(With apologies for the title.)

When I first heard the heroic Sarah Chayes on NPR, heroic was not a word that leapt to mind.  I used to make jokes about her tough assignment: Paris, France.  Her uniquely pronounced tagline, “this is Sarah Chayes in Parizz,” always caused my wife and I to try to guess to whom she was related to land such a cushy and sought-after post.  But Karma must be bad at NPR, because suddenly she was datelining from war-torn regions of Afghanistan.

One minute, after putting to bed her report on the adopt-a-tree program at Versailles, she’s at the charming boulangerie on the corner selecting fresh baguettes to feed to what I presume was an endless stream of visiting friends and family.  The next minute she’s dodging mortars and IEDs on her way to interview a warlord.  I imagine dealing with guests became less of an issue after that.

Then her story gets even more amazing.  I’ll let her website tell the rest:

In 2002 she decided to leave journalism to help rebuild the shattered country, whose fate will help determine the shape of the 21st century.  Currently she runs a cooperative in the former Taliban stronghold, producing fine skin-care products from local fruits, nuts, and botanicals. (www.arghand.org) The aim is to discourage opium production by helping farmers earn a living from licit crops, as well as to encourage collective decision-making. From this position, deeply embedded in Kandahar’s everyday life, Ms. Chayes has gained unparalleled insights into a troubled region. Her book about Afghanistan since the Taliban is The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (New York: Penguin, 2006)

I bring this all up because after Obama’s can’t-please-any-of-the-people-any-of-the-time speech there’s a (destined to be short-lived) surge in coverage of Aghanistan on NPR.  I’ve heard a lot of repetitive and insipid takes on the situation, but there’s one thing I haven’t heard: Sarah Chayes.  Why would this be?  Why wouldn’t they interview someone who is not only unusually knowledgeable about the situation but also clearly in the NPR address book?  Did she not give two weeks notice?  Did she talk about fight club?

The reason is not that she’s hard to find.  She’s back in the states.  Things in Kandahar have gotten too dicey for her business to continue operating in the open.  In fact I just attended a rather brilliant lecture she gave about the war in Afghanistan.  One of the aims of the lecture was to explode a number of myths about the situation, a mission she accomplished thoroughly.  Is that the problem?  Is it that her narrative goes against the conventional wisdom too much and would therefore take too long to explain?

So come one, NPR, get on the stick.  Get Sarah Chayes back on the air as an expert this time.  Give her knowledge and ideas some play while the topic is hot, because if recent history is any guide we’ll all forget about Bush War 2.0 in a couple of days. While she was on in November 2008, and while her book did get a little coverage when it was released, she’s had nothing like the week of long segments you aired and still prominently feature on your home page based on Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s strychnine in print.  Is Hagerty’s personal journey into neodeism really that much more important?

I’m looking at you, Morning Edition, Diane Rehm, ATC, etc etc etc.

And while I’m on the subject I’m going to recommend (again) that you look at some other important and novel recent takes on Afghanistan from William Lind.  Maybe you’ll even interview him.

What's wrong with this picture?

A commenter who somehow managed to overcome the recent technical problems this blog has been having with too many people trying to comment at the same time posed the following question this morning:

What is Krista Tippett’s agenda?

This is an intriguing query.  Since I can’t hear the vocal inflection of the person who asked it I can’t tell if it’s sarcastic or serious, but it deserves exploration.  It spurred me to think and research more about the whole problem with much religious “journalism” in general and Speaking of Faith in particular.

It turns out that the agenda of SoF is a bit hard to tie down because they don’t seem to have an official mission statement on the SoF website.  Their stated priciples are, unsurprisingly, couched in a warm miasma of platitudes:

When she [Tippett] emerged [like Venus from the sea!] with a Master of Divinity from Yale in 1994, she saw a black hole where intelligent coverage of religion should be.

The black-hole-generating religion reporters who worked before 1994 have got to feel good about that one!

…she began to imagine radio conversations about the spiritual and intellectual content of faith that would enliven and open imaginations and public discussion.

She draws out the intersection of theology and human experience, of grand religious ideas and real life.

Evidently Krista didn’t study a lot of geometry at Yale Div, as I’m not sure how you “draw out an intersection.”  I just can’t tell if she means “clearly delineate” or “smudge beyond recognition.”

