The local public radio station here – in concert with all the other public radio stations across this blessed land of ours – is having their fall pledge drive this week. And I am defiantly not pledging to support. I am willfully and maliciously denying them my dollars and support, in spite of all their blandishments and incessant, unrelenting guilt trips. This, in spite of the fact that I worked part-time for the classical music side of that enterprise some decades past, before all the part-time announcers were let go. I thought for weeks that it was only me, that my announcing work was unsat. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the reason, as I had gone very rote and mechanical over announcing the name of the piece of music up next, the composer and performing orchestra or soloist, and throwing in a bit of relevant information about the piece. No, it wasn’t me, as I later found out; they left all the other part-time shift announcers go – the girl who worked during the week at an animal shelter, the woman who was a mainstay of the local little theater group, the guy who was a full-time writer for various little local publications. All of us were served notice; a kind of Friday Night employment massacre.
It was a positive relief not to have to drive across San Antonio in a wonky car, in time to make it to the Saturday afternoon shift, although I did miss sometimes … well, no, I don’t miss anything. Except for the paycheck for a shift of work that I could have done in my sleep, a tour of duty in a high-rise building with a magnificent view – that bit was nice. As it eventually turned out, though, I could get along very well without it. The station came into a bomb of money, and wanted to go into covering local news, rather than paying live bodies to play classical recordings at night and over the weekends. They preferred to take the classical feed from Minnesota Public Radio. I guess that it worked out cheaper in the long run.
When did my serious disenchantment begin to flower? Probably sometime after 9-11, and that was with the Morning Edition – All Things Considered side of the NPR house. I just didn’t feel it anymore. Prairie Home Companion, as hosted by Garrison Keillor, just got more and more out of tune with genuine fly-over-country Americans as it went on. Garrison Keillor became more vicious, hateful, and obnoxious, which was really a pity, as he had put on a good act there, for decades – of affection for small-town America. All that went by the board – I bailed from Prairie Home Companion and never went back. I think that I stopped listening to public news radio a couple of months into Barack Obama’s turn in the White House. The slobbering full-frontal worship of the Wonder Black Prince of Chicago was just too much to bear. The final nail in the coffin of my affection for NPR came with the rise and subsequent deliberate media murder of the Tea Party. Our local chapter was formed of as earnest, well-educated, engaged and publicly responsible a group of citizens as could be found anywhere – and yet the national media, to include NPR routinely sneered at and slandered Tea Party organizations as gatherings of stupid, uneducated, bigoted hicks.
My affection for the classical music side of our local public radio has also thinned out considerably over the last year, as those who programmed the daily feed of classical selections went all out for gay pride, women’s history and black history months with effusive commentary and frequent selections of certain composers. It seems now that black history month has lasted for a whole year, and with announcers pounding incessantly on the merits of composers like Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, the Chevalier St. George, and William Grant Still. Since Florence Price was black and also a woman, I swear we got a double ration of Dances in the Canebrakes. Look, all the above were perfectly acceptable as composers of listenable classical music, but constantly replaying their compositions at the expense of the whole realm of other classical composers and musicians? Persistent wokery reaches its slimy tentacles into every single refuge that there is over the last few years. Comment as you wish.
I completely stopped listening in October 2012 when the Magliozzi brothers retired. For the prior ten years though I listened less and less to the non-Car Talk programming. The 70s though the 90s were NPR’s golden years. But Garrison Keillor along with both the morning and evening news programs went full Michael Moore after 9/11. Dumbed down, reactionary, leftist crap. They haven’t gotten a dime from me since Car Talk went away.
That tracks with my experience (except the working for them part). Have been on the automatic contribution plan for many years and will probably let it ride, but nothing extra,
and the TV side gets nothing (though I watch some of the science and history shows from time to time).
I only listen to the hourly news headlines on the radio so that I know what the line of the moment is, but often have to switch off before the five minutes are up.
Sgt Mom
Your more high brow taste as well as your serving others and general civility and participative nature – all virtues that I don’t have – kept you loyal a lot longer than I. But NPR probably had a lot to do with my move to the left by its general obnoxiousness. A friend of ours noted that a representative moment was when the same NPR show was very critical of spanking as discipline for children in dangerous situations who hadn’t learned reason or talk yet was followed the next week by a delight in spanking in terms of s/m sex.
