“Let be be the finale of seem”

-Wallace Stevens (who was a journalist for a short time)

While we aren’t quite to the end of the week, I think we have a clear “best in show” sense abuser today. In a “two way” reporting on the breach in the wall between Gaza and Egypt, Day To Day correspondent Peter Kenyon declared confidently that “there does seem to be some kind of a growing sense” of something in Israel.

Let’s break down just how weak a construction that is:

• “There does seem”. He’s introduced “seem”, so we know the information he’s about to try to communicate is unreliable. It may be a misapprehension on someone’s (presumably Kenyon’s) part. Basically no one is committing to anything, and I think that’s a good way to protect from any sort of libel suit. Reporters can be so vulnerable to litigation these days.
• “some kind”. So whatever is seeming to be is now not only unreliable it also has an unknown quality. That’s exciting because the listener is required to imagine all the different kinds of whatever it seems to be, making the normally passive experience of listening to the radio much more interactive and 21st century.
• “growing” Whatever is seeming to be some kind of something is definitely getting larger or taller, so that’s good. Or not. This is sounding more and more like a late night UFO report from a drunk illiterate Texan. But, finally, what is it that we’re talking about…

Wait fot it… Wait for it…

• a “sense” of something!

So what are we left with after that deconstruction?

A sense of something that’s growing and has a mysterious unknown quality and only seems to exist – it may just be a figment of Peter’s imagination like the milk-detecting fridge is a figment of Laura Sydell’s.

Now that’s powerful reporting! Or some kind of growing sense of powerful reporting at least…

Is your refrigerator metaphor running?

Laura Sydell, correspondent for NPR’s feared “Arts Information Unit,” tried (not very hard) during tonight’s ATC to come up with a way to communicate the futurrific potential of the wireless bandwidth the FCC is about to auction off. The heart of her metaphor, to which she returned throughout the report, was a refrigerator that you could call with your cellphone to find out if it thinks you need milk. As the story progressed, the relevance and utility of this terrifying half-fridge half cellphone chimera became increasingly unclear.

First of all, the ability of a refrigerator to communicate with the outside world is in no way hampered by our current telecommunications infrastructure. (Thank God!) Millions of people have always-on high speed internet access in their homes ideal for such a fabulous ice-box to take advantage of right now! It could text your cellphone with all kinds of news about the milk over your home wifi network or over an ethernet cable even if the FCC fails to increase the wireless spectrum available to crucial consumer products ever again. Hell, it could make blog posts so everyone in your extended social network could know exactly how much you are hurting for moo-juice.

Now that you know this I’ll wait here while you run out and purchase your internet-savvy food cooler immediately, before Laura Sydell and the readers of this blog beat you to it…

What’s that you say? You don’t want a fridge with some kind of special milk-detecting shelf that requires a special milk bottle into which you must transfer all milk so the custom sensor can inform the fridge of the milk level? And the magic thingy can’t tell the difference between a fresh bottle full of delicious, bone-building, grade-A milk and a month-old bottle full of putrid chunky microbial growth medium that used to be milk? So you mean you don’t want it? Luddite! It’s your fault we don’t have flying cars!

So, Laura, I guess that there are just two things wrong with this picture: milk detecting fridges have nothing to do with new bandwidth, and no one wants a milk detecting fridge.

But other than that, strong work!

The Rehminator vs. The Hitman

Diane Rehm and many of her callers had unusually sparky exchanges today with obnoxious and shameless author Stephen Marks (“Confessions of a Political Hit Man”).

The guy debates like a dysfunctional 10 year old arguing with his little sister, wielding such master-class forensic stratagems as “I know you are, but what am I?” and “Nyah nyah na nyah nyah.”

He frequently leveled ad hominem attacks against inquisitors rather than address their questions. Diane was forced to ask him to be civil to her callers on several occasions, although her famous couth prevented her from really keeping him in line.

Least surprising moment: when he mentioned having discovered that one of his relatives was a mobster.

Stockenfreude

Have you ever noticed the weird excitement Public Radio reporters exude when they talk about the stock market diving?

What’s that about?

