Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Open Thread - Wednesday

NPR related comments welcomed.
Posted by Mytwords at 6:15 AM
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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Work to keep NPR honest, but please support your local public radio stations!

Support?...Since the 2000 election or so, I have not given a pennie to NPR. And I won't as long as there is the smallest chance that my money will go into the pocket of Cokie Roberts.

12/20/06, 10:26 AM
Anonymous said...

I'm new to this blog (having just discovered it via a link at http://www.crooksandliars.com/), but I'm interested because it is a subject that concerns me deeply.

To the above comment "Support?...Since the 2000 election or so, I have not given a pennie to NPR...", I would suggest a more constructive action would be to redirect your support to public media that are picking up the slack where NPR is failing.

Where I live (Portland, OR) there is mainstream public radio (KOPB) and alternative public radio (e.g., KBOO, http://www.kboo.org/), and I have been shifting my support to the latter.

12/20/06, 10:48 AM
Porter Melmoth said...

Excellent suggestions: to move past NPR and support more promising sources such as you list above. It is important for me personally to keep the heat on NPR (which I keep up to date with through this blog), but I personally do not support NPR anymore. Besides, with their corporate influx and endowments, they scarcely need my trifling contributions. However, this can be a tough issue, because each station also has their own programming, which offers lots of non-NPR news items, not the least of which are excellent music selections. Part of the corporate interest in NPR is that its infrastructure is already in place, whereas statup satellite radio (which is the chief threat), can be a hit and miss proposition.
And finally, something that I've been hearing a lot on my station: that some poll was taken that supposedly shows: "80% of NPR listeners tend to SUPPORT (emphasis mine) companies that support NPR". That reason alone is enough to actively seek out and support more sincere news endeavors.

12/20/06, 12:47 PM
Porter Melmoth said...

[Typo in last message: for 'statup' read 'startup']

12/20/06, 12:49 PM
Anonymous said...

Yeah the corpoRAT bastards certainly are rolling in it. Hmmmm...all this new SURGE crap wouldn't have anything to do with all that blood money and war profiteering, would it? Not that we'd ever hear about it on NPR.

12/20/06, 3:56 PM
Anonymous said...

Thank you for your blog.

NPR seems to use more conservative think tank experts than liberal think tank experts. I don't seem to hear folks from the Center for American Progress and from CREW as often as folks from Heritage foundation and what not.

Also, NPR and PBS have David Brooks, the Rightwing OP-Ed columnist from the Times on the air at least once a week, but they NEVER feature Bob Herbert, the columnist who's consistently towards the left.

12/20/06, 6:53 PM
Mytwords said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
12/20/06, 9:36 PM
Mytwords said...

Thanks for stopping by and offering comments. I thought I'd comment on my statement please support your local public radio stations!

This comes from my experience with my own local NPR affiliate station, which offers a lot of better programming: Alternative radio, Bob McChesney's Media Matters, Radio Nation, Counterspin, BBC, etc.

I guess I view our local station as doing a lot of good. I'd love to see it drop NPR's news shows for Pacifica and Democracy Now! but I don't see that happening without a listener revolt. My hope is that this blog could be a resource for anyone wishing to convince station managers that NPR is not "balanced" "liberal" etc, and if not dropped altogether, should be balanced with more "alternative" broadcasts like Democracy Now!

But I realize each person has to consider their conscience, ideas, local environment, and decide on their own course of action.

12/20/06, 9:37 PM
Anonymous said...

You might not like NPR news, as I don't, but NPR still has lots of other great programming. Performance Today is the best classical music show there is, in my opinion. And I love Fresh Air, Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! and World Cafe. I even like the quaint little On The Media.

12/20/06, 10:48 PM
Mytwords said...

Yes, I'd be happy to see NPR become a culture outlet drop the "news" altogether.

12/20/06, 11:15 PM
Porter Melmoth said...

Yes indeed, I think we're mainly taking NPR news to task here. It's almost as if the blog should be 'NPR News Check'. I think that that's why there's so much valid criticism here, because we know what an entity like NPR can really be (a valuable resource, and an enjoyable one, too). That's the main reason why it's painful to see the news division as such a failure. The contrast between 'cultural' NPR and 'news' NPR is very 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'.

12/21/06, 12:45 AM

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