David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
Sometimes I can just feel the neolib oozing from an NPR host and their faith in capitalism to fix all things.
For me it really started when Freakenomics lobbed those softball questions to one of the Koch brothers, and then I had a moment of “…what the fuck are you doing? …have you always been like this? …and I’m just now noticing? …oh god …oh god! your previous episodes are so terrible too! how did I not see this?! it’s all bathwater! no baby! oh fuck!”
I can’t quite put my finger on moments like yours, but had the same strange sensation of creeping revulsion toward NPR, where it once felt like a safe, familiar, even comforting, thing.
NPR, in a million ways small and large, carries water for the status quo, and it’s fuckin gross. Even just small ongoing things like their current phrasing “the war in Iran”. It’s an anodyne, neutral phrasing used in their broadcasts, seemingly as a rule. Same neutral language for cops when “an assailant was shot and died”, or when “a weapon discharged”, etc.
It’s never the war against Iran, it’s not “the unprovoked attack against Iran”, etc., it’s just this vague inscrutable thing merely happening, and merely in Iran. No one is responsible, and it just is there. And thankfully, it’s only IN Iran! Wouldn’t it be worse if that were spilling over into other places and things?
There are countless stronger examples, but this one is current and consistent and you can hear it in any random news broadcast, and it tells a huge lie in a tiny word every time.
Freakonomics was a big breaking point for me too. I used to think it was really cool, and even read the first book! But there was an argument in it that stuck with me, and was sort of the marquee analysis for the show for a long time.
It went something like, in the 90s there was all this fuss about super-predators, urban youths who would grow up without stable families and surrounded by gang violence, and they would basically never develop a conscience, and you’d have a generation of killers that made the cities unliveable. Apparently this was something Killary stumped about but I remember it being all over the news at one point. So why did this never occur? Because this generation would be the first who grew up with favorable laws and views toward abortion, so women were able to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
And at first I was pretty amazed at this, I was like, wow aren’t liberal reforms great? But after reading and learning and thinking more about the world I realized what I wish was obvious: there never was a threat of “super predators,” these people are just incredibly racist, and the freakonomocs team were fucking hacks.
Then one day I was picking my kids up and listening to Elliot Abrams on freah air or some shit speaking in dulcet tunes about the necessity to invade Venezuela. Another segment on Wait wait don’t tell me was about a precision missle that could precisely target a particular person, and they made a joke about how the missle could fly so close to the target that samurai swords would pop out and slice up the terrorist. Queue hysterical laughter.
And that was it, I realized these people are the most bloodthirsty fucking freaks imaginable. People who sounded smart to sell massacres and racism to dumb idiots, like myself at one point, to middle brow pseudo intellectuals who didn’t really pay attention, just wanted to feel good about being informed while learning nothing.
Once you see how NPR is just dripping in gore, you can’t unsee it
You’re falsely linking two different things, Freakonomics never connected the superpredator myth to abortion, just crime.
It’s also disingenuous to imply that Stephen Dubner (a libertarian) could speak for the views of every single NPR affiliate. It doesn’t work that way.
Tangentially, the Freakonomics guys definitely didn’t understand sumo well enough to give a full explanation of their data on that topic, however.
Oh yeah, to be clear I don’t think Freakonomics is worth listening to, but trying to draw a link between the views of a single host and community funded media at large is not honest.
I wish my break with them was that lucid, I just vaguely felt uneasy and decided to unsubscribe several years ago. Disquieting to know my gut was spot-on well before I pieced it together
My break was just hating their editing style. Wasn’t until years later when I learned they were conservative.
Radiolab has some good stories, but the editing is so grating. I wish there was something with energy between them and Science Friday or podcasts where it’s just two people talking back and forth. I appreciate Radiolab’s effort to keep me engaged and science exciting, but… it feels insulting to my attention span to do it as much as they do.
…which is a fair thing to insult, but not that much.
This American Life and The Moth may not be quite the format you’re describing but if you’re not familiar, they are old (big backlog), and quality and tend to feature viewpoints from the ordinary and even marginalized, both in their own ways.
Actually when I think about it, unless I’m misremembering, This American Life did a piece on body dysmorphia long before that concept reached more mainstream awareness. I don’t know how I’d feel about it now (I’ve just learned a lot since and it’s been like 10 years or something), but at the time I remember finding it compassionate and insightful, really opened my eyes on something I was previously only dimly aware of and curious about, before.