Looking Ahead

At NCPR we try to discourage the brass from coming to town by subjecting them to intense on-air grilling by our listeners. NPR's chief operating officer Ken Stern was our latest guinea pig in testing this strategem, just this morning. We have given similar treatment to NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and NPR president Kevin Klose. They keep coming. Transparency seems to be a quality held in some regard at NPR. So thanks Ken, for your willingness to field from all comers on short notice and with good grace.

Next week NCPR staff will be attending a retreat guided by Rob Paterson, a Canadian media and community provacateur. Among our goals is to find ways to deepen NCPR's relationships with the communities we serve, and to increase the opportunities for two-way and many-way conversations among those communities. While some of the new technologies offer opportunities for us to achieve this, it is new ways of thinking about our role in the public conversation that will make the real difference. Pretend for a moment that it is 2020. What should NCPR be doing? How will the job and the toolbox change? Let us know what the future of public radio should look like.

Missing Martin:

As each celebration of his birth goes by, I miss Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr more. And not so much for his achievements in advancing human rights--towering as they are, or his soaring oratory--inspiring as it remains to this day, but more for the example of his steadfastness in the face of fear.

Having lived with the Twentieth Century's burden of frightfulness--nuclear annihilation, wars without number, vast and rapid change, and the newer insecurities of the Twenty-First, terror, poisons and pandemics--I think of Martin often. In a 1985 article in The Other Side, Chuck Fager wrote, "King was as free of fear as the rest of us were gripped by it." And as the tragedy of 1968 showed, he had better cause than any to tremble. King's achievement was to show us the proper response--to let fall the fear that is the burden of all, in order to keep reaching out for the freedom that is the birthright of all. So that we might persevere until a time when, as he says in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities."

Out of Box Experience:

In his Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley proposes that our capacity to reason and even our senses are governed by mental patterns, perceptual sets, that determine the limits of what the mind can conceive. The mind uses a taxonomy--a set of categories--into which it squashes the somewhat messier occurences of life, that not only shapes what we think but what we can think. Everywhere, polar categories such as liberal and conservative, cosmopolitan and provincial, A-Type and B-Type, believer and secularist constrain both the public conversation and the interior monologue. And to have different categories, or different categories of categories, would make of us a different people.

The author Borges, being a librarian, was an aficionado of classification systems. In his description of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, he notes that it contains a taxonomy of animals that bears no relation to our scientific concept of kingdom, phylum, class, etc. Instead there are "those that belong to the Emperor," "those that tremble as if they were mad," and "those that resemble flies when seen from a distance." The first order of business in trying to think outside the box is to be able to see the box.

Volunteers Disqualified:

You don't normally think of a bacon cheeseburger deluxe as brain food, but a trip to the town diner usually gives me plenty to think about. The regulars can be relied on to talk--at length--about everybody else's business. Today Mike, a frequently-disappointed friend of public radio, and I had round thirteen of a years-long discussion of "fair and balanced." While no one scored a knockout, Mike always gives a brisk workout.

A couple good licks from Mike: "Two sides to every story" is Beltway fiction. Outside the DC partisan bubble, there are five or twenty sides, or maybe only one--but it's hard to tell from NPR. Or--think tank commentators always have an agenda, they are there to sell their point of view, not to advance an open discussion of the facts.

So here is my modest reform agenda. First, burn all the rolodexes. Anyone who volunteers themselves as an "expert" on a given topic is automatically disqualified. Compile a new address book of those who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the mic. Second, any time you use a source with a 202 (DC) area code, you have to obtain views from people in twenty other area codes before calling a 202 number again. And third--what about bartenders as talk show hosts? They already manage the angry, the annoying, the opinionated and the overheated on a daily basis. Call in an expert.