Through the Eyes of a Stranger: American Radio

~ Clarissa

Back in Ukraine, I used to be a huge fan of nighttime radio shows. I find something very comforting in the idea of voices speaking softly in the background as I work on the computer, informing me of the news and not trying to invade my field of vision. In the US, however, I never had a chance to listen to the radio. Since I don’t drive, it didn’t feel like it made sense for me to buy a radio.

Now, however, I finally decided to familiarize myself with the American radio, especially as so many people rely upon it as their main source of news. I had no idea how to choose a radio station or which stations are good. I think I vaguely heard something positive about a radio station called the NPR. I seem to recall a former colleague of mine telling me that his first action as a finally employed professor was to donate money to the NPR to support their progressive activism.

I have no idea if the NPR my colleague supported is the same NPR that I’m listening to but I have to say that I’m a little confused. As I said before, I have trouble determining what counts as news as opposed to humor among the American news sources. This is why I’m now confused as to whether this NPR channel is supposed to be humorous or serious. The very first two pieces of news I heard about from this radio station were:

1. A Tea Party group in Florida is protesting against fluoridated water because they believe it is a governmental intrusion into the lives of citizens.

2. The Obama administration and the Congress can’t reach an agreement as to whether pizza should be considered a vegetable.

I know there is a lot of insanity going on in the world but, surely, things can’t be that weird. Can anybody enlighten me as to whether NPR is a humorous radio station?

If there are radio stations you particularly enjoy and listen to often, please recommend them to me. I’m planning to take up radio listening seriously since it does wonders for my grading. I want talk radio, though, not music channels.

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Published by Clarissa

60 thoughts on “Through the Eyes of a Stranger: American Radio”

  1. NPR is serious. They’re the radio equivalent of PBS, and those stories are both real. The pizza one has been going around the blogosphere all day.
    I enjoy CBC Radio 1, I love listening to Q with Jian Ghomeshi, I have a bit of a crush on him, but I listen to it on the internet, rather than the radio. For music stations, I go to Last.fm. 🙂

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    1. Oh, and NPR has shows like This American Life and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! which are not news, but fun and interesting to listen to nonetheless. Ira Glass is second to Jian Ghomeshi on my list of radio personality crushes, which consists of exactly two people.

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    2. I still can’t believe the pizza story. On the heels of the recent discussion on this blog where people tried to convince me that the attitude to food in the US is not unhealthy, it is especially interesting. I can’t believe I missed all that while I’ve been busy recording my online lectures!
      I’ll check out Jian Ghomeshi for sure!

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      1. Who tried to convince you of that?? That’s a strange interpretation of that thread.

        “For nearly a year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been crafting a proposal aimed at providing more nutritious school lunches that include an array of fruits and vegetables. But the food industry and its allies in Congress have pushed back on the details, saying the proposal would be costly, partly because of vegetable prices.”

        The USDA, the Obama administration, and all the consumer groups want more fresh fruits and vegetables in school lunches. Sounds like a healthy attitude from all sides to me – except : The food INDUSTRY has pushed (bribed) congress to water down the changes by leaving in the potatoes and tomato paste as is.

        “Ordinarily, these types of issues would be hashed out as the USDA gathers comments from the public while finalizing the proposal. But several lawmakers made an end run around the process. They added amendments to block the two changes — on starchy vegetables and tomato paste — to agriculture spending bills moving through the Senate and House.”

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        1. A country where the president and the congress seriously discuss if pizza is a vegetable is a country with a very unhealthy attitude towards food. I cannot imagine that happening anywhere else in the developed and semi-developed world.

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      2. Pizza is an American staple. There are actual rage-fights between people who prefer New York City pizza vs. those who prefer Chicago pizza. The battle over pizza is an ideological one. You’re not arguing pizza. You’re arguing the home town. You’re arguing who is more American and what it means to be American. You’re arguing America. Everything is riding on giant greasy cheesy slabs of meat-slathered communion wafer. If pizza can be classified as a vegetable, America wins.

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      3. A friend of mine refuses to believe that real pizza comes from anywhere but New York City street vendors. I do not think he would agree that it is a vegetable, however, as he always gets his with extra pepperoni.

