Sense of Omission

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?

The World: Back of the bus

PRI’s The World is a heroically consistent “eat your broccoli” public radio show. Though not often gripping, they are one of the few sources of good, frequent global reporting in American media – especially important given our current president’s alarming New Yorker-cover-ish view of the globe. Let your local public radio station know they should subscribe to this show.

So far today’s most entertaining/shocking story on public radio is one The World presented on fundamentalist Israeli Jewish women self segregating on buses. Wow, just…wow. Orthodox Jewish burkas. Way to be!

Memo to Middle-Eastern countries: try not to make it look too much like you all deserve each other.

Find and listen to the report on this page.

Aside from The World’s parchingly dry style, the only other complaint I have about the show is the time it wastes on aggressively obtuse world music coverage at the end of each episode. The more incongruously hybridized a musical group is, the more eager The World is to provide them with publicity.

Then again I do loves me some Tutsi/Cambodian trance-ragtime played on found antique Inuit toy instruments by Chechen octogenarians.

Putting the Zero in “Studio 360″

Weekend public radio is astonishingly hit-or-miss: the cacophonous cackles of “Car Talk“, the funereal earnestness of “Speaking of Faith“, and yes, the creepily ubiquitous harmlessness of “Prairie Home Companion“.

Surely there is no one person who enjoys every bit of programming public radio networks find to pass the Judeo-Christian Sabbaths. Of course, as I was once chastised by a local public radio reporter whose story on regional mortarless stone bridges I found so dull as to consider it a public health risk, “the great thing about radio is that if you wait long enough something you do like will come on.”

If what’s on next is PRI’s “Studio 360” I can pretty much guarantee that my wait will be at least an hour.

The show is hosted and created by Kurt “if he co-founded Spy Magazine shouldn’t he be funny?” Andersen, and his choices of topic and style of execution have a lot in common with many other tragically failed treatments for narcolepsy.

The show’s token humorist, Iris Bahr, plays the character of a flibbertigibbet British reporter named Fiona Chutney in what I have to believe is some kind of post-post-post-modern attempt to make fun of making fun of making fun of things. The humor gets hopelessly lost somewhere along the way in most of her sketches, but in today’s episode it becomes clear why.

She makes the classic mistake of trying to parody the fashion world, which is a humor black-hole so dense that not even light comedy can escape.

Think about it. What’s Sasha (Borat/Ali G) Cohen’s only consistently unfunny character? Bruno, the gay fashion world reporter. Which of Ben Stiller’s many bad movies is the worst? “Zoolander” the unhilarious send-up of that zany world we call “fashion.”

The fashion world is already a parody of itself in both unintentional and intentional ways, and parodizing parody just doesn’t work very well. It is to humor what trying to divide by zero is to math.

To make matters less pleasant she employs an accent that is an exact female version of chronic self-amuser Cash Peters of “Marketplace” and “Savvy Traveler” public radio fame.

Bahr’s personal website flaunts an impressively diverse CV that includes service in the Israeli army and Neuropsychology training at Brown, so it’s comforting to know that if she “keeps her day job” she’ll have a lot to fall back on.

Fun fact about Kurt Andersen: he has claimed that Lynne “Aww shucks me and Dick are just folks, what’s all this Darth Vader stuff?” Cheney has pursued a long term “extravagant” flirtation with an unidentified “friend” of his. “Friend”, Kurt? Really? Is it the same anonymous “friend” on whose behalf you solicited free psycho-pharmacological advice from a guest at your last cocktail party?

Whatever.

My personal advice to your “friend” would be to go for it! Join the mile high club on “Marine One”! Personally inspect the endowments of the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities! Head out on a cougar hunt with the second lady, but beware of accidental discharge…I think Dick taught her everything she knows.

Okay, I’ll stop.

To be fair, given the show’s sterling list of contributors and Andersen’s intelligence and Rolodex, I’m certain they’ve produced many great segments and will produce more in the future. I just haven’t heard any yet. (If you have, post links here!)

Sounds like a piece of, I mean on, Lynne Cheney would be a hoot…

I’m just sayin’.

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.