Are they feeling superior to those who bought into the capitalist economy? Or are they nervous about their own holdings? Or maybe the breathlessness stems from some kind of apocalyptic feeling?

This morning I could hear it so clearly as they announced “only a couple of hours before US markets open…” in the wake of the Asian and European sell-offs.

Weekend low point

Filed under “Too many things considered” is the Sunday All Things Considered story on brothers John and Hank Green. These two snooze-inducers “realized their relationship had become nothing more than a series of text messages and e-mails” so “they began posting video blogs for each other on YouTube.”

What’s wrong with this story? Where do I begin:

The entire premise makes an enormous but common category error. NPR unthinkingly buys the dumb idea that exchanging recorded, non-interactive video clips is new and that its newness makes it uniquely qualified to help these text-message-addled brothers re-connect. Well, I have another technology they should learn about that’s even more amazing. It’s called the telemaphone machine, or something newfangled like that, and I hear tell that you can actually say something into it and have a person on the other end respond immediately! Then you talk again and then they do! Imagine the revolution we’ll now be able to have! No more of those awful, stilted, waaaaay too much information one-way YouTube video clips. Soon you’ll be able to actually ask the person you are talking to about the things you are interested in in the order you want to hear about them instead of having them describe their trip to the grocery store! And, no tedious, painstaking editing and uploading of video clips! You just talk! What a future!

[editor's note: I was way too harsh on the content of these guys' videos and their viewers based on my understanding of them from the story. After actually watching some of them I took out that paragraph.]

As a blogger I often get this creepy feeling that one day everyone will have a blog. They won’t have time to read anyone else’s, just narcissistically manage their own little garden of superficia and knit rhetorical cozies in which to store their quotidia.

This will make the blogosphere about as useful as a map of the United States that is EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE AS THE ACTUAL UNITED STATES.

1:1 Scale adds nothing and is really hard to fit in the glove compartment.

If I knew what she knows

I’m going to take a brief break in my critical diatribe against the verbal tics of public radio hosts to give an honorable mention to a frequent subject of public radio reports: Hillary Clinton.

She has become the queen of “You know.” Just listen to her extemporizing on the stump, in interviews, or in debates. She seems to add one to three “you knows” to every single sentence.

How long has this been going on? Don’t they teach them better than that at Wellesley?

She also seems to have quieted her shrill voice and midwestern accent. Perhaps the extra difficulty of mitigating those is what is causing all the “you knows”.

You know?

There’s a kind of sense

…all over the world, tonight! (sing it)

A funny sub-genre of sense getting is the adjectival modification of the question. You’ll hear public radio hosts straining to get various kinds of senses. Sometimes they want a “strong sense” or an “overwhelming sense,” but my favorite is the commonly heard “general sense,” such as the one Renee Montagne attempted to elicit from an interview subject on Morning Edition today.

Did she want something even more vague than a regular old sense? Really? I guess the subject should have made sound effects with their mouth instead of answering in language.

Sometimes I really miss Bob Edwards.

Sense of well saying

The second big tic indulged in by too many Public Radio hosts is the word “well” or the phrase “well and…” This throw-away word is often employed to “segue” (transition) from one topic to another during an interview or discussion. Such an almost subverbal conversational signal comes in handy during the kind of fast moving discussion live radio demands, and I have no problem with its appropriate use. But in some cases the word has become almost a medium of its own in which the conversation takes place. Some hosts use this word to begin virtually every declarative statement they make on air. Curiously this is often combined with “getting a sense”. Where you find one you usually find the other.

Robin Young, dulcet-voiced host of WBUR’s nationally syndicated “Here and Now,” is one of the champion well and sense-sayers, but she is dwarfed by the true Michael Jordan of the technique, New Hampshire Public Radio’s Laura Knoy. Ms. Knoy begins virtually every episode of her often terrific 5 day a week show “The Exchange” by trying to get a sense from each of her subjects. I once heard her carefully ask “just give us a sense” four times in a row to her four guests, strongly implying she actually chooses to do this. (Robin Young owned up to the practice via email and indicated she considered it a bad habit.) Laura also manages to leave Robin in the dust well-wise. Just today she began her interview with a combination of the two, “Well and Jamie I’ll start with you. Give us a sense of…”, for triple bonus points.

Airbag deployed!

Tuesday ME Hi/Lows

Low Points:The theme today is meta: talking about talking about stuff.

Baseball! Baseball! (I’ll write about my weariness over NPR’s obsession with baseball in a future post.) Today they talk about baseball officials testifying before congress, when, in fact, they should be talking about why they should be wasting time talking about talking about baseball.

Another low point: Talking about the ridiculous, media-created kerfuffle about whether or not Hillary gives enough responsibility for civil rights victories to Martin Luther King. Please find something less stupid to cover or skip election coverage for the day.

High Point: Gwen Thompkins’ unblinking, poetic, nightmarish story about election-related tribal violence in Kenya. I’m as jaded and horror-numb about insoluble African tragedy as anyone, but this report, prosaically entitled “Kenya’s Parliament to Convene First Meeting,” ripped that emotional scab right off. Her lovely clear, calm voice recounting this gruesome story with telling details (“missing eight teeth”) and vivid sound clips should send everyone to their keyboards demanding news agencies double funding for actual reporting. This was an old-school NPR pre-produced report, not the usual so-called “two way,” which is when a reporter in the studio asks agreed-upon “give us a sense” questions to another reporter on the scene. I hope she wins an award for it.

Monday ME Low/High Points

Low Point: Cokie Roberts, Matriarch of the Roberts family NPR Dynasty, and her autonomic meaningless poll result recitation.

Quote:

“Even the pollsters will tell you not to focus on the horse-race and look at the other things…but the horse-race is irresistible.” Did New Hampshire teach them nothing?

High Points: Report on the Sacramento River Delta describing the enormous and inevitable problems there. Chillingly calls to mind the prescient and lengthy NPR reports on New Orleans’ vulnerability to Hurricane flooding prior to Katrina.

Also shades of Zwerdling (see previous post) when a Hillary Clinton recording was played in which she called the office of the president the “highest and hardest glass ceiling.”

NPR Gets Me Hot!

I never thought I might have to create a “sexy npr” category, but if we get more reports like today’s final story on Weekend ATC by Petra Mayer it will be necessary.

They were skirting the edges of a “maybe too many things considered” category post by covering a Japanese Beatles tribute band (they didn’t even make the obvious Japanese Beatle pun) when suddenly an interviewee came out with:

• “This is the most fun I’ve had all week! Well, actually I had sex about an hour ago…that was pretty fun.”

Normally NPR sexiness is entirely unintentional, for example when Danny Zwerdling warned an interviewee he was about to give them the high hard one a few years ago.

Congratulations Petra!

(Anyone know if this made it to the west coast feed?)

Good stuff: Storycorps Today

If I’m going to be sniping uninvited at Public Radio’s periodic foibles I feel I have to be fair and point out the high points as well.

The best thing I heard this week was the remarkable Storycorp from today’s Morning Edition by Martha Conant, who survived the crash of flight United Airlines flight 232. Don’t miss it.

I especially loved the fact that she refused the mindless irrationalization of one of her fellow passengers who told her that God must have some unfinished business for her.  She realized “the flipside is God didn’t have anymore work for all those other people, and I don’t believe that.”

All too common sense (Episode I)

(Note: I’ve noticed that 90% of people arrive here from an internet search on “common sense questions“. Unless you happen to be a public radio listener or have an ear for language you aren’t going to find what you’re looking for here. Common sense is getting harder and harder to find anywhere and I wish you luck.)

Now back to the post:

The Behavior

The most constant irritant that assaults my delicate sensibilities is, by many light years, the minute-to-minute over employment of the word “sense” by virtually all Public Radio hosts when they ask questions.

Next time you turn on the radio keep your ear out for it. It will astonish you just how often hosts undermine their questions by starting them with some variation of “sense.”

Some all-too-common examples of this rotten preamble:

• Give us a sense of…
• Is there a sense there that…
• What’s the sense of …

The host of “Here and Now” once asked a guest “Give us a sense of your mother’s sense of…”

A couple of weeks ago on “Day to Day” a host asked an interviewee if she could “see a sense” of something.

