Bloggasm

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has rarely been one to avoid responding directly to his right wing critics. He’s been on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on multiple occasions and has even appeared on Michael Savage’s show. As an opinionated pundit, he believes that people like him should be willing to face off with others in public forums that are not always friendly to their views, and he finds those that avoid doing so “cowardly and irresponsible.”

So when National Public Radio’s ombud, Alicia Shepard, refused to come on his Salon radio show to address his criticisms, he decided to write about it. Shepard wrote a column in June defending NPR’s tendency to refrain from referring to enhanced interrogation techniques as “torture,” and Greenwald followed it with a paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal the day after. Shortly after his response was posted, he asked a Salon intern to reach out to Shepard to see if she would speak to him for his online radio show. According to Greenwald, an NPR spokesperson said that the ombud was out for the week and would get back to him Monday. Salon’s intern said that when she spoke to Shepard on Monday she refused to go on the show because she didn’t “want to get into a shouting match.” (I reached out to NPR for comment this morning. A representative responded that he would try to get someone to speak to me on the record. I’ll update this post if I receive a response)

“I think Shepard has an obligation to engage NPR listeners when it comes to controverisial issues surrounding NPR,” Greenwald told me in a phone interview this morning. “Even that original column that she wrote was due in part to the fact that I had written about NPR’s practice of not calling interrogation techniques torture, and that’s what caused her to get so many emails in the first place and respond. So I felt like it was clear that my blog was sort of the centerplace where a lot of NPR listeners were voicing these complaints, so it was a natural place for her to go in order to have this discussion to address these issues interactively rather than the one way monologue.”

But doesn’t a person have the right to refuse an interview? After all, some have refused to go on shows like the O’Reilly Factor because they felt like they wouldn’t be given a fair platform to present their views, and many that have gone on such shows have come out regretting it. Greenwald seemed to agree that there are certain circumstances in which it would be practical to turn down an interview request, but he said that when you opine on controversial topics you should make a reasonable effort to respond and engage with your critics or those you criticize.

“That doesn’t mean you have to go and confront every single person,” he said. “If you’re inundated with requests I think it’s fair to pick and choose based on audience size and other factors, but it was pretty clear that I was the primary critic in this regard. I played a large role in spawning the controversy in the first place. I think it was pretty cowardly and irresponsible for her not to being willing to address it.”

Greenwald said that he has conducted over 100 radio interviews for Salon Radio, and not one has degenerated into a “shouting match,” so he finds that excuse without merit. I suggested that perhaps Shepard felt that she had addressed the criticisms against NPR and readdressing them in an interview would seem redundant.

“I thought that her column left a lot of questions unresolved and unanswered,” he replied. “You can write a column addressing critics and be pretty thorough and address all the arguments, where you won’t satisfy your critics but at least you would have answered them, whereas I felt like her defense of NPR’s policy left open more questions than it answered. So I thought that it made sense to try to explore those questions with her.”

Greenwald said he still hopes to have Shepard on the show, and there has been at least some conversation via email with an NPR representative about that possibility.

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An email I just received:

Hello,
I know this is really peculiar but I was writing to ask the source of a David Sedaris quote you had on your Twitter, I think? I was at an Ira Glass lecture a few months back and he played a Sedaris reading with the quote, “I love you, I love you, but I don’t know how to love you, It is a mantra we learn one day and use regularly for the rest of our lives…” toward the end of it. I’ve read and heard a lot of Sedaris’s work but had never come across that particular essay and the quote has been running through my mind ever since. I got fed up scanning through his books (and I can’t find my copy of his first book, anyway) so I googled it, and your page was the only thing that came up.

Anyways, if you know what I’m talking about, that would be great, a huge moment of clarity, and quite the testament the internet as an information source.

Thanks,
Daniel Dreiberg

This is what I wrote back:

Hey Daniel,

The exact same thing happened to me. I went to see Ira Glass in Charlottesville VA and heard that quote and couldn’t get it out of my head. Unfortunately I think it was just one of his diary entries that he read on NPR before he was super famous and he never collected it anywhere. It’s a shame too, because though I remember the first part of the quote I couldn’t remember the entire thing. Do you remember it all?

–simon

Back in July I published a piece at Bloggasm arguing that the episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money” — where the show spent an entire hour recounting the steps leading up to the mortgage meltdown — was a form of journalism called “Explainer Journalism.” The episode, like most episodes from This American Life, was absolutely brilliant.

Well, this week they had a follow-up hour long special that attempts to explain the financial crisis as it currently stands. Go download it while it’s still free.

I’m not a regular listener of talk radio, but I’ve always wondered why they use a one-person format. It seems like they could keep the conversation going more smoothly if a talk radio host had another host to talk to. To me, it just seems so unnatural for a guy to basically talk to himself for hours straight; the few times I have listened to the medium I noticed that there seems to be no flow.

I’m currently reading an article about right-wing radio that was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s written by David Foster Wallace and is titled “Host.” Now, I usually hate it when bloggers simply block quote huge chunks of text, but I really need to in this instance.

In this particular passage, Wallace describes the difficulty of being a talk radio host:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech or speech’s ticcy pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

Excerpted from The New Kings of Nonfiction

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As an avid iPod user, I think podcasts are the coolest thing since sliced bread. A great online magazine would have a mixture of articles, blog posts, podcasts, and Youtube video. Because of their rising popularity a podcast association has been formed so they can collaborate on advertising strategies and create their own little special interest group.

via mm

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2. Talk radio not popular in Washington DC

Bill O’reilly’s radio program, “The Radio Factor,” was dropped from local Washington DC stations. Other than Rush Limbaugh’s program, talk radio isn’t popular in DC. Its ratings are so low that it isn’t even listed on most rating charts.

At first glance, one would assume this is because DC is a liberal city. But this isn’t the case.

“”It’s not that we’re a liberal town,” says Jim Farley, who oversees programming for all-news WTOP and news-and-talk Washington Post Radio.

The Washington Post article says “By comparison, Seattle and San Francisco — two famously liberal areas — have popular conservative stations. And “Savage Nation,” the radio show hosted by Savage, who was once fired by MSNBC for making anti-gay slurs, is a perennial hit in the Bay Area.”

via national review

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