        Pizza is very American and good luck trying to stop us figuring out how to stuff ourselves with more of it than is already possible.

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      4. Nowhere in the story did it say the president was discussing anything with anyone. But you do seem very emotionally attached to that idea so I am beginning to doubt that explaining the reality of the situation will ever have much effect.

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      5. “I understand you are being facetious but this is really scaring me.”

        Cute, but not relevant to the story in anyway. The issue was not discussed, or voted on. All consumer groups and the USDA were trying to get rid of the pizza and fries and the powerful food industry and crooked congress made an end run around the process before it had begun.

        But maybe we can fix this by raising awareness about how unhealthy pizza is on our blogs!

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        1. “All consumer groups and the USDA were trying to get rid of the pizza and fries and the powerful food industry and crooked congress made an end run around the process before it had begun.”

          -You are forgetting the idiot parents who don’t teach their children that eating this garbage for LUNCH is a very stupid thing to do.

          “But maybe we can fix this by raising awareness about how unhealthy pizza is on our blogs!”

          -A great idea! I know parents who feed their 2-year-old nothing but pizza and French fries. And these are educated people, too.

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      6. Now we are back to personal responsibility? I thought you were encouraging fighting for our consumer rights, which you declared Americans had “forgotten how to do”.

        Anyway we are talking about hot lunches, and foods that are extremely tantalizing for kids. Fries and pizza do not belong in school lunches, and were not there when I was growing up (nor were soft drink machines).

        When the government stops funding schools (so they need sponsors) and when lobbyists completely take over government this is what happens.

        And you know some really weird “educated” people, Clarissa. Again, probably because you are in the midwest. Although I have some “uneducated” relatives out that way and even they don’t force their children to eat “nothing but fries and pizza”.

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    3. We must have listened to the NPR at the same time. I had a good laugh at the “is pizza a veggie?” discussion. The afternoon programming is more low key, the morning programming is more news. I like both actually. I have a hell of a commute, so the NPR is a gift.

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      1. Sounds like they twisted the story for dramatic effect, or for intentional comedic effect, to the detriment of everyone’s understanding of the situation. It really isn’t funny at all how industry and congress made an end run around the process. As a consequence children will be eating more starchy food instead of healthy fruits and vegetables in the future. So now, thanks to npr and their clever and amusing take on the story, we can ignore the ugly truth of the matter and instead blame it on Americans and their weird culture.

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  3. Houston: one of largest cities in US and has a Pacifica radio station which means less corporate than NPR although not without its own problems.

    I can no longer tolerate KPFA-B in Berkeley but there is KPFK Los Angeles.

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  4. NPR gets high marks because of how bad the rest of U.S. radio is. AM radio in the U.S. is filled with call-in shows with people yelling and the occasional sports station. FM U.S. radio has Christian stations, pop music, country music, and NPR.

    Some cities have community radio stations run by volunteers. Community radio stations have a bigger variety of music and less yeIling than other stations. In your region, a community radio station is 88.1 KDHX, http://kdhx.org/

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  5. The fluoridation of water thing harks back to the Cold War. There was a film called Dr Strangelove – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, which featured a mad army officer who was convinced that the fluoridation of water was a communits plot, and that the “cahmunists” were out to interferere with our “bahdily fluids”. It was satire, of course, but there must have been real people to base the satire on.

    But perhaps in a democratic society a person has a constitutional right to enjoy typhoid and dysentyery.

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  6. First year in the US: no TV, no telephone, no Internet; only my books and a radio. This was the Fall of 2004, during the presidencial campaign. As I was slowly driving into madness or as I was merely experimenting a cultural shock I was not expecting at all, NPR kept me ‘sane.’ I discovered the channel randomly and I found it was by far the best radio station available to me then.

    That being said, I now drive every Monday morning from Montreal to the US and I listen to the radio while driving. In Canada I listen to the French language equivalent of CBC Radio 1 and also CISM, the Universite de Montreal radio station, which has an outstanding muscial playlist. In both these channels, news are fairly diverse… well, they are OK in comparison with other media outlets. The minute I cross the US/Canada border and I switch to NPR, I am sure to hear ‘president Obama’ and ‘Israel’ within five seconds in the news section. This has always been strange to me. I know Canadian and US politics are different, but in Canada we do not heat ‘Prime Minister Harper’ and ‘Israel’ every five seconds.

