Two months of NPR

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Tuesday, January 1. 2019

I've had the local NPR on the radio for about two months. It's been interesting. I think it's the radio designed mainly for graying suburban moms and grandmas. It has a soothing, virtuous, homey tone and it assumed you agree with their angles and spin because you are bien pensant like them.

It doesn't take long to get the daily predictability:

Bad things: Orange Man, the economy, guns, White Supremacists (where do they find those?), the climate crisis, Putin, Russia Russia Russia, oil companies, border security, the obsolete US Constitution, people who won't recycle

Good things: The UN, Nancy Pelosi, The SPLC, any LGBT movement, illegal immigrants, government regulations, Pocohontas, Romney (they suddenly love him), anybody who feels oppressed or offended. And recycling is the highest form of virtue.

They have pretty good taste in music, though.

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 13:00 | Comments (24) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thankfully the 60's generation that took over public radio is dying out. Sadly it appears that they have trained those taking over to be as leftist as they were.

#1 Ron Snyder (Link) on 2019-01-01 13:24 (Reply)

The last time I listened to NPR was in the mid to late '80s while driving through rural Wisconsin. Their insistence on re-writing the U.S. Constitution so repulsed me I never listened again. However it is good to know that they are consistent and I haven't missed anything in the intervening three decades.

#2 Talnik on 2019-01-01 13:36 (Reply)

I listen to NPR regularly on my (longish) commute to and from work and 90% of the time it's informative and not too political.

Then there's the 10% of the time it is political and it always leans in one direction. I flipped out a couple weeks back when an interviewer (Ari Shapiro) let some guy go unchallenged when he said that Trump sent Cohen to Prague to collude with the Russians.

There is no evidence of such a meeting occurring. But either Shapiro didn't know (bad) or he allowed this to be presented as the truth (worse).

#3 Eric Lindholm (Link) on 2019-01-01 13:48 (Reply)

The music is good. The Metropolitan Opera is a family favorite. Marketplace is interesting when I hear it, which isn't often.

#4 James the lesser (Link) on 2019-01-01 14:10 (Reply)

NPR and PBS are not alternative media to the mass/corporate media. They would be Libertarian in politics if they were alternative.

#5 JP Blickenstaff on 2019-01-01 14:16 (Reply)

Two months. Surely your sin was severe to merit such penance.

#6 Soren K (Link) on 2019-01-01 15:35 (Reply)

I used to listen to NPR while driving across much of the country for business if I couldn't pick up any other station, that is until I heard them hold up Bill Clinton as a saint when he was dirty to the core. Haven't listened since.

#7 JC on 2019-01-01 15:35 (Reply)

I prefer my community radio station which still plays a few national radio shows like "World Cafe"

#8 William Cox (Link) on 2019-01-01 15:59 (Reply)

Best show they ever hosted was Car Talk. That was genius radio.

#9 Bird Dog on 2019-01-01 16:33 (Reply)

I loved Car Talk.

#9.1 Texan99 on 2019-01-01 16:34 (Reply)

I miss it. Caaah Tawk, from Our Fair City.

#9.1.1 Bird Dog on 2019-01-01 16:51 (Reply)

The last time I listened to NPR was decades ago - during the Rodney King Riots in LA, the local NPR in DC had on several professors from Howard University to talk about the riots.

Every one of them - and I mean everyone! - said that the white truck driver, Reginald Denny, must have said or done something to have caused the thugs to nearly beat him to death.

The host of the show didn't disagree; in fact, he said that black folks do not harm others like that unless they brought it on themselves!

Such a disgusting display of ignorance passing itself off as an "intellectual" discussion. I shut NPR off and haven't listen to them since. And I have to say that I don't feel like I've missed anything.

#10 charles on 2019-01-01 17:48 (Reply)

Think back to how many times you saw the video of the LA police beating Rodney King. It was a good video for a news outlet I recognize that. But why was it aired 295 times on national TV? To cause exactly what it caused. The press wanted a riot and got a riot. They wanted deaths and they got deaths.

#10.1 Anon on 2019-01-02 18:26 (Reply)

I keep hearing all this Reduce-Reuse-Recycle blather, then when they get to specifics they sound like one of my schoolmate's crotchety Old Man. "Turn down the thermostat, shut off the light, sort out those pop bottles, put all the kitchen scraps in the compost bucket. And clean up your plate. Don't you there's people starving in India?" Talk about recycled.

What kind of Slow Pony doesn't Reduce waste (goodbye newspaper, hello Maggie's Farm), Reuse all those wonderful containers (even if just once, for leftovers), and Recycle all their reparable and obselete stuff (don't hoard someone else's treasure)? Heck, I completely refurbed my workshop with repurposed lumber and hardware I had accumlated.

Only stupid, careless people have a big waste footprint; I'd like to think that's not NPR's target demographic. So why all the preaching and hectoring? Are they really trying to Save The Planet? Or just slipping some donor cash to their Apparatchik buddies?

#11 Mike Anderson (Link) on 2019-01-01 18:35 (Reply)

"...Only stupid, careless people have a big waste footprint; I'd like to think that's not NPR's target demographic. So why all the preaching and hectoring?

