On the other hand, Neal Conan, on Talk of the Nation, is a national embarrassment. Not only does he stick to the right-to-middle stable of guests which FAIR refers to, but he regularly cuts off listeners who call in with questions or comments that challenge these guests, as soon as his sensitive ideological detector sniffs a heresy coming on -- generally in mid-sentence. Many a program gives one the experience of listening to the Fox network with eyes closed.
"All Things Considered," or as it is often more accurately referred to, "Small Things Considered," spends far too much time on trivial "human-interest" topics, as do its weekend edition and the noon shows "Here and Now" and "Day to Day." (One sometimes wonders how many humans are really interested in these topics. The inoffensive, blah flavor of the names of these shows accurately mirrors their content.)
Of course, all this is from the point of view of someone with a general world view radically different from the general population. Since its early years (when it was a lot smaller and feistier), NPR has steadily tried to expand its audience, which probably necessitated becoming blander and more "crowd-pleasing." And a national network of their size does require a lot of moolah, which means kow-towing to the broad middle of opinion. (PBS is of course orders of magnitude even worse, since TV requires orders of magnitude more moolah.) But their fawning on white, male, rich authority figures is scandalous, nonetheless.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt