WE WANT FOX RADIO!:

All Things Considerate: How NPR makes Tavis Smiley sound like Linda Wertheimer. (Brian Montopoli, Jan/Feb 2003, Washington Monthly)

Last May, I had the chance to participate in an NPR fellowship for young journalists interested in public radio. There were eight of us in all, each of whom worked with a mentor to produce a story that would become part of a Web-based news magazine. In order to decide who would host the magazine, the mentors and NPR folks held auditions: One by one, we were required to stand up and read a few lines to the assembled crowd, who would then compare notes. We weren't allowed to watch the auditions. As we waited in the hallway, some of us tried to make small talk; others found a quiet corner where they could go over their lines. But we were all thinking about the same thing: The Voice, the NPR Voice, and how the hell we were going to pull it off. The Voice is tough to describe, but you know it when you hear it: It's serious, carefully modulated, genially authoritative. It rings with unspoken knowledge of good wine and The New York Times Book Review. We were terrified of it.

As it turned out, I couldn't quite manage The Voice--the hosting gig went to someone else--but I quickly realized that if I wanted anything to do with NPR, I'd need to figure it out pretty quick. NPR's ascendancy has been striking--"Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," its drivetime shows, are the second and third most popular radio programs in the country, and the network's listenership continues to grow--up 18.5 percent in 2001 alone. A big part of the reason is the unparalleled quality of its news coverage. NPR's journalism is in-depth, accurate, fair, intelligent, and, not insignificantly, virtually commercial-free. In the sea of vituperative right-wing radio, NPR is an island of sanity, civility, and seriousness. And its reporters and personalities are truly talented: Their ability to explain complex issues in plain, sharp, value-neutral language may be unsurpassed in all of broadcasting.

But the network has also become something of a victim of its success. If you listen to a lot of NPR, you realize how similar it all sounds: no matter who is talking, or what they're talking about. There's a simple reason for the homogeneity: The drivetime shows, the 800-pound gorillas of public radio, have become so successful that the sensibilities of their influential hosts and correspondents have come to dominate all other NPR programming. Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, Bob Edwards, Carl Kasell, and their peers have a tight grip on the sound of NPR, especially Linda Wertheimer, whose cadence--a sort of patrician delay--still defines the NPR sound even though she no longer serves as a host. It is a sound created by boomers for an audience of their contemporaries. The Voice is theirs, and if you can't pull it off, as I quickly discovered, you'd better get out of the way.

It is an extremely appealing Voice--to a certain demographic. About 20 million people tune into NPR each week. Their mean income is $78,216, and their average age hovers just below 50. Nearly 90 percent of those who shared their racial information are "non-Black/non-Hispanic," according to NPR survey data. In other words, the people whose Zeitgeist Edwards et al., have been extraordinarily effective in catching are affluent, middle-aged white liberals, who tune in to the drivetime shows on their way to work and sometimes continue listening for the rest of the day. This demographic just adores NPR, and NPR gives the love right back.

That's the conventional wisdom anyway, but studies don't seem to bear it out. Here's just the latest poll to show that Republicans are as likely to listen to NPR as Democrats, Republicans More Likely Than Democrats to Use Talk Radio for News (Frank Newport, January 6, 2003, GALLUP NEWS SERVICE). It was perhaps Ann Coulter who best summed up the reasons for this, on Booknotes (C-SPAN, ):

COULTER: [N]o one in the entertainment world is going to watch this show.

LAMB: Why not?

COULTER: Because we're using words with more than two syllables.

LAMB: But you're...

COULTER: If they watched the show they'd all be conservatives. Did you see that NPR listeners, something like 72 percent are conservative? And you remember from your own show here when you just had open lines, it was all conservatives calling and you had to set up a liberal line. If liberals paid attention to politics, they'd all be conservatives.

There's more truth to that than might appear at first glance. For instance, there are plenty on the isolationist Right who will forthrightly admit they just don't care about the Iraqi people, but folks on the anti-war Left claim to care. Unfortunately, you can't care about the people and know what Saddam's Iraq is really like and still oppose his overthrow. So, on this issue, as on many others, to be a Leftist and not descend into schizophrenia requires a really profound ignorance.

Conservatives, on the other hand, welcome news and information because it tends to confirm our philosophy. Unfortunately for us, the purveyors of news tend to be liberal, so, we're stuck listening, reading, and (to a lesser degree) watching them. After all, if you want to be an informed citizen of the Republic you do need to read the Times and the Post and such, even though their editorial policies are mostly antithetical to conservatism.

NPR, particularly on those affiliates that have abandoned classical music, is unique in that it is the rough radio equivalent of cable television's all-news networks, combined with C-SPAN. Many of the shows and all of the hosts may be annoying, but if you want to be able to find news and discussion of the news at any time of the day, you're guaranteed to find them on your NPR station and unlikely to find them anywhere else, except for the few hours of Imus in the Morning and Rush in the afternoon.

The author's contention that NPR hosts are fair is laughable on its face. The other day I actually heard what may be the quintessential NPR moment. Diane Rehm had a discussion about the Bush judicial nominations and her guests were Stuart Taylor from National Journal and Nan Aron from Alliance for Justice. Now, we all know the format for modern talk shows; you're supposed to have a a lefty and a rightie, a pro and a con, whatever, but two opposing viewpoint. Here, instead, we had a liberal lobbyist and a reporter. Stuart Taylor happens to be an exceptionally good reporter, but he's also, by any measure other than his willingness to judge harshly the maneuvering of the Clintonites during impeachment and his open-mindedness about the unpleasant legal steps that might be required in the war on terrorism, a liberal Democrat. Yet here he was placed in the awkward position of defending Bush nominees, whose legal viewpoints he frequently had to acknowledge disagreeing with, from the ad hominem attacks of Ms Aron, and,
not coincidentally, Ms Rehm herself. Finally a guy called in and said that he couldn't help feeling that Ms Aron was biased because she not only rejected every Bush nominee they discussed but even dismissed the ABA for giving Judge Pickering a highly qualified ranking. Ms Rehm responded that perhaps the bias was in the caller's own mind since the show had presented views from the entire political spectrum and so could not be cited for bias. Ah yes, the spectrum according to NPR: all the way from radical leftist to garden variety liberal, hosted by another liberal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 21, 2003 10:27 AM