.

[the_day_setup]

It's possible that I missed a story or two; it's not like I listened every hour of every day. But what I heard was basically what I describe.

There are a lot of things that the average right-wing pundit-follower believes about the media on the "other side" that are absolutely untrue. I figure the average Dittohead also firmly believes that Obama is a socialist, despite the fact that his fiscal policy is barely distinguishable from Reagan's. I'd ask *why* he's afraid to not just go ahead and be more of a real liberal in the context of such knee-jerk criticism from the opposing side, but I'm aware that he was never much of a liberal in the first place; us liberals just really *wanted* him to be one. :)

[beldarzfixon]

Yeah, the right-wing myths about the "other side" (which isn't as "other" as they fantasize) get pretty amazing. I'm often quite amused at what Limbaugh (first-year college dropout) and his ilk believe goes on in Journalism schools. But I actually *went* to one, so what I say about it can't be trusted. =)