American Radio: Your Best Bet in a Crisis

We were having a moan yesterday at The Guardian’s coverage of the crisis, letting various loons waffle on while failing in their civic duty to provide clear information to the public. And while the FT continues to be utterly reliable, it isn’t for the layman. So where can you find simple, accessible information about this mess? American public radio.

Take This American Life, presented by Ira Glass on Chicago Public Radio, and downloadable as a podcast here. Listening to just a couple of minutes of the discussion on this show makes you realise what a self-serving, sturm-und-dranging oaf John Humphries can be. In media circles Today is fawned over as being the agenda-setting show, but given its relative lack of context most ordinary people are lost in its hand-wringing over details. 

Glass on the other hand provides an informative, even-handed analysis. Rather than being the “frenzy” of radio (as Marshall McLuhan once characterised it) that Humphries whips up, this is a soothing balm. Glass’s phlegmatic temperament in no way diminishes his ability to target culprits and deflate the bad ideas that brought us to where we are. “It’s part of Republican orthodoxy that if we’d fixed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005, we wouldn’t be in the crisis today. Is that true?”, asks Glass in the tones of a bedtime story. “That’s absolutely not true”, replies Charles Duhigg of the New York Times in equally undulating tones, before explaining soberly and clearly why not, reminding us: “The blame for this [crisis] is absolutely bi-partisan”. The soundtrack of vox pops and music fades in and out slowly. I feel better already.

With NPR, if you get confused and miss an explanation, then don’t worry, because there’ll be another one along in a minute. This is radio calibrated towards the listener, rather than the presenter.

Equally good is Planet Money on NPR, where there’s Larry Ausubel, one of the guys dealing with the “toxic waste”, who with a lovely camp lispy voice tells us that everyone’s houses are worth something, and we just need the market to be unfrozen again. And the avuncular Jack Gutentag, a university professor specialising in mortgage economics, quells listener fears about mortgage lenders trying to ask for all their post-securitized money back: “We are still a nation under law, and the law cannot be set aside, no matter what happens to the lender”. Ahhh.

When it’s done right, America does this stuff so, so well.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Other | October 13, 2008 8:03PM |