My true breaking point were the announcers & phone ins from New York but played on our local public station on 9/12 (I think some even on 9/11). I always kept it on in my office as background music/chatter (a sure sign of not having a very musical ear) and if tere was ever a time when New York news was American news it was at the time). The venom against the U.S. (that this should teach us, one said, not to colonize and destroy other cultures but we were dogs, destined to soon return to our own vomit). Mamet said a moment for him was when something idiotic on the car radio led to his tightening jaw led to his wife saying she was tired of him keeping the station on just to be consistently pissed. He realized she made sense – that was no way to live (or listen).
Around here there was a general disdain for the people who put on shows for free, sometimes providing the tapes out of their own money. My husband and his good friend did a Saturday night show that was kind of folk music, kind of Czech. His friend was an excellent musician, he and his wife true folkies, thinking bluegrass a late and not especially desired innovation. They know (and knew then, almost 50 years ago) an immense amount about fiddling, old tunes – he was offered a job in the middle of Appalachia and left as much to work with the genuine talents there as for the salary (double here).. My husband believed each show should have at least one John Prine – it was diverse, there was that.
But the worse cases were the people who really prepared a lot and paid for their own tapes – another English department guy who had also graduated from the Episcopal seminary and his friend, the Rabbi, had a Sunday morning talk show that discussed movies, modern culture.and religion. There were rather unceremoniously dropped and it took them a while to get the tapes they had provided for the recording.
These were amateurs, replaced by national shows. Given this is A&M the station itself was minimally left-wing – but all the national stuff moved from the somewhat irritating to the actually offensive. I’d kept it on at the business in the seventies and eighties (jazz a somewhat restorative background to xerox machine noise). Now keeping it on would be a statement of your politics (and a divisive one).
Oh, and McNeil/Loehr were central – would anyone now on NPR have regular editorials from Richard Rodriguez? At a reception for applicants for a minority lit person here, I talked to a charming man who loved Rodriguez, had read and liked my husband’s book on genres (that there are ones that meet if sometimes challenge reader’s expectations) and I knew he wouldn’t get hired. He didn’t. There are no boundaries in some things, there are firm ones in others – a Hispanic that liked Rodriguez was not in that venn map of “real” Hispanics.
Here’s a link to an NPR feature about Pennsylvania elections now: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/10/27/pennsylvania-governors-race
The narrative is that the GOP gubernatorial candidate is proposing to appoint a state election official who will interfere with fair/free elections.
What’s most interesting is complete omission of reporting on an on-going immediate lawsuit going to the PA Supreme Court about mail ballots and drop boxes — key issues in the also-on-going disputes (‘denials’) of the 2020 elections.
The issue as raised by the GOP is that mail ballot ENVELOPES are required by black letter law to show the date it was sealed, by the voter. A lower court held the date requirement was moot, given that a “mail” ballot picked up a USPS postmark with a date. But in PA a bunch of “drop boxes” are used that — not being post boxes — don’t add the date. And undated envelopes with ballots are being collected. So, should those ballots be opened and votes counted? Or are they supposed to be sequestered unopened while courts figure it out? Or should they be destroyed un-opened? And is this the sort of thing a secretary of state appointed by a governor should decide?
Nearly a quarter hour of NPR news analysis ignores this issue.
But NPR wants you to remember that they don’t have advertising. That fact summarises their hypocrisy as well as everything else put together, doesn’t it?
Because I loved Keillor for years – listened every Saturday, bought the tapes for Christmas, my children grew up on him – I have written about NPR often. I won’t bore you with the hundred links here, but “The Sadness of NPR Christmas” is one of my most-read posts over the years. Anyone interested can search NPR or Keillor at my site. The comments on my posts have been spectacular, as he is clearly in some vein of conservative thought gone badly wrong and many people liked him. My wife hung on with Marketplace while doing the dishes, and still listens to the competitive word/current events shows when she thinks I don’t notice. I also loved Car Talk. Keillor loved both the Minnesotans and the NY artsy people he became part of, so his criticism of them was always kindly. That changed slowly after he married the Danish exchange student from HS he saw at his reunion and moved there. He became increasingly bitter and angry. I was off him by 1994 if not earlier. Sorry the rest of us aren’t good enough for you, Gary.