So an outright mission statement from SoF seems a bit elusive, maybe ineffable or even transcendent.  Sound familiar?  Maybe you can only have a poetic way of knowing the agenda of Speaking of Faith.  Maybe you have to look at it sideways.

Or maybe you need to look at their sponsor.

A primary sponsor of SoF appears to be, from the prevalence of their ads on the SoF website, the Fetzer Insitute. Luckily for my purpose they aren’t shy about articulating their mission statement:

The Fetzer Institute advances love and forgiveness as powerful forces that can transform the human condition.

Wow, who could be against that?  “Advancing” is a weak, vague verb to use in the context of love and forgiveness, however, so let’s take a closer look what they actually do.  Their programs range from extremely laudable sounding, if quixotic, world peace initiatives to less universally approved-of claptrap consisting of new age healing and spiritualism mixed with junk science some of which reads exactly like jacket copy for Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

So what we’ve discovered is nothing less than a teeming nest of modern Theosophers.  These folks find the hardscrabble wonders of rationalist secular knowledge to be unfulfilling, uninspriring unless they are spiced with heaping helpings of tired, intellectually empty and dishonest but highly decorated teleologies.

These sentiments have a corrupting influence on public discourse and encourage what atheists call “woo.”  Woo is a helpful category that refers holistically to irrational beliefs, especially in the realm of health care.  The problem with woo is that it can kill.  When Christian Scientists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or New Age cult members refuse modern medical help for their children, and the children die, that’s the dark side of all this spiritual role-playing.  What if deluded, costumed, Klingon-speaking Star Trek fans refused actual medicine in favor of a spray painted salt shaker they claim is a treatment from the 23rd century?  What really makes that different?  And should we really be spending money on trying to detect souls with fMRI machines when, for example, vaccine production is so slow and antiquated?

The real “black hole” in religious journalism, at least since the “emergence” of Tippett, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Karen Armstrong and the rest of the weak teleologists, is the inability of such people to be objective.  They see a noble heart in, as far as I can tell, every religious or spiritual idea they’ve ever covered.

Isn’t it frighteningly easy to imagine a friendly hour-long interview between Krista and, say, Jim Jones, or Charles Manson?

Ultimately what fails to satisfy about Speaking of Faith is the extreme ecumenicism Tippett’s “agenda” requires.  It’s intellectually crippling, akin to a restaurant which tries to delight both big game bush-meat lovers and vegan PETA activists.  Everyone likes to eat, right?  They have that much in common, so it’ll be great!

Imagine if “On the Media” had a similar mission?  The whole point of the show would disappear.  No malefactor would be thoroughly investigated or subjected to cleansing, well-deserved ridicule.  So when an agenda like that of Krista’s Theosophical Sunday School infects public radio for two hours every weekend, taking up space where a superior program might thrive, it annoys me.  And I’m not alone.

You may not be surprised to learn that one of the most common google search queries leading people to this blog is as follows:

Krista Tippett Annoying

As any habitual listener of NPR will tell you, the most depressing regular segment of Morning Edition is “Story Corps”. Basically they go around the country taping people talking tearfully about their loved ones dying.  That’s not their mission statement, it’s just what ends up happening waaaaay too much of the time.  Or maybe those are just the ones some death-obsessed producer at NPR always ends up choosing.  As a result of this ghoulish proclivity on their part we generally dive for the off button as soon as we hear the opening notes of the deceptively treacly Story Corps theme song.

Today no one was close enough to shut down the radio, and as a result we listened to the whole thing.  It was about a mortician, natch.  But I will say it was one of the least depressing I’ve ever heard.  Go figure.

NPR has done a really wonderful job of reporting on the trees, but they just don’t get the forest.

Mandelit Del Barco has heroically chronicled the struggles of L.A. gangland. Sylvia Poggioli, just today, has bravely told us of the struggles of Italy against the Neapolitan mafia. Countless reports about the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon are delivered by myriad reporters. Tales of Columbian and Mexican drug cartels are easy to find. Then there are the reports about the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And yet, somehow, the connection is never made.

” I’m missing the war
Till beads of sunlight hit me in the morning
So much time so little to say “

Don’t let Ben Folds’ lyrics be our cultural epitaph.

Read your William Lind.

