This Week's NPR Rant
Weekend Edition Saturday has, for the third week in a row, followed my favorite regular segment with veteran newsman Daniel Schorr with a segment apparently designed only to enrage me and sour my Saturday morning. I've taken to thinking of it as "Right-wing Media-mouth Blats at Random".
I really don't get this regular segment at all. It's not news, it's not analysis, it's just random opinion, and the only constant is that it features a person who already has wide distribution of whatever random opinion they care to offer. And, I should say, a right-wing person. We haven't heard Rachel Maddow chatting at random, or Katrina Vanden Heuvel, or Eugene Robinson.
This week, the right-wing media-mouth was syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Parker isn't on TV for 15 hours a week, like Joe Scarborough, and isn't on the editorial board of a major newspaper, like Dorothy Rabinowitz, but she does have a regular column at the Washington Post, and is widely syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, appearing in more than 350 papers nationwide.
The primary topic of discussion was the situation of Nadya Suleman, the woman in California who gave birth to octuplets late last month.
Has Ms. Parker spent the time since the octuplets made the news tracking down Ms. Suleyman and interviewing her, or the doctors involved, or anyone involved? Apparently not. Did she in fact have any tidbit of new information about this story which made quite a splash weeks ago? Apparently not. Had Ms. Parker any actual knowledge about this story that could not have been gained from reading and watching the same media coverage everyone else in America saw weeks ago? Apparently not.
She did, however, have quite a few judgmental opinions to offer, though none of them were more insightful or well-informed than ones available at my local supermarket checkout. Apparently, Ms. Parker just hadn't gotten all the gossip out of her system yet, and NPR was happy to help her out with that.
Seriously, NPR, if you must spoil my first waking hours on Saturday by airing random bloviations from a right-winger, could you at least keep up with the news cycles? Nadya Suleman is so last-month. Couldn't you at least have gotten Parker to talk about that chimp in Connecticut? I'm sure she could say something about the morality of keeping a chimp as a pet, and that whole Xanax angle? Hoo boy! Talk about quality programming!
I've been regularly expressing my opinions to NPR directly, but I think it's probably time to suggest to the good folks at my local member stations that my regular donation might be affected by the persistence of this segment. Maybe the programmers in DC will listen to them.
I really don't get this regular segment at all. It's not news, it's not analysis, it's just random opinion, and the only constant is that it features a person who already has wide distribution of whatever random opinion they care to offer. And, I should say, a right-wing person. We haven't heard Rachel Maddow chatting at random, or Katrina Vanden Heuvel, or Eugene Robinson.
This week, the right-wing media-mouth was syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Parker isn't on TV for 15 hours a week, like Joe Scarborough, and isn't on the editorial board of a major newspaper, like Dorothy Rabinowitz, but she does have a regular column at the Washington Post, and is widely syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, appearing in more than 350 papers nationwide.
The primary topic of discussion was the situation of Nadya Suleman, the woman in California who gave birth to octuplets late last month.
Has Ms. Parker spent the time since the octuplets made the news tracking down Ms. Suleyman and interviewing her, or the doctors involved, or anyone involved? Apparently not. Did she in fact have any tidbit of new information about this story which made quite a splash weeks ago? Apparently not. Had Ms. Parker any actual knowledge about this story that could not have been gained from reading and watching the same media coverage everyone else in America saw weeks ago? Apparently not.
She did, however, have quite a few judgmental opinions to offer, though none of them were more insightful or well-informed than ones available at my local supermarket checkout. Apparently, Ms. Parker just hadn't gotten all the gossip out of her system yet, and NPR was happy to help her out with that.
Seriously, NPR, if you must spoil my first waking hours on Saturday by airing random bloviations from a right-winger, could you at least keep up with the news cycles? Nadya Suleman is so last-month. Couldn't you at least have gotten Parker to talk about that chimp in Connecticut? I'm sure she could say something about the morality of keeping a chimp as a pet, and that whole Xanax angle? Hoo boy! Talk about quality programming!
I've been regularly expressing my opinions to NPR directly, but I think it's probably time to suggest to the good folks at my local member stations that my regular donation might be affected by the persistence of this segment. Maybe the programmers in DC will listen to them.
posted by Paul at 7:20 AM |
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