NPR represents the Arts & Humanities Tribe I grew up in very well. That’s just not the same thing as “public.”
I vividly remember the moment I quit NPR. It was somewhere in the mid-1990s. I was an avid listener of “Morning Edition.” I was also an avid C-SPAN viewer. I saw a Newt Gingrich speech on C-SPAN one afternoon. The next morning NPR aired the same speech–but made a very, very awkward edit to completely change the meaning of Gingrich’s speech to make it despicable.
It was never the same after that. It was my red pill moment. I’d been a liberal until then. I’m not now.
Sgt. Mom, feel no guilt whatsoever.
My wife and I were early fans of PHC, and saw the show live several times. Great stagecraft–during a break I watched Keillor and the cast revising the script on the fly and just in time. Or did I see merely an act for the attentive?
Keillor was such a genius for so long . . . sad. He exposed a lot of artists and genres to audiences they might not otherwise have reached, and was a great storyteller at his best.
About the time of the Gulf War he became insufferable and his monologs started sounding like sermonettes. I didn’t necessarily disagree with all of his opinions and observations but I didn’t listen to hear his political-spiritual struggles and I don’t miss him.
I made a New Year’s resolution about 15 (or more – I don’t remember exactly when) years ago to listen to NPR in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I was able to do it for maybe 3 weeks. The sanctimony was just too much for me. And many of the topics they chose to discuss was simply bizarre.
Oh – Steve Sailer’s book about Obama was called “America’s Half-Blood Price,” which I thought was genius.
Prince. Sigh.
Try KQAC online good programming (most of the time) M-F
I stopped listening to Wisconsin Public Radio in 2020. They used to have three hours of old time radio on Saturday and Sunday nights. In 2020, they cancelled Old Time Radio Drama with Norman Gilliland, as old time radio was so racist. I have not listened since.
You’re way more patient than I, Sgt. Mom.
The last time I listened to public radio regularly was Labor Day, 1990. All Things Considered ended their programming with Pete Seeger singing his version of The Internationale, this being at the end of a year when Communism crumbled and Germany was about to reunify. Yes, those events were newsworthy, but the sense I got was that the reporters in the no-longer-Soviet Bloc were a little subdued about having to report it.
The musical programming had gone south some time before, with single movements of the standards rather than the whole piece, and soporific guitar music (was that an early box-checking going on). Somehow I haven’t missed public radio since.
Ginny
These were amateurs, replaced by national shows. Given this is A&M the station itself was minimally left-wing
My local NPR station had a whole bunch of locally produced shows. I considered them rather idiosyncratic and also rather good. So local that I ran into one DJ in the line at the local polling place one election day. I recognized his voice. Little by little the local DJs got replaced by national programs. Another DJ, whose show was American Pop, had a show on an opera singer who did a good job on pop songs. (Not all opera singers who have sung pop are in that category.) That also got my attention because during the show I found out the opera singer and I were born and raised in the same area (probably born in the same hospital). Circa 2000 is when I noticed the local DJs being dropped- at least the election day DJ.
I stopped listening to NPR news after listening to their post-election coverage in 1984. I had voted Third Party that year, so I was neutral regarding the Demo/Republican candidates, who were Mondale and Reagan. I noticed a decided sneer in the announcer’s tone in discussing Reagan’s victory, which showed me that NPR was taking sides. No more NPR for me.
Circa 2000, I stopped listening to Prairie Home Companion, which I had listened to since 1983. I got tired of listening to reruns from several months ago. Had PHC filled in the rerun slots with shows from years ago, I would have continued listening. As a result,I didn’t catch Garrison Keillor going off the deep end regarding political partisanship.
Soon after, I discovered the existence of CD Box sets, many priced at $1 or $2 per CD. Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Blues, C+W, Bob Wills and Western Swing, Brazil, Ella, you name it. As a result, I had so much inexpensive, good quality music on my shelves that I didn’t need to listen to NPR or the local classical station to get good music.
I believe that once in the last 10 years I tuned into the local NPR station, and saw that the smug tone I had noticed in 1984 had increased.
I admit that I do not now, nor have I ever listened to NPR. Part of that is because for much of the last half century [*shudder* I AM getting old] I have lived in small town Colorado with these large granite things blocking the signal of small, weak radio stations which most NPR stations are. Part of it is an aversion to what is functionally State controlled media. Our government for a long time has been functionally Leftist in nature. As such, their media outlets only broadcast what supports and extends collectivism.