These are all the same thing, and have been since World War I. But nobody talks about it.

The crisis of the legitimacy of the state.

Dear reader(s) and NPR,

I do have a software company to run, so sometimes typing pointless, obsessive, and grandiose opinions about public radio into the great silence of the interwebs has to take second fiddle. Go figure. (I blame blogosphere sexism.)

But close students of Airbag Moments will have noticed that a number of the trends I’ve previously identified, named, and railed against have continued unabated on public radio throughout the summer. If anything, public radio ombudsmen seem to have spitefully incorporated my most strident peeves into their style guide rules.

Take for example the news of Estelle Getty’s death. NPR, in its brief piece on this “Golden Girls” comedienne, found the time to report about the severe dementia that made her final years a tragedy and eventually killed her.

Happily, although I may be the only reader of this blog, I found out I am not the only person to be annoyed by this bizarre compulsion to ghoulishness. They actually read a listener letter complaining about the gratuitous privacy-ignoring and dignity-destroying aspect of her obit.

But here’s the problem: They read the letter, but did nothing to address its contents. That sort of complaint absolutely requires a response either defending this grim editorial bias or promising to do better in the future. Just reading the letter on the air does nothing but beg the question, sort of like a passive aggressive non apology, a middle school mean girl forced to say something like “I’m sorry what I said about your not being pretty hurt your feelings.” Brooke? Bob? Where are you guys on this media absurdity? Do you approve of this practice? If so, you must be really looking forward to hearing all the disturbing details of the final struggles of Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Rue McClanahan in the coming years.

Meanwhile “storycorps” today continues its almost unbroken streak of tearful deathbed diaries.

What is it, NPR?

The war and economy aren’t depressing enough for you?

Sincerely,

A.M.

…but he plays one on TV.  Well, in the movies anyway.

I’m speaking, of course, about Talk of the Nation’s guest yesterday, Mr. Michael Douglas.

It seems he’ll be appearing before lawmakers.  Weirdly he won’t be there to testify about what possibly illegal methods he used to get Catherine Zeta Jones to marry him, something I’d expect most congressman (and NPR-obsessed bloggers) to be keenly interested in.

Instead he’s there to discuss a topic even more near and dear to this blog’s heart, Nuclear Proliferation.

But here’s the problem.  Douglas is a self-styled advocate on this issue, but even he, a trained actor, can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”  Maybe he’s trying to method-act presidential diction?

How many posts do I need to produce about this before people start getting it right?

New clear, new clear, new clear…

Today’s Morning Edition embodied some of the positive trends I see in NPR reportage.

There are subject areas that demand constant coverage and attention as opposed to the “declare a crisis every ten years and forget about it” syndrome Mainstream Media is so often prey to.

American and global energy use and abuse certainly falls into this category, as does the problem of educating underprivileged legacy-challenged children.

A brief 27-second item foreshadows future dramatic oil price and pollution increases as Chinese are said to have a lust for just the kind of gas guzzlers that American car companies are desperate to supply.

A longer piece describes a Newt Gingrich-inspired program of rewarding poor urban kids with cash if they improve their grades. Of course this kind of idea is unpleasantly crass and serves as a sad commentary on a society that so often makes it impossible for public schools to do the job we ask of them. But at this point anything is worth trying. And who could really be against rewarding poor kids for academic performance? After all many of them already have after school jobs, legal or otherwise. Isn’t paying them to study in order to succeed in the long term a better option, at least in theory?

Wonderfully for the fatuous jerk-a-knee behind the newspaper comic “Mallard Fillmore” (doesn’t the title really say everything that needs to be said about it) reporter Odette Yousef manages to find a cartoonish academic, associate professor in educational policy Richard Lakes, who actually says the following:

“This message really reinforces that these low-income kids are destined to a life of wage-earning,” said Richard Lakes, associate professor in educational policy at Georgia State University, who called the program “morally bankrupt.”

“It reinforces that these children in particular are going to be servants of the middle and upper classes,” he said.

This is where the radio format really comes in handy. I probably would have believed that statement to be an invented Jayson Blair kind of quote by a made-up person if I hadn’t heard him with my own ears.

“A life of wage earning?” Really? And that’s a bad thing? Compared to what, exactly? Being an associate professor? I guess Georgia State pays Professor Lakes in magic beans and the laughter of children?

