It was pledge week on the radio recently, and as I hadn’t heard Cokie Roberts on the radio recently, I wondered if my preconditions for resuming my donations to NPR might have been met.
My conditions were simple: No money to NPR so long as they employ Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts. Williams is (famously) history, and Roberts no longer seemed to blight my morning radio. Is it safe to donate? Apparently, not.
I have the same feelings about NPR and those two bozos.
I heard Roberts on NPR quite recently – ??last week??, maybe. Supporting NPR (or not) is a little complicated – I live in rural interior Alaska and NPR is a big deal up here, being the only place people get to hear classical music and news from a not-American perspective. Believe it or not Ted Stevens was a huge advocate for NPR, not so much because he loved BBC world news but because it provided services to bush communities that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten (stuff like this garnered him a lot of support from the sizable Native community here (votes and money).
But I freakin’ can’t stand them anymore. It’s tempting to invoke the old saw about not being so open-minded your brains fall out but it’s pretty clearly a matter of nauseating pandering to the right.
I didn’t give this time around, but I have and will continue to in the future. I don’t feel that I have to like or agree with EVERYTHING on my local public radio station in order to donate. Lots of the best stuff on WLRN (our local “NPR” station in S.Fla.) isn’t even NPR product, but often Public Radio International (This American Life) or American Public Media (Prairie Home Companion).
NPR’s systematic omissions are as dangerous as Fox’s outright fabrications. If it’s personalities like Juan Williams that keep you from donating to NPR, you would seem to have reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
On All Things Considered the other day, there was a palpable sense of pride in the voice of the journalist discussing the assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, but no discussion of what it means for the president to order the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen. Preposterous.
They call themselves “commercial free” during their pledge drives, but then rattle off a list of big corporate sponsors during station breaks.
The media is totally broken.