That's because what you're hearing is an altar-call during an endless revival show put on by the Church of the Left.

This is how Lefties, Progressives, and others of that ilk recharge their self-righteousness and sense of superiority over the mouth-breathing Deplorables who infest the country.

#11.1 PubliusII on 2019-01-01 21:52 (Reply)

NAILED IT!

I listen to the shows on Saturday in the morning and otherwise never listen to NPR anymore. 100% of the things I know because it was my job, they get wrong and badly wrong. I can make the leap required to believe that they get everything else wrong too and I hate that now, rather than interview the actual person, they go to their correspondant for the Pentagon, for instance and ask that dolt to explain military policy rather than ask someone in the military.

#12 Curtis on 2019-01-01 23:41 (Reply)

For my liberal relatives, NPR serves up a palatable party line daily so they can make sure they are in sync. It’s interesting to hear them say, “I heard this on NPR...” to identify it’s correctness. When I say “I read this in the WSJ...”. It’s acceptable to them but suspect in some way.

I have no other explanation for how all of them are totally in sync.

#13 DirtyJobsGuy on 2019-01-02 07:08 (Reply)

I listened to NPR daily during commutes from about 1985 until around 2003. It became unlistenable somewhere along that time frame. I found myself mentally arguing with whoever the correspondent was about half the time. I finally shut it off for good when my now deceased Wife complained that I was always in such a foul mood when I came in. Never looked back and I wonder why I put myself through that. I became particularly annoyed with their pretentious, studied, and inconsistent pronunciations of names, places and words of foreign origin.

#14 LWS on 2019-01-02 09:53 (Reply)

I used to donate to NPR I liked it that much. once I woke up on immigration about 15 years ago and started listening to NPR with new ears I realized they were not on my side. The end came when I listened to a weekend edition show one Saturday where the host interviewed at length a woman who lived on the border and claimed she was the 10th generation Hispanic in a very strong accent and claimed repeatedly that the Minutemen who had come to the border to publicize the lawlessness of the illegal immigration were 'murderers." Not once did the host refute the accusation or ask for clarification but let the accusation stand that Minutemen were murderers.
However, you can learn a lot listening to public TV and radio as they are so blind they reveal things unintentionally. An example was a sad and tearful interview with a young woman who was a native of Lewiston Maine who was out of work and desperate for money for her family and who told the reporter she had high hopes she might be able to get work at the new Somalian refugee center in Lewiston.
the best one was on public tv here in Miami in a show on immigration. The host, a young Haitian woman asked her guest, a young Latino immigration attorney, why we needed so many immigrants to come here. The attorney lowered her voice and moved in close and said to the host that unfortunately, many of her clients needed workers who would work 7 days a week but none of the locals were willing to work as much. Of course, we used to have people that worked 7 days a week forever, we called them slaves.

#15 Delmar Jackson (Link) on 2019-01-02 10:19 (Reply)

I became particularly annoyed with their pretentious, studied, and inconsistent pronunciations of names, places and words of foreign origin.
For example, Nicarrrragua. I speak Spanish well enough to have worked in Latin America for 4 years. In English language conversation I never use Spanish pronunciation for country names. As such, Nicarrragua and the like amuse me.

I turned off NPR news in the 1980s. After voting Third Party in 1984, I noticed that NPR announcer discussing the Reagan electoral victory did so in a sneering tone. That indicated to me that NPR took sides.

I used to listen to the music that a local public radio station put out. The DJs were local, with idiosyncratic choices of the music they played. Over the years, the local DJs have been replaced with canned, nationally distributed programs.

#16 Gringo on 2019-01-02 11:50 (Reply)

Phony Spanish pronounciations are indeed pretentious, as are other attempts at foreign "local" pronounciations by NPR-types seeking to suggest how cosmopolitan and global they are.

Whenever I hear that sort of thing, I often ask if the person calls Germany "Deutschland," China "Zhong Guo," and so on. Silence usually follows.

#16.1 PubliusII on 2019-01-02 12:54 (Reply)

My last time listening to NPR was when the commanding Admiral at Pearl Harbor was supposedly being interviewed about what was being done for the 50th Year Commemoration of the 1941 attack. Instead, the interview turned into an attack on the Admiral on why the U.S. had illegally taken over Hawaii, and if that hadn't happened, the Japanese never would have bombed Pearl Harbor. The Admiral was so taken aback he didn't know how to answer. I switched off the station and it has pretty much stayed switched off until today.

#17 Jim on 2019-01-02 15:47 (Reply)

Where, oh WHERE, is the Gang of Z to set us straight? (For weird values of "straight".

I too have given up NPR and PBS, though I do donate to my local volunteer station.

#18 Sam L. on 2019-01-02 16:52 (Reply)

Derbyshire on what gets called a white supremacist
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2016-12-02.html#05
in response to an essay by McWhorter.

Only one variety would have any ill will.

#19 rhhardin (Link) on 2019-01-04 06:19 (Reply)

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Tuesday, January 1. 2019

Two months of NPR