Are you like me? Are you a conservative who hates himself for occasionally (or often) turning the radio dial to National Public Radio only to get whacked in the head with obvious bias?
With most NPR features, the bias manifests itself in story selection. For example, we must have a million different angles on the quagmire of Iraq. My radio station would say, "Assume lots of horrible crap is taking place all the time. We'll update you when the situation changes."
Terri Gross and Fresh Aire is my least favorite of the bunch. She interviews all kinds of people (liberal and conservative) in a long program. One interesting feature: When she interviews conservatives (like Grover Norquist), you can FEEEEEEL the tension. When she interviews any liberal figure they're just chatting like old buddies. Wow, is it irritating.
Listen and tell me I'm wrong. Better yet, don't bother. If you'd like to have the NPR quality and tone without the annoying content, go to NPR alum Ken Myers' Mars Hill Audio. They have a tape subscription service that absolutely rocks. Check that out.
Hunter, you have hit on the reason why I can never be a great investigative journalist and I have to limit myself to being an 'armchair columnist'; I simply cannot bring myself to listen to NPR or to read The New Republic, even for purposes of research. My constitution is too delicate to absorb such pollution. But I admire you for your dedication to your craft. You're a better man than me.
ReplyDeleteOh, and in that vein: a number of my friends were begging me to see Fahrenheit 911, if only for the purposes of issuing a rebuttal freighted with the apposite scorn. One friend even tried the tactic of mocking me for my frailty, but I grew up as a Yeshiva boy - we lived with ridicule from public school and Catholic School kids every day, so we built up resistance.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't, couldn't see it; had to leave the hit pieces to my fellow conservative columnists.
Daniel, I give in to the impulse all the time. Not on Terri Gross, mind you, but I catch a lot of Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The primary reason is that my lame local guy is taking calls from people with nothing interesting to say in the morning and Michael Savage is on in the afternoon. NPR is a lot less painful when a Democrat is in the White House without any scandals. The early Clinton administration was a good time to catch NPR because the libs felt confident and weren't whacking personal favorites all the time.
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