![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stuff worth reading and hearing
May. 16th, 2005 03:17 pmHere's a couple of pieces by two people who write (and speak) way better than I do.
Confessions of a Listener. Garrison Keillor explains his taste for quirky radio programs -
sometimes even right wing talk radio in small doses. Here's a few samples:
I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up. The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics. The US Marine just returned from Sudan with lots of firsthand impressions of the crisis there; the journalist just back from Falluja, where he spent three months; a firsthand documentary about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Middle East--that's what Edward R. Murrow did from London in 1940, and it's still golden today. It's the glorious past and it's the beautiful future.
...
The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time. I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed, but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness. I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it. What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful.
You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050523&s=keillor
Bill Moyers has given a very inspiring (and often funny) speech about the need for media reform. He's not pushing a particular cure, but he's very clear that he said/she said style of presenting opposing viewpoints is not effective journalism. He also had interesting things to say about Kenneth Tomlinson, now chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and his attempts to label CPB programs as biased and liberal. Tomlinson has buried polls that don't support his conclusions, refused to meet with Moyers, refused to appear on Moyers' show, and spent $10,000 in public money on tracking who has appeared on Moyers' show. Here's a few brief quotes:
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical.
...
He said New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, among other reporters, had relied on official but unnamed sources "when she served essentially as the government's stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."
Hear Moyers' speech at National Conference for Media Reform:
http://www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/moyers.mp3
Read a transcript of Moyer's speech:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/1329245#transcript
This is an mp3 file. The speech is 45+ minutes, so getting it via a slow internet connection may take a while
There's an article about the conference here:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/2183DBC809328E3686257002007A5988?OpenDocument
Confessions of a Listener. Garrison Keillor explains his taste for quirky radio programs -
sometimes even right wing talk radio in small doses. Here's a few samples:
I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up. The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics. The US Marine just returned from Sudan with lots of firsthand impressions of the crisis there; the journalist just back from Falluja, where he spent three months; a firsthand documentary about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Middle East--that's what Edward R. Murrow did from London in 1940, and it's still golden today. It's the glorious past and it's the beautiful future.
...
The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time. I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed, but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness. I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it. What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful.
You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050523&s=keillor
Bill Moyers has given a very inspiring (and often funny) speech about the need for media reform. He's not pushing a particular cure, but he's very clear that he said/she said style of presenting opposing viewpoints is not effective journalism. He also had interesting things to say about Kenneth Tomlinson, now chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and his attempts to label CPB programs as biased and liberal. Tomlinson has buried polls that don't support his conclusions, refused to meet with Moyers, refused to appear on Moyers' show, and spent $10,000 in public money on tracking who has appeared on Moyers' show. Here's a few brief quotes:
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical.
...
He said New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, among other reporters, had relied on official but unnamed sources "when she served essentially as the government's stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."
Hear Moyers' speech at National Conference for Media Reform:
http://www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/moyers.mp3
Read a transcript of Moyer's speech:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/1329245#transcript
This is an mp3 file. The speech is 45+ minutes, so getting it via a slow internet connection may take a while
There's an article about the conference here:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/2183DBC809328E3686257002007A5988?OpenDocument