And in what world is paying kids to do better in school more likely to land them a wage-slave “career” than not paying them to make good grades.

This is the kind of mindless, aesthetic, pre-determined-by-politics response normally associated with the focus-grouped paranoid fantasies of Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

Professor Lakes has taught me something: previously I thought straw men only came to life in the Land of Oz.

Recently NPR introduced a special media player that many of its programs now employ on their websites.

(Find my more recent and negative thoughts about this here.)

Here are some pros and cons of version 1.2:

Pros:

• The player automatically organizes shows into discrete segments. Thus if you click to listen to the entire Wait Wait Don’t Tell me episode the player displays it in labeled subsections, like “Not My Job”. That is really nice, and is just one part of the player’s…
• There is Jukebox playlist functionality. In addition to dividing shows into useful subsections the player also accumulates individual stories as you click on them. Thus you can browse the NPR website and click on a series of stories which gradually install themselves into the player’s playlist. It’s even easy to delete and re-order items in the playlist.

Cons:

• Big Brother. As far as I know the player doesn’t give the listener the choice of downloading the clips for later playback. Downloadable files and podcasts must be provided separately on a show by show basis. Many programs, like “Wait Wait”, do indeed provide such files, but who knows how long that will last? Making media viewable only online is a nefarious trend that eliminates an important feature of the internet, and I don’t like anything that appears to be part of it.
• Playback problems. I have experienced a number of playback seizures, sometimes lasting several minutes, especially when trying to adjust the play head to hear a section again. Presumably this will improve over time.

Neither pro nor con:

• Advertisements occur within the playback. Listening is generally prefaced with an ad for, for example, NPR store digital radios. On the other hand the advertisements are far less obtrusive than the station IDs and sponsor messages every twenty minutes that you hear on the radio, not to mention PLEDGE DRIVES (curse them!), so I can’t really call these ads a net negative. On the other hand I can’t tell how often the ads are meant to display. Sometimes they play only before the first selection, sometimes, and I think this is just a bug because it’s far too often, they seem to play between each one.

Overall I think the player is a positive development and long overdue.

Props to the NPR web techs!

Since I just wrote about PRI’s The World’s routinely excellent global coverage I think it’s appropriate to point out where this kind of reporting isn’t adequate. Luckily I have former foreign policy adviser to the Edwards campaign Michael Signer to do it for me. (With a name like “Signer”, shouldn’t he be the presidential candidate? Or maybe he has a brother named “Bill”…)

His recent Washington Post commentary “It’s a Scary World, Don’t Campaign Reporters Care?” spanks the media for ignoring or only superficially covering the foreign policy positions of the candidates, even though such policy statements have (shocker!) proven historically to be accurate predictors of policy.

Interestingly, from a Public Radio point of view, he states the following:

In November, I got a call from a major national radio program saying that they’d be doing a substantive piece on the candidates’ foreign policies — how they were developed and what the process revealed about the candidates’ thinking.

Perfect! I thought. At last. I was in Iowa City and drove 45 minutes through blinding snow to a small studio for an hour-long interview. When the segment aired, my heart sank. It had changed into a quick-and-dirty recitation of a few policy proposals from all the candidates, Republican and Democrat — not the substantive compare-and-contrast that had been promised.

I can’t say for sure whether or not this was National Public Radio, but a little Googling strongly indicts a report by Martha Wexler on All Things Considered of December 9, 2007. Signer doesn’t even merit a sound-bite from his hour long interview.

Whatever the purpose of this NPR report, and however appropriate or not Signer’s interview was for that purpose, his point is very, very important. We live in extremely dangerous times. The entire news media, and Public Radio in particular, need to make international coverage a huge priority.

Take just one foreign policy example. I was sentient during the cold war and woke up sweating from my share of Terminator-style atom bomb nightmares, but I feel the US is at more risk of Nuclear attack then at any time in our history.

Sure, my opinion doesn’t matter, I’m just a grumpy blogger.

But what about this fact? Both Bush and Kerry, men who agree on little, were asked during a 2004 debate what the greatest threat facing our nation was, and both immediately responded “nuclear proliferation,” specifically nukes in the hands of terrorists. (Ok, Bush started to answer “Jesus” out of debate habit but then caught himself. And what he really said was “nukuler perlimifiration,” but the point remains.)