Those last two aren’t even really parseable, but I guess they sound like they have some meaning since people actually answer them. What’s the proper response to the question “do you see a sense?” And by the time you are asking for a mere sense of a sense what do you really have? Something so vague that it seems hardly worth the electricity required to broadcast it across this great country of ours.

Which brings me to the sort of 7th grade English teacher point: almost any question is weakened by asking it using the “sense” form. Using “sense” implies that you expect a nonspecific answer. I’ve never heard a host ask “Can you give a blurry, poorly thought out, partly inaccurate report about…” But that is, in essence, what they are asking. It insults both the interviewee and the listener. If the interviewee is only capable of giving a sense then maybe the show needs to find someone with better information.

Can’t you just hear the proverbial blind men trying to figure out the elephant asking each other what their senses of it are?

Fixing it

Just stop using it. Almost any question you can ask weakly with sense you can ask more forcefully by just dropping it. “Give us a sense of the anxiety there about the housing slump?” can easily be converted to “Is there anxiety about the housing slump there?” Plus, with just a little more work, they could choose to select from the host of more specific words available to the journeyman interrogator. A modest list: hypothesis, feeling, assessment, reaction, impression, appraisal, estimation, evaluation, judgment.

Where does this come from?

This meme infests every show on Public Radio with the possible exception of “On the Media”, but I’m not totally sure why.

I do have a few theories.

1. Maybe it’s only a bad habit. Teenagers sprinkle their speech with enough “you know”s and “like”s to drive the average grandparent to drink. They clearly get it from each other. Probably some prominent NPR host started the habit and the rest just unconsciously adopted it. Maybe they need to have a “sense” jar where they must deposit a quarter every time they use the word. A penny would make more “cents” but I don’t think it’s enough punishment. (OMG, I really apologize for what I just wrote – but not enough to delete it. Yet.)

2. Maybe it’s a post-modern capitulation to the elusiveness of fact. The problem is that a basic mistrust of certainty, a very good trait in anyone, especially a journalist, when taken too far leads to susceptibility to spin, which is fatal to good reporting. If someone expresses an idea with enough confidence a reporter might just believe the tone rather than the substance, due to their own bare cupboard of trusted knowledge. That’s how we ended up at war with Iraq. The neocons seemed so all-fired confident with their “we make reality” stuff that the reporters and a lot of Americans just went with it.

3. Maybe it’s simply too much time in the studio. Recently I got to thinking about radio recording studios. They are a bit like sensory deprivation tanks – usually no windows to the outside world, dark, silent except for what comes in through the earphones. Maybe the isolation someone in such a room feels inspires them to reach out for more senses from those outside somewhere.

That last thought makes me a little sad for them.

I’d really love it if a genuine Public Radio broadcaster would give me an answer about whether or not this use of sense is automatic or volitional. Maybe they could even give me a sense of why they think they do it.

I will make note of especially clumsy or compulsively repetitious uses of sense on various shows as this blog progresses.

Welcome – Mission Statement

Don’t get me wrong, I love Public Radio, NPR especially. My life would be far less enjoyable without it.But nobody’s perfect.

Public broadcasting in general and public radio in particular are the last bastions of content inoculated from the ever-lower lowest common denominator free market. As a result it shall be held to higher standards than the mass-media money honeys, squawking heads, and priests of celebrity worship.

Public radio has the most easily annoyed, persnickety, proudly upper-middlebrow listeners in the world, and I think I’m 99th percentile in all of those categories. So who better to start a blog solely for the purpose of bringing to light public radio’s broadcasting practices which range from great to silly to tone deaf to unprofessional/irresponsible?

For the purpose of selling recycled reports on CD, NPR touts its “Driveway Moments“, which they refer to as times when “rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.”

For the purposes of this blog, I’d like to expand the in-car listening imagery by introducing the concept of “Airbag moments“. Those are the times when someone on Public Radio says something so ridiculous that your airbag is suddenly deployed when you slam your head on the steering wheel as you rant at the radio.

So I invite all you NPRs (Nerdy Peevish Radicals) to join me in ranting about a few of your least favorite things.