PBS is much the same, just in the TV band. And what used to be individual local PBS stations here are now under a group management. I admit that I do sometimes watch history and science specials, but noting the Leftist bias in the scripts. And my wife likes the British mysteries on Saturday nights [note: do not go to the rural Brit county of “Midsomer”. They have a higher per capita murder rate than Chicago by far.].
One interesting thing about PBS. Long ago when the world was new and my now very much adult daughters were in Girl Scouts [this was before they became the Stalin-ettes], my wife was a Troop Leader. As I was an assistant Boy Scout Troop Leader for my son. I had to just be an assistant because of my work schedule.] One of their special trips was to the nearest PBS station [different county] KTSC in Pueblo, Colorado. They were taken on a tour by the station manager. At the time, there was a funding argument in Congress over how much to give them, and the manager gave a speech to the girls wanting them to lobby their parents to write their Congress-critter in support of giving them more money. My wife is far from being a Leftist. She spoke up in opposition. And the answer of the station manager was, “We are the government. You have to give us the money.” Which kind of summarizes their attitude. I don’t care if Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie are the front men for the all-powerful State.
Subotai Bahadur
I used to like to listen to All Things Considered. It tickled my curiosity bone. But, funny thing, it broadcast right about supper time, and it turns out kids want attention, and need a bit of supervision with chores and homework. I liked the lack of ads on PBS, and I liked the classical music. We still tune in the Met Opera. (I wonder if some of the ATC leftward swing had to do with who was able to listen at supertime–childless?)
But I soured on TV news reporting after the Loma Prieta earthquake–hours of virtually nothing useful when simple things–like a little camera panning, or a map with push pins to show unaffected areas and known problems–would have been very enlightening. (Our friends turned out to be OK.)
I didn’t notice the political bias that much (I wasn’t very interested), but I did notice that I could get ten times the information in half the time by reading a report–and when usenet news groups came on tap I was in hog heaven. And then the internet…
After spending some time immersed in a story, and then listening to the news summary on the radio, it started to become clear how much was left out–enough to lie with. I didn’t take notes then, but the skewed language and omitted information and dislike for swaths of the population seems more egregious now. It could be that I just notice it more.
Wrt PHC:
I used to schedule my Saturdays to make sure I would hear A Prairie Home Companion. The highlight was generally The News from Lake Wobegon, with its wry but affectionate view of archtypical Minnesotans.
The show stopped when he ditched his lover/helpmeet for a rediscovered old sweetheart and moved to Europe for a while.
My Saturdays reorganized, and when the show returned with a New York home it wasn’t so convenient to listen to any more, but I tried. The “Hear the Old Piano” opening seemed a trifle tasteless, under the circumstances, but the big change was the bitterness. Garrison didn’t seem to like the folks in “Wobegon” any more, and it showed. I’m not a fan of bitter humor.
Or lies.
Lies.
I never regularly listen to NPR even though I have been forced to pay for it my entire working life.
But because I have occasionally heard it at work, I have a few anecdotes.
The most salient is when I happened to hear the announcer tee up a story about the Trayvon Martin case assert that it had renewed debate about “stand-your-ground” laws.
Now since the defendant in that case had been attacked and knocked to the ground, there was simply no possibility he could have retreated, rendering any discussion re “standing his ground” utterly moot.
In other words, NPR was lying to its audience, deliberately, with malice aforethought.
NPR has been and still remains nothing more than a propaganda mill for the regime.
NPR? National Prozac Radio? Like a loop of Volvo owners talking about their 240’s that had a Bernie bumper sticker covering a Free Darfor sticker covering a Free Tibet Sticker
NPR the network was always mostly a waste-land. Ever since I first heard it in the mid 1980’s. Now individual local shows especially on the smaller stations, they were often pure gold. Some of the most magical radio moments I’ve heard was some guy with a real passion and a fantastic collection of records you have never heard before and would never hear anywhere else. Same goes for quiet a few of the college stations.
But the big city NPR stations output and the syndicated shows have always been bland, pedestrian, patronizing and boring. Very derivative and third rate.
