For several months, I’ve been participating in a series of National Public Radio surveys, which are always kinda fun and make me feel like I have some tiny voice in…somethingorother.
Today’s survey asks what kind of economic news we’re hearing and what kind we want to hear. At one point, it inquires what proportion of national news we’d like, what proportion of stories about individual citizens, what proportion of local reporting.
I guess I’m an awful crank, but you know…I could do with a lot fewer human-interest pieces. Today, for example, NPR focuses on the life and hard times of Ms. Sylvia Martinez, whose luck has been flowing downhill since she was laid off a $52,000-a-year job. “Fifteen days from homeless,” she’s victimized by a fire in an apartment above hers, which leaves her few belongings soaked and the ceiling down in the living room. She’s unsuccessfully assayed suicide, her grown daughter has fled (taking Sylvia’s grandchild), and on and on.
It’s not that I’m not sorry for the lady. It’s that I don’t think wallowing in stories like this serves any purpose. We know, already, that things are tough all over. Breathes there one American citizen who doesn’t have a relative, friend, or acquaintance affected by the collapse of the Bush economy? If we haven’t seen the equity in our homes disappear, if we’re not making payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of the asset underlying it, if we’re not out of work ourselves, we certainly have enough people in our own lives who have been hurt by this disaster to understand what it means on a human level.
Please, dear NPR: Take your reporters off the sob stories and assign them to local coverage. Get rid of some of the gab-fests and replace them with in-depth local news programs. As newspapers close and local television and radio news stations deliver little more than advertorial and infotainment, we need professional, responsible, investigative reporting on the local level. We need news, real news, on all levels: international, national, and local.
Do you listen to NPR? If so, what would you like to hear more of? Or less of?
Oh my goodness, it was that very story that resolved me to put on headphones from now on when NPR is on the radio at work. Things are hard, I get it. Tragedies and such are happening all around us. Yes, some of us are living it, some of our friends are hurt. If the only purpose the story serves is to rehash the pathos, though, I don’t want to hear it. There’s simply only so much my nerves and empathy can take.
I’m tired of the opinion pieces and too worn out to deal with the human interest pieces unless they’re offering ways for us to help and be helped. @jobangels on twitter has the right idea.