The first and best analysis of the economic bubble occurred on NPR's Chicago radio station WBEZ and the Ira Glass award-winning show, This American Life. The journalism was professional, honest, and in-depth. This kind of sane and serious reporting on a difficult subject supports continued federal funding of public broadcasting in a democratic society.
True, it’s far less expensive to produce programming on the radio; but professional journalists must be competitively paid. Great journalism is not cheap. Fortunately, Ira Glass had turned This American Life into a revenue-producer, so he was able to engage two smart reporters in May 2008 to become the first and only to ask, “Why are mortgage lenders loaning money to people who can’t afford to pay it back?”
The Ira Glass team uncovered honest, straight-forward answers. The resulting show, The Giant Pool of Money, won the Peabody, Polk, and duPont-Columbia awards. The show subsequently employed the same intrepid tactics to explore the health care debate and the failures in Haiti.
Asking Questions TV, Magazine, and Newspaper Reporters are Afraid to Ask
As broadcast journalism’s first medium, it’s surprising that radio has become, thanks to NPR and Pacifica, the most willing to take risks and experiment with new methods and messages in order to truly engage people.
Despite NPR, radio is today largely known for the kind of noise that moved poet Denise Levertov to write in the Sixties, "One is in despair over the current manifestation of malevolent imbecility and the seemingly invincible power of rapacity . . .”
Right-wing commercial talk remains radio’s ratings leader. According to the medium’s trade journal, TALKERS Magazine, 14.25 million people (mostly red-blooded American males) listen to Rush Limbaugh in an average week.
Sanity is Restored Daily on NPR, and It’s Becoming More Popular
National Public Radio’s news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, rank second and third in America. Each one wins some 13 million unique listeners each week, far more than all cable TV news. The four television networks combine weekly to attract just twice NPR’s audience for nightly news.
Thoughtful, nonpartisan broadcasting can be found on any FM radio dial in America just below 92. There, one in ten Americans are listening to such NPR shows as Diane Rehm’s daily two hours of intimate, honest, live talk, Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview program, Talk of the Nation, and the new Radiolab, in which the team of veteran reporter Robert Krulwich and musician Jad Abumrad take on difficult topics in science and philosophy. Whether exploring the concepts of time or morality, they make each subject not just comprehensible even to the average Limbaugh lover, but entertaining as well. More than a million users download Radiolab podcasts each month.
All NPR Stations are Not Daring Risk-Takers
Not every FM station shows the courage Chicago’s WBEZ displayed when it embraced the idea Ira Glass proposed for This American Life. In fact, some critics deride NPR for going too far to the right in its attempts to achieve political balance with All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Such constraints, they claim, long ago made talk radio either bad news for progressives or just plain dull listening.
NPR’s lost progressives are tuning into the Pacifica network in greater numbers. Although it leans left, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! is popular and professional, and the morning news program The Takeaway, hosted by John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee, is serious, lively, and live.
The Risk Ahead: Bland and Boring Programming
To keep growing, NPR must encourage more program directors to take a lesson from WBEZ. In order to develop more daring, experienced program makers like Ira Glass, NPR needs to challenge bright, young broadcasters to come up with fresh ideas. Like any business, the tendency is to play it safe with proven breadwinners. Settling for the status quo soon leads to inertia and stagnation. Any organization at rest is dying. Of course, such cowardice is unlikely to bring down NPR.
Consider all those other news organizations that prevented their employees from attending the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally to "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the Washington Mall on November 30, 2010. Not NPR, however. They did not worry that employee attendance would show them to be liberal. Oh, actually NPR did warn their employees not to attend the rally.
NPR pledge drives are dreary enough already. With reaction to a bad economy instead of the programming action that's needed, public radio fund raising could go the way of public TV drives – aged doo-woppers begging money from the kind of old guys who tune into Rush Limbaugh.
References:
Chandler, Paul and Stewart, Peter, Basic Radio Journalism, Elsevier Inc., New York, N.Y., 2003
Various NPR Journalists, This Is NPR, The First 40 Years, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, 2010
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
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