    The sitcom ‘Parks & Recreation’ had a delicious parody of NPR a couple of weeks ago.

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    1. “The minute I cross the US/Canada border and I switch to NPR, I am sure to hear ‘president Obama’ and ‘Israel’ within five seconds in the news section. This has always been strange to me. I know Canadian and US politics are different, but in Canada we do not heat ‘Prime Minister Harper’ and ‘Israel’ every five seconds.”

      -:-) So true!

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  7. What are your thoughts on Mexican radio? Because when I dial in and tune the station, they talk about U.S. inflation. I understand it just a little. No comprende. It’s a riddle.

    If you really want to have fun you could check out 93.7 FM Houston the Arrow (or probably any big-budget right-wing American station). The playlist is the usual classic rock applesauce, but the morning show is appalling. Four guys, two of whom are in character with these black and gay caricature voices so that the show sounds “multicultural,” spouting right-wing doublethink bullshit that will make you want to die with how pompous, ignorant, and hateful it all is. One of their teasers calls Obama a “racist sumbitch,” alluding to the POTUS’s alleged anti-white sentiments (and surely trying to displace the actual racism that has fueled much anti-Obama vitriol). Sometimes on the way to work I listen to them for three minutes if I wake up feeling extra masochistic. This one time, though, this one time, they blew my mind. They advocated legalizing marijuana. I guess that movement really does have legs if it’s even picked up the conservative redneck nutbars. Then again, the conservative redneck nutbars I’ve personally met loved their dope as much as their .22s, so maybe it’s not so weird after all.

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      2. The competing station, 107.5 FM the Eagle, has a genuinely appealing morning show. The morning and midday shows for Austin’s 93.7 FM the Rock are even better. They all play the same music though. Lotta Stones, Journey, Eagles, Floyd, etc.

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    2. “This one time, though, this one time, they blew my mind. They advocated legalizing marijuana. ”

      Haha. An amusing myth is that liberals are more rational about cannabis than conservatives.

      ps, “redneck” is an offensive slur.

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      1. “ps, “redneck” is an offensive slur.”

        Mea culpa. Ita est ut dicis. Gratias ago.

        Clarissa, does WordPress allow you to delete offensive class-related slurs from posted comments? Can you change it so my thing just reads “conservative nutbars”?

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      2. Nah never mind jokepost as usual and a bad one I know you can’t change comments. But I am serious about the mea culpa. You’re right, Isabel. Shit’s not cool.

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  8. I don’t listen to terrestrial radio much anymore, I listen to Sirius satellite radio and my collection of near a 1,000 CD’s 😀 Where I live in Jersey, we have at least two pop Top 40 stations, two stations that play nothing but rap and R&B ballads, and three Spanish stations, one that plays ballads, one that plays generic salsa and one that plays Reggaeton, and no rock station, for real. That’s why I got satellite radio for my car, I love the 60’s and 70’s stations, Classic Vinyl, Boneyard, the 40’s stations, Prime Country and Siriusly Sinatra, I’m a musical schizophrenic 😀 If you can, you really ought to check it out, I think most electronics stores like Best Buy install satellite for cars and they got almost every type of music out there 🙂

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  9. are you kidding? At least pizza is a food. Under the Reagan administration there were people who argued that catsup should count as a veggie in school lunches!

    Poor NPR used to be way better before it got all paranoid about losing its funding and/or sold out to its corporate sponsors.

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      1. In a crooked government run by the all-powerful corporations. You might note that these two isolated incidents were roundly mocked by >gasp< outraged Americans. This is why we need successful programs like "gardens in the classroom" or whatever it's called, that was started on poor areas btw, instead of imagining that we can use our consumer rights to get agribusiness or food industry (often the same) to supply us with healthy food.

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        1. “This is why we need successful programs like “gardens in the classroom” or whatever it’s called, that was started on poor areas btw, instead of imagining that we can use our consumer rights to get agribusiness or food industry (often the same) to supply us with healthy food.”

