Bill McKibben on innovative public radio

This American Life's Ira Glass

by Ken

Given a long enough weekend, I hold out the possibility, at least, that a person's (meaning "my") mind may slowly resume functioning. Over the weekend, facing a medium-length subway ride, I armed myself with a New York Review of Books issue that -- like most of them for me these days -- was incompletely read, and stumbled across an interesting piece (in the Nov. 11 issue) by Bill McKibben on interesting doings in public radio.

McKibben begins:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But then he confounds me at least with some surprising numbers about public radio listenership:

[A]n equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes -- are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace -- programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. You'd find not just the big news shows but also a variety of call-in shows: national ones, like On Point, The Diane Rehm Show, or Talk of the Nation, with its much-loved Science Friday edition, but also a number of superb local talk programs, with hosts like Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer in New York, Michael Krasny in San Francisco, Steve Scher in Seattle, Larry Mantle in L.A. -- the list is very long.

These differ from the commercial right-wing shows in that they daily feature guests from a wide spectrum of American political and cultural life: on the morning I'm writing this, for instance, Tom Ashbrook of On Point in Boston spent an hour discussing the rise of social gaming on Facebook, Krasny covered "the troubled construction industry," and The Leonard Lopate Show examined the current state of the company Google. The sine qua non of these efforts is Terry Gross's relentlessly intelligent interview show Fresh Air, which is based in Philadelphia, has been running for thirty-five years, is syndicated to more than 450 stations, and claims nearly 4.5 million listeners.

"And yet," McKibben notes, "very little gets written about public radio." Nor is there any "well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys)," which he suggests "reflects public radio's smooth professionalism -- it's gotten so good at its basic task that it's taken for granted, a kind of information utility."

I've mentioned before that I'm a rather reluctant daily Morning Edition listener. Since the loss of Rachel Maddow's Air America morning show (and before that the amazing Morning Sedition) I haven't found anything better on TV or radio to help me get out of the house in the morning. I find ME kind of stodgy and limited in its purview. Still, the information it does present isn't hopeless and is somewhat useful.

As a matter of fact, McKibben isn't here to defend what he describes as the public radio "flagship" broadcasts like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which he suggests have undergone something of the ossifying process observable in much more complete form in the standard infotainment newsmedia. He quotes All Things Considered veteran Brooke Gladstone:

As they become the primary news source for more and more Americans, public radio newsmagazines are restricting their own ability to move listeners. Like physicians in medieval times they seek to balance the four humors (so as not be too choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholy) by blood-letting. Public radio newsmagazines are looking a little pallid these days, because the passion has been drained off.

Later, McKibben writes:

It seems churlish to criticize even mildly the flagship public radio news shows -- their reliable excellence deserves lavish praise. In recent years, though, it's started becoming clearer that, for all their polish, the big shows like All Things Considered suffer from some of the same constraints that plague other parts of elite American journalism. They aim for a careful political balance -- one academic study found their list of guests slightly to the right of The Washington Post and "approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report." That's not a particularly interesting place to be, and it may explain why, especially in the Bush years, many left-of-center listeners defected to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, a highly professional but ideologically engaged daily hour on the Pacifica network. Others -- particularly young listeners -- are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive -- Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent. "There ought to be something in the public radio idiom that delivers information live," says Hockenberry.

Now throughout the piece I'm not confident that I'm hearing the same thing as McKibben. I should probably listen to more of the shows he recommends, but the ones I've sampled haven't done much for me. Notably, in a few weeks of listening to The Takeaway, I didn't get it at all. I couldn't even figure out what the show thought it was doing which represented an upgrade over Morning Edition. Of course, it may just be that I'm too old and/or hidebound to represent the "particularly young" audience thirsting for the kind of innovation he's so excited about.

For McKibben the fountainhead for the new wave of information-based radio programming is Ira Glass's This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio. (I can't say I've given the show a fair chance, but it's never held my attention. Again, though, that may just be me.)

Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed -- there's no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that's never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others -- like Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (known as the Kitchen Sisters), David Isay, and Jay Allison -- who had long been producing remarkable programs, including segments for the flagship news shows, extended features, ranging from quirky accounts of family kitchen rituals to politically minded portraits of juvenile prisoners. The best ones came to be called "driveway moments," because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they'd gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that's what he's done in This American Life.

Glass and the people who have come to work with him, and the people who have been inspired by his example, have in common "a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn't show up on the newscasts," to covering "life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions."

"A FEW OF THE BROADCASTS WORTH LISTENING TO"

In the print version of his article, Bill McKibben promises a list in the on-line version of radio shows he considers worth listening to. As he points out in the article, via streaming and free-download podcast, virtually every show he mentions can be heard by anyone who owns a computer "free of charge and without the slightest hassle." Here's the list. Note that in the on-line version each listing is a live link.

• This American Life
• Sound Opinions
• Planet Money
• Re:sound
• Too Much Information
• Radiolab
• Studio 360
• Fresh Air
• 360documentaries, with the best from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Wiretap, from the CBC
• Transom podcast
• On the Media
• BBC Radio 4
• The Sound of Young America
• Q podcast
• Vocalo
• The Takeaway
• To the Best of Our Knowledge

McKibben has a lot to say about Glass's approach, and about shows like Studio 360 and Hearing Voices and Radio Diaries and To the Best of Our Knowledge and especially Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad's Radiolab. "In one sense," he writes, "this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It's like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules." However,

there's one problem, and that's the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it's very hard to get paid anything at all; in the early weeks of the fiscal downturn two years ago, NPR canceled two of the shows -- Weekend America and Day to Day -- that were consistently airing the work of new independent producers. Up-and-coming broadcasters are increasingly left to make their own way. Consider, say, Benjamen Walker, whose show Too Much Information airs weekly on New York's independent radio station WFMU. It absolutely crackles -- an hour-long mix of "interviews with real people, stories about fake people, monologue, radio drama." It's good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he's made so far. That's a lot of people, but it's zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker's previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. "I think I made $80," he says. "If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It's much better not to think about it."

McKibben lays a good share of the problem at the doorstep of public radio station program directors. In the following excerpt he's quoting Greg Kot, cohost of the pop-music discussion show Sound Opinions, which he thinks is the bee's knees.

They are the gatekeepers for what gets on the air -- and their default mode is clearly to say no. "I'm not a radio veteran," says Kot, "but in my experience, program directors are conservative, afraid to rock the boat." They depend on their listeners to ante up about half a station's budget at pledge time, and local underwriters such as restaurants and bookstores to provide most of the rest, so they don't want to do anything that might offend them.

But the result is all too often flaccid radio, and listeners who have no idea what else is out there that they might enjoy. There are public radio stations so hidebound that they run the not-that-hilarious Car Talk twice each week.

Well, um, actually I think Car Talk is that hilarious -- and a lot else besides. I get a much better sense of the way people are living life in the America of today from a single broadcast of Car Talk than I got from all those weeks of trying to figure out what the Takeaway people thought they were up to, besides being "innovative," of course.

Nevertheless, as McKibben points out, we have hardly any serious discussion of what's happening on the radio, and I think anyone who cares should check out what he has to say.

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