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Hello from Amherst/Nashua. Email me if you want to get a beer sometime. I used to listen to NHPR a lot when I had a long commute one summer and would occasiona

Hello from Amherst/Nashua. Email me if you want to get a beer sometime. I used to listen to NHPR a lot when I had a long commute one summer and would occasionally tune in. My biggest complaint isn't that NPR is too liberal, only that it is very surface-thought in its discussion of topics. Too often a story will raise what seem to be obvious and interesting (but maybe difficult) questions and the journalist or interviewer will just move on. I dimly have one example in mind, a government agency (port authority?) in Oregon had millions in carbon credits (tax offsets) that it couldn't use, so it sold them to some other Oregon company for cheap to some corporation. Imagine its $5m tax credits that it sold for $1m. The company could then offset $5m of taxes. This was billed as a good deal for the port authority. Of course as described it's really the state of Oregon losing $4m by selling the credit on the cheap, which seems totally insane. This was never discussed. I gave up after that story.

ethbro 9y ago
> My biggest complaint isn't that NPR is too liberal, only that it is very surface-thought in its discussion of topics. Too often a story will raise what seem to be obvious and interesting (but maybe difficult) questions and the journalist or interviewer will just move on. Tom Ashbrook (On Point) does this especially egregiously. Some of his simplistic (or biased) "So what you're saying is..." moments make me cringe. I realize it's a call in show, but jesus, there isn't anyone out there with a less obvious liberal bias / more technical background who's interested in the job? Let callers or interviewees make their points fairly, then debate them. Rhetorically dancing around the topics with the advantage of being the host just makes me feel like I'm listening to Bill O'Reilly. (Ugh)
- mediaright 9y ago
  You should both check out WNYC'S "On The Media." It's NPR style, but every interview you hear is a 40-60-120 minute interview that's been boiled down to 8-10 min for the show. It's truly bespoke radio in that way, so they get to cover the issues at the core of something. It's my favorite show week to week.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    On The Media is fantastic. It's really hard to find succinct sources that don't totally misrepresent their subject, and they do an impressive job of it.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    In GA, we've got Political Rewind, which is similar and also fantastic. It's also a simple formula: find an expert in the field who's also a halfway decent host, then invite guests who work in the professional and balance their biases against each other.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Yeah, this gets exhausting with some of their shows. The ones where the interviews are interviewee-focused like Fresh Air are good, but some shows just get infuriating. Diane Rehm, for all her awards, has an awful tendency to cut people off in ways that destroy clarity. Things like letting someone give "on one hand..." and cutting them off as they say "but on the other hand...", so that only half their opinion gets aired. On the "more technical" side, Science Friday really needs a host who understands something about science. Flatow's digested 'restatements' tend to be flatly wrong, and he's often two or three laps behind what an interested layman would pick up. I can understand going slowly in the name of accessibility, but he sort of forfeits that right by arriving at completely inaccurate final summaries. It's not bad overall, but there's an aggravating tendency for the interviewers to 'participate' when they're not really qualified to have a dialogue instead of simply offering prompts.

ethbro 9y ago

> My biggest complaint isn't that NPR is too liberal, only that it is very surface-thought in its discussion of topics. Too often a story will raise what seem to be obvious and interesting (but maybe difficult) questions and the journalist or interviewer will just move on. Tom Ashbrook (On Point) does this especially egregiously. Some of his simplistic (or biased) "So what you're saying is..." moments make me cringe. I realize it's a call in show, but jesus, there isn't anyone out there with a less obvious liberal bias / more technical background who's interested in the job? Let callers or interviewees make their points fairly, then debate them. Rhetorically dancing around the topics with the advantage of being the host just makes me feel like I'm listening to Bill O'Reilly. (Ugh)

mediaright 9y ago
You should both check out WNYC'S "On The Media." It's NPR style, but every interview you hear is a 40-60-120 minute interview that's been boiled down to 8-10 min for the show. It's truly bespoke radio in that way, so they get to cover the issues at the core of something. It's my favorite show week to week.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  On The Media is fantastic. It's really hard to find succinct sources that don't totally misrepresent their subject, and they do an impressive job of it.
- ethbro 9y ago
  In GA, we've got Political Rewind, which is similar and also fantastic. It's also a simple formula: find an expert in the field who's also a halfway decent host, then invite guests who work in the professional and balance their biases against each other.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Yeah, this gets exhausting with some of their shows. The ones where the interviews are interviewee-focused like Fresh Air are good, but some shows just get infuriating. Diane Rehm, for all her awards, has an awful tendency to cut people off in ways that destroy clarity. Things like letting someone give "on one hand..." and cutting them off as they say "but on the other hand...", so that only half their opinion gets aired. On the "more technical" side, Science Friday really needs a host who understands something about science. Flatow's digested 'restatements' tend to be flatly wrong, and he's often two or three laps behind what an interested layman would pick up. I can understand going slowly in the name of accessibility, but he sort of forfeits that right by arriving at completely inaccurate final summaries. It's not bad overall, but there's an aggravating tendency for the interviewers to 'participate' when they're not really qualified to have a dialogue instead of simply offering prompts.