I never ever understood the appeal of the Prairie Home Companion. What stuck me a few mins into to the very first time I heard an episode in 1986 was – this guy has utter contempt for the rural folk he is describing. It stuck me at the time as nothing more than an updated Christy’s Minstrels Show except this time the characters were rural Minnesotan whites rather than southern blacks. And the Mr Bones skits were even in there in an updated form. The books do have some merit as a a light read but those shows just left me cold. As someone with grandparent who were farmers and knew rural life as a kid. So Keillor later nasty political opinions came as no shock.
As for PBS. That was a different matter during its golden age from the mid 1970’s to mid 1990’s. McNeill / Lehrer, Washington Week in Review, Firing Line etc were first rate TV and must watch. And with Masterpiece Theaters monopoly on BBC shows and with all those PBS / BBC co-productions PBS was the default TV channel for years. But PBS started losing the BBC shows in the mid 1990’s and all the first rate shows started fading away as people retired so that by the early 2000’s PBS was just another so-so cable channel with little going for it.
Since then I just check in with NPR and PBS every now and then to just see if the are still the walking dead. Which they are. The small local public stations and college stations are still worth a listen for their local shows. Still some real gems out there.
PBS is proof that a lot of ‘Murkins will watch perfect dreck if it’s done by Brits.
Our local affiliate runs three Brit crime dramas in a row on Sunday nights . . . OTOH once in a while NOVA or Secrets of the Dead is worth the hour.
If I were a benevolent dictator, Sesame Street and all the other stuff on NPR/Public TV would have to get capitalistic religion and fend for themselves
I grew up in an NPR/PBS household, but when I became a man I did away with childish things.
However there is a Cookie Monster
Cookie Monster is one of the greatest inventions of American TV. A blue furry, googly-eyed, limited-language, children-eyed puppet with a manic desire for cookies. What could be more beautiful in all of its child-like simplicity? What can be more relatable than a obsessive desire to gorge oneself on that greatest of American snacks, cookies (no they’re not biscuits)?
Think Voltaire or Homer or Conrad could have conjured up such a fictional creature? Well maybe Dostoevsky could, but more certainly the touch of genius fell upon Jim Henson that day.
Then they finally really did it, the maniacs, they blew it up. They ruined it as only the barbaric cultural vandals that PBS/NPR had become could do. First they soiled Cookie Monster’s vital force, in the name of fighting childhood obesity, by making him convert and admit that cookies are only a “sometime food.” Then, even, worse they revealed that his name was Sid.
I’m sure George Lucas had a role in this
The veil fell from my eyes about NPR around the time of the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. ATC and Morning Edition dutifully reported that their man was in trouble. But they also used his voice every time they possibly could, in stories that had nothing to do with politics. Especially those. Any time they could insert a quote sounding folksy and knowledgeable and harmless talking about anything, he was there. It was a lovely bit of subtle propaganda and I was impressed and horrified in equal measure.
For a few decades, I used to keep NPR playing in my car for my long commute. I had been getting fed up with their bias for some time, however, and when podcasts came to my attention ten or twelve years ago I made the jump and never looked back. It’s been at least five years since there was one word of an NPR broadcast heard in my car. I despise them now, and want them stripped of all government funding.
Terri Gross, who hosted “Fresh Air” on NPR is the one that turned me off completely. She is the most condescending, self-righteous know-it-all I’ve come across in years.
I like Radio Lab, This American Life, and the Classical and Jazz Music. That is about it. All Things Considered is trash. I never give because they hate us.
My experiences with public radio go back to the late ‘60s / early ‘70s in California, including my own stints both as a DJ and news director of a campus affiliate in Southern California…and I remained a loyal supporter (time and money) and listener for almost 30 years after that….
The entertainment was generally good, the news was always center-left (but not somewhere to the left of Gang of Four as it has become), but solidly done and a viewpoint I found worth listening to in contrast with other, more conservative sources of news.
The classical music programming, whether local, regional or national (including Minnesota PR and the NYC stations) ranged from interesting-and-worth-hearing to superb. As a musician, I loved it…and learned a good deal about alternative folk/rock that I might not otherwise have done.
All that changed over the ‘90s, as public radio became increasingly openly leftist (as opposed to merely center-left) and openly elitist in a divisive way. Increasingly LGBQTWhatever, less and less room for the sort of people I used to know in public radio/television who gave money and their time, and showed up for the Brie and Chablis fundraisers….
