Our family has grown into a kind of love hate relationship with National Public Radio. It started in Flagstaff, the one and only town in Arizona where liberals are the majority. All of our friends were listeners and everyone in my grad department was a staunch supporter. They even wanted us to sign up to take calls during their fund raising call-a-thons. So here are some of our loves and hates about NPR.
1. Love--The morning shows--Most people label NPR as "libaral" and they probably are (I don't hear too many slanderous statements about Mr. Obama for one thing), but they laud themselves as "unslanted news" and I'm happy to go along with them. Call me a neo-natzi liberal but I can't handle the extremism of Fox or the opposite ends of MSN/CNN. I enjoy NPR's Morning Edition when I catch it. It gives a terse round up of national news and I really enjoy The Diane Ream Show. She's extremely old and her voice can get annoying, but she has a good system. She brings up a topic, then brings experts on from both sides to discuss their views. She's a great mediator and never lets things get petty. You'll feel dated if you check it out, but I think you'll like it and you'll have to admit, as I have, the woman is good at her job.
2. Hate--The Music--I'm sorry, but the music featured on NPR is extremely weird. It just is. Don't get me wrong, it's always very credible, usually grammy award winning artists, but I think they get their grammies because no one else is in their category. Seriously, it's stuff like bands composed of a didgeridoo, a banjo, a steal drum and three other men in kilts playing tamborines and dancing jigs, then they'll call it "Celtic Tropical Blue Grass" and then they'll try to sell you on it by saying that it's wildly popular in some obscure province in northern India. Well I'm not buying it.
3. Love--Saturday Shows--I hate to say it, but I love this action. You start off the morning early with Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. It's like Morning Edition with longer features. Scott Simon is a master and has been involved in all sorts of mass media productions and documentaries. He has an amazing interview style that puts everyone at ease and is never an "in your face" type of inteviewer; the man is very easy to listen to, perfect for a Saturday. Then you go to my personal favorite, Car Talk. I don't care who you are, these guys are funny. It's like a phone-in advice show, but instead of fixing crumbling relationships, they fix crumbling Renaults. The guys are two New Englanders with heavy accents, and a course bloody knuckle history, but they are never crude and they give some funny but effective car advice. Their comedy angle is that the ever couthe and cultured NPR is ashamed to have their show on the air, especially right after refinements like Weekend Edition. Some of the ad-hoc engineering they suggest on a vehicle sounds totally crazy, but I usually run it by my Dad and nine times out of ten he says, "actually, you probably could fix the fuel injection with bubble gum, like they say on Car Talk, but it would have to be some kind of gum with magnesium in it, like Big Red or Dentyne". So if Dad says they're right, there has to be something to it. After Car Talk comes Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which is a comedy news quiz. It's kind of like a political spoof on a gameshow. I think it's very funny at times, but it can be crude and you have to be pretty up with current events to get any of the jokes. Finally we have the fabled A Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor, one of the world's greatest radio personalities, makes this show a hit. It's patterned after the good old radio variety shows. You listen to it and you feel like you've taken a trip back in time forty years, but the topics they laugh and sing about are current. If you ever feel like your life is just moving too fast, listen to "Prairie", as the "in" people call it and before you know it you'll be thinking about good home cooked meals, long summer days, fried chicken or at least something that feels like home and your childhood. I'll admit, for me it's chicken nuggets and instant potato pearls.
4. Hate--Fund Raising--They're always doing it. Now they are even pre-fund raising to reduce the length of the actual fund raising, which in reality, hello, only lengthens the whole ordeal. It's public radio, so I realize they have to fund raise, but wow, they seem to do it once a quarter or more and it goes on for a solid week or more. It's very obtrusive. They usually only play the one minute news updates in order to dedicate the rest of the time to blabbing on and on about what kind of book you could get if you donate your lung and like five hundred dollars to "keep NPR broadcasting near you". It's usually a book about the Grand Canyon written by some Flagstaff hippy that willing to sign it for an extra hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah, sounds like a wise investment to me. I turn the radio off while they raise their funds.
5. Love--Science Friday--I love this show. It's just about cool science innovations or investigations or both. No politics involved. It airs on Friday afternoons and you can podcast the good stories as well.
6. Hate--The World--Weeknights they play the BBC World Report and The World. Two shows dedicated to political entanglements in far off places. It's a lot of blahhhh. Treaties broken in the Gaza Strip, peace talks in Palestine, protests in Greece and especially parlimentary debates in the UK. Super boring and it never seems to go anywhere. Every night they share the same stories they just change the names of the places and the people involved. Every now and then you hear an Obama in there just so they can make sure you're still listening, which I'm generally not. I think they use it in jails to calmly lull inmates to sleep and reduce penitentary violence. It's always on as I come home from work and I have to fight to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. To liven things up they switch to sports and report on Cricket and Rounder scores. Seriously?!! What makes matters worse is that they always have two stuffy old male news anchors leading the charge, always throwing in annoying Britishism like "the main news" and "his flat was ransacked". They really just get under my skin and even though I can't see them, I can just picture their horrible teeth just inches away from the microphone. Darn brits and their smirky little acccents. Just because they sound smart, doesn't mean we have to swallow their stuffy take on international news.
3 comments:
What's funny about this is that I just listened to the Diane Ream show for the first time this morning and thought, "wow, her voice is kind of annoying" but I was too interested in the show to change the channel.
Thanks for the other snippets..now I know what to check out on Saturdays!
You'd be interested to know that Ms. Diane suffers from spasmodic dysphonia and that she's really not that old at all. I stopped listening to NPR during the Bush years. It was just too much. I loved Science Friday.
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