Monday, August 20, 2007

Open Thread

NPR related comments are welcomed.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heard the Koster interview and *jeez* it was just weirdly tip-toeing around all sorts of issues. When he compared Noreiga to Saddam I thought "ding ding ding ding!!!" but not in the way NPR wanted. Quite revealing tht Simon left that one alone to die.

Anonymous said...

Over the weekend some tool interviewing the great Les Paul essentially asked him why Paul didn't just stay home and die. It was unbelievable. (the actual question was something along the lines of why Paul continues to perform at the Iridium every week. Paul laughed in the guy's face, but apparently that was too subtle.)

Jeebus.

I tuned in for half a minute this morning, and not only were they "reporting" on television set, ferchrissakes, I felt like the peice was aimed beyond the technically challenged to the mentally challenged.

What a waste of a once useful asset.

Anonymous said...

What a line of questioning to throw at a living legend...

I am sure no one here disputes that (holds nose) "NPR" (ahem) sucks. It is just mind-numbing anymore to witness the degree to which they do.

Some real "hit-parade" moments in my memory was el-Grosso interviewing a Tibetan monk and pressing one who lives in pacifism in the face of Chinese occupation "well, wouldn't that be seen as a form of cowardice?"

And back in the mid-nineties, this cwuute lil' barb on MarketPlace - "a blue light special on pink slips at K-Mart"

Crass.

Anonymous said...

Just stumbled in, and was wondering. Do you imagine that NPR is an independent news outfit that just happens to suck, or do you assume that they are merely another pipe in the Wurlitzer, another specie of mockingbird?

Kevan Smith said...

I don't think NPR sucks. There are some great NPR programs. Unfortunately, they aren't the news ones.

Unknown said...

Oarwell,

NPR news currently shows the effects of Rove's attempt to politicize the entire machinery of government, in this particular case by appointing Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as the chair of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Anonymous said...

Well certainly, CPB's been tainted by pro-guv & corp suits... but how does that explain the durability of the PBS programs with a backbone i.e. NOW, Moyers' Journal & Frontline? Those smarmy milquetoasts at (holds nose) NPR (end) could stand to take a cue.

Anonymous said...

BPFBunny asks "... but how does that explain the durability of the PBS programs with a backbone i.e. NOW, Moyers' Journal & Frontline?"

Look again at Moyers. He's vigorously covering up Operation Mockingbird with limited hang-outs and gate-keeping the naive media reform movement.
When he was in the White House he helped plan USG psy-ops programs waged against Asia yet tells us nothing about State Department and CIA psy-ops infrastructure. Because he's part of it. He was a Director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 967-1974 helping to control public opinion during the worst of the Vietnam War.

Moyers got some of his cover back when Ken Tomlinson targeted him so publicly.

You can look forward to more of propagandist Ken Burns making us feel we should be like the stalwart US citizens back home during WWII when his series 'The War' plays right after 9/11/07. And note that there was a convenient scandal over not enough minorities in the series so a special segment on Hispanics was added... just as Hispanics are replacing blacks as the core of the poverty draft.

That's PBS for you, Voice of America for the reading classes.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and oarwell, yes, NPR and PBS are part of the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer.

The nation's airwaves are not given to The People. Especially not after The Sixties.

Mainstream media is a high-tech form of Pentagon stability operations backed up by decades of CIA co-opting of the cream of the crop behavioral science research at the Ivy League grant sponges, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Yale, etc.