Am I the only one who remembers that? Am I the only one who actually believes it?

What has the Bush administration done about it since? Precisely nothing, as far as I can tell, but I can’t really be sure because the media barely covers it!

Note to the the media: stop waiting to cover problems only after they explode and try to do some predicting. I know it’s no fun to be Cassandra, but it is your chosen profession.

Case in point: Daniel Zwerdling on ATC did an unbelievably good job warning us about a Hurricane flooding catastrophe in New Orleans in a lengthy 2-part report aired in 2003!. For people who love New Orleans listening to that story wasn’t a Driveway Moment it was an entire Driveway Afternoon. (Did he get a Pulitzer for that? He should have.)

Maybe the media can try that kind of coverage with a few scarily important international conundrums?

Maybe NPR correspondents get paid by the “sense”?

NPR saint/matriarch and sometime seagull at the television news landfill of conventional wisdom Cokie Roberts (you’re better than that, Cokie!) commented on the Democratic primary on Morning Edition today.

I was disappointed to hear the following at the very top of her “three-way” with Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep:

“…because there’s a lot of sense that these primaries tomorrow are the make or break primaries for her campaign and there’s been you know so much criticism that she’s is not human enough and these shows give some sense of humanity…”

Steve & Renee make the extra effort to avoid asking for a sense (thanks, guys!), but she volunteers two senses in one sentence anyway!  The initial one is described as “a lot” of sense.  What a bargain!

There’s a lot of sense among a lot of us here at Airbag Moments that the phrase “a lot of sense” is really unattractive, not to mention that it has a lot of sense of meaningless.  How many senses is a lot?  I think six is a lot, since we humans use only five.  But maybe a lot is more like a hundred senses.  I’ve heard that OT-8 scientologists like Tom Cruise and Vinnie Barbarino have that many.

Let’s decide on a new grammatical term for these “sense” constructions.  Literary style mavens implore us to avoid the passive voice, often for good reason.  I propose we should name these phrases that use sense in this way something like “ultra-passive voice”.

Any other ideas?

Ya know, maybe Hillary’s new love of “ya know” is just a “tell”, ie that little unconscious thing a person does while playing Poker, such as cocking an eyebrow, that spoils their attempt to bluff the other players.

Here’s a Hillary quote from Mara Liasson’s Morning Edition story today on Clinton’s recent embarrassment of primary losses:

“Ya know, this is a long journey to the nomination, ahh ya know, some weeks, uhh, ya know, uhh, one of us is up and the other’s down…”

At that point the sound faded out so I couldn’t get a larger sample of Ya Knowing, but it’s clear that at this rate she is close to depleting our nation’s precious strategic “ya know” reserve.

If she wants to be taken seriously as a green candidate she absolutely must reduce her “ya know” consumption from three per sentence to less than one!

Otherwise how will she be able to criticize McCain’s gluttonous squandering of the phrase “my friends” without looking like a hypocrite?

Ya know?

Other hilights from today’s ME:

If you are a fan of extra-plummy female British accents, as opposed to the noisome one affected by Fiona Chutney, Nigella Lawson is a pure pleasure. To paraphrase my great uncle, I have no idea what she was talking about, but I loved it.

I also enjoyed the interview with Norman Lear, in spite of its blandness.

Finally, there was a terrific listener letter making the useful point that if Mitt Romney and other Mormons feel that the nation was prejudiced against him because of his religion, maybe they should realize how unfair it is that an atheist running for national office would suffer even greater bigotry…from them. (How about a little more coverage of that, NPR?)

Note: I feel I should say that I don’t dislike Mormons. On the contrary, if any generalization about the Mormons I’ve known can be made it is that they are friendly, helpful, sunny, hard-working people. It’s just that I find their young belief system risibly vulnerable to debunking, historical, archaeological, and otherwise. Someone said a cult is a small, unpopular religion and a religion is a large, popular cult. Mormonism is a perfect example. (See Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.)

If we had only mainstream Mormons available as a study sample we might even draw some sort of causal connection between theological gullibility and personal goodness. But there are just so many counter-examples…

Now that Romney is out of the race I’m sure public radio shows, and thus this blog, will find less reason to mention Mormonism.

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?