Tuesday, June 15, 2004
(6:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Garrison Keillor: A National Treasure
Listen to the news from Lake Wobegon from June 12, 2004 (starting approximately five minutes into the linked clip, or at 01:34:54 of the whole show).
I know people think that NPR isn't very good and that "we leftists" need to invest in a radio infrastructure built primarily on "attitude" -- but I'm sick of attitude. Yes, some of the shows are boring. Yes, Terry Gross is simply awful. But I challenge anyone to show me any widely available media product that is of consistently higher quality than A Prairie Home Companion or This American Life. I challenge you to find a news source that is more consistently trustworthy and even-handed than NPR. This is what happens when news and entertainment is done on something other than a for-profit basis. This is what happens when you get a group of people together who believe that the radio is a medium of public service that cannot simply be reduced to another tool for the extraction of profit. NPR may well be the last broadcast media venue in America that reminds us what it is like to do broadcasting without a dismissive snear -- what it might look like not to be engaged in a contest of who can be the ugliest.
The "sneering discourse" -- how else to describe the blogosphere, or at least its leading lights? I certainly agree with Atrios on many questions of substance, but I'm not sure that his approach is ultimately different on a formal level from Glenn Reynolds', with his snarky "indeeds." How many blog posts do we read every day that end with something like "imagine if Clinton had tried to pull this shit" or "of course, if it was a liberal who was doing this, the media would be all over it"? Smug superiority, the media become little more than fodder for snearing media criticism. Give us the formulae! Who is good and who is evil?
Are the Republicans really the only Manichean dualists around here? Is there anyone who has not used a guilt-by-association argument? Is there any mainstream public debate right now in which people are really acting in good faith, really putting everything out on the table, without first filtering it to test its relative benefit to one "side" of the political debate? I know, I know -- in order to get "our" goals through, we have to get those evil people out of office -- but when was the last time "we" made even a token gesture toward achieving "our" goals? 1994?
I'm still voting for Kerry in 2004, and I'm confident he'll do a significantly better job than Bush, but I wonder when was the last time that politics properly so-called took place -- not our debased concept of "politics" as the jockeying for position of the two major political parties, but politics as the people actually making choices about how we want to build our society. I wonder when we'll finally cash in on the promise of democracy.