In the ‘90s, my morning commute switched from Morning Edition – All Things Considered (which seemed more and more false advertising) to CDs of history and philosophy courses from The Teaching Company….by NPR’s openly anti-American pro-Moslem reaction to 9/11 (we were in the larger NYC metro area) tore it for me. I haven’t listened for more than a few minutes since.
First, thanks for the kind words on Tea Party leadership. If only we had been treated fairly in the news, a guy named Trump might not have felt a need to get into politics.
Being from MN, was originally interested in Prairie Home Companion. Even read the book. But it never quite sat right. Even early stories had a something not quite right. Now we know why — Oh, man, how he hates us!
The NPR world went from “McCarthyism is still lurking in Republican circles” 24/7 to “…trans, gay, bi, women and minorities are hardest hit by the right’s lurking Jan 6th McCarthyism”. And little to no music.
Here in Nashville (Music City), the local public radio station (WPLN) first went to more talk, reducing classical and jazz music, then acquired frequency rights from the Vanderbilt campus station and split into all-talk and all (mostly national feed) classical. That lasted for a few years, and then they axed broadcast classical entirely, going with some weird hybrid I can’t stand to listen to. I complained, along with a slew of other classical fans, but of course to no effect. And like many who posted here, I had been a big supporter of the local public radio station. I donated, helped with the pledge drive, and read newspaper articles for the deaf service. I suppose our type just isn’t wanted anymore. My children grew up hearing great music in the car. Now that experience is lost for coming generations.
I got tapes of PHC every month from one my chiefs wife in 1984. They were wonderful and I listened a bit even coming from he Middle East. I quit for the reasons but whenever I hear it in the car for the news I can’t stand that all the announcers to every single person or business that isn’t woke “hard right extremists” every single time. That’s outrageous.
I hate typing on iPads!
Oysteria will appreciate that when Terri Gross was just a local host in the Philadelphia market she interviewed Jerry Falwell. It must have been in the mid-1980s. I have no love for Falwell but WHYY on in the office because it programmed classical during the day prior to Gross. The interview caught my attention because I was closely following politics at the time and Falwell was becoming an important force. Falwell ran rings around her and it was clear from her tone and conversation that she had no idea. None. She should have been humiliated but didn’t get it. My appreciation for Falwell’s intellect went up a couple notches and my regard for Gross went even lower. After that I made sure the station got changed at 3pm.
All classical all the time at
Classical963.com
The only button which gets used on either the car or the stereo
Local, here in the Toronto Ontario area so some local oriented ads, but no lefty smarmy editorializing.
@Ginny
“These were amateurs, replaced by national shows. Given this is A&M the station itself was minimally left-wing.”
Having worked at both, I much preferred KANM to KAMU. KANM was a bit more difficult to listen to in the car, tho the pay was better (>$0) at KAMU.
KAMU broadcast Hearts of Space beginning with ep. 1, so they had that going for them.
To be fair, I have to say that our local NPR affiliate is still mostly local. They do buy shows from APM and the like, but they can still boast of their home-town curation etc. and they cover local artists and events of all kinds pretty well, including live and recorded music made by local talent in various genres.
Terri Gross grosses me out and always has. I wouldn’t listen to her if she was interviewing The Most Interesting Man in the World.
I was a charter donor to the San Antonio NPR station when it launched while I was in college there. I was an annual donor to my local NRP affiliate for nearly 30 years in a dozen different cities.
I have a vivid memory of the day I decided I would never again donate to NPR:
The day that NPR “journalists” reported the Buch tax cuts had caused the deficit explode on the same day that the US Department of Treasury reported it had never collected so much tax revenue in a single month.
I stopped pledging sometime about 1996/7. It happened when I was listening to All Things Considered one afternoon. A story – just a story about just a thing of some interest and without a thing to do with sexual orientation. And yet, in the three people interviewed, one was gay, said so, and made every effort to spin just a story into just-a-story-and-I-am-gay.
It occurred to me in that moment that it was difficult to recall a story (or daily show at least) over the last many months that didn’t include a gay interviewee. And that is when I understood that that NPR was not really in the news business – it was in the indoctrination business. And I chose to no longer fund indoctrination.
I can’t stand the condescending, smug attitude of all NPR announcers.