          -Yes, I think we all realized already that you don’t believe in consumer rights.

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      3. “-Yes, I think we all realized already that you don’t believe in consumer rights.”

        wtf? Was that necessary? Jeez. In fact, I fully support their efforts and think consumer groups should keep up the pressure. I am just not waiting around for them to succeed any second now because I have gotten a clear picture of what we are up against. Big difference!

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  13. Fear of the fluoridation of the public water supply has been part of paleoconservative** lore for a very long time, reaching back to the late 1940s. The commies are poisoning our precious bodily fluids! You must watch the movie Dr. Strangelove, a satire of the late fifties/early sixties.

    Debates about whether pizza is a vegetable are not exactly new. Back in the 1980s, a Reagan appointee was claiming ketchup as a vegetable for school lunches. Actual vegetables are more expensive than starch, so anti-tax cheapskates want to cut any item they can from the subsidized school lunches.

    **(original John Birch types, frank white supremacists, isolationists, delusional anti-communists)

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    1. “Fear of the fluoridation of the public water supply has been part of paleoconservative** lore for a very long time, reaching back to the late 1940s. The commies are poisoning our precious bodily fluids! ”

      -It’s very hard for me to imagine that any body can be serious about it.

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      1. Fluoride is a cumulative toxin. Its use may be a contributing factor to the increase in Alzheimers and osteoporosus. That said, the fanatic conservative response to it is very much overblown.

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  14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

    This is the basis for the Dr. Strangelove character. And yes, sadly, they were and are completely and totally serious. They apparently have an active website, but I’m not going to link to that nonsense. They also didn’t like integration, communism or common sense much. Anti-floridation was one of the big platforms of John Bircherism, if I recall correctly. My knowledge is all second-hand.

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  16. Clarissa: Thank you. My dad told me some stories when I was younger about a teacher he used to have who was a John Bircher. Since I’m a history nerd with a really good memory, it seemed like a good time to post what I knew. Although I am surprised that only one other person on this thread had heard of them. What’s weirder to me is that they are apparently still active, post Cold War. I guess they still have good ol’ Fidel and flouride to rail against.

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  18. Just out of curiousity, why do you dislike music programs? I can’t concentrate unless I have music playing, personally. Does the music distract you? Feel free to ignore the question if you think it’s too personal.

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    1. Yes, I’m weird about music. I feel like it needs my undivided attention and then I can’t do anything when it’s on. It’s strange because I can watch TV and work on my literary translation or grade at the same time. But music needs too much investment, otherwise I perceive it as noise.

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  19. I get it. I can sometimes get distracted by music, but mostly it helps me work. Especially if I can work out a playlist ahead of time. Or just stream a radio program that plays music, which is nice, because all the decisions are made for me. Then again, I’m also a concert fiend 😀 I’m the girl doing the strange full-body dance tap up front or zooming around in the pit, or singing along if I know the words.

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  20. Isabel :
    Sounds like they twisted the story for dramatic effect, or for intentional comedic effect, to the detriment of everyone’s understanding of the situation. It really isn’t funny at all how industry and congress made an end run around the process. As a consequence children will be eating more starchy food instead of healthy fruits and vegetables in the future. So now, thanks to npr and their clever and amusing take on the story, we can ignore the ugly truth of the matter and instead blame it on Americans and their weird culture.

    It’s always a danger to be ironic cross-culturally or even cross-ideologically. People develop the weirdest views of each other that way.

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  21. @Clarissa
    Sadly the world is that weird right now. It’s why Jon Stewart’s comedy show on Comedy Central is a trusted news source. Read the Onion; it’s shockingly prescient sometimes. :p

    I feel the same way about music with lyrics. It’s got to be something like light classical or something instrumental for me not to get derailed while working. And I cannot play any music all day. I once had a co-worker who’d do nothing but play the Christmas station all day every day from after Thanksgiving to New Year’s. As everyone knows, the Christmas songs are usually the dreckiest of most singers’ ouevres, and the station usually confines itself to the same twenty songs which are all variations of five songs.

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