Radio Blah Blah

It is to my unending shame that I have yet to donate any money to KUT, my local NPR station.

Or at least that's what I've thought until recently. The stories have done nothing for me lately, with the ever-present exceptions mostly coming from Marketplace.

To wit: this morning they wasted half of my drive to work talking about the sequel to that wretched film, Night at the Museum. I don't know whether the Smithsonian will benefit from its popularity, nor do I care. That that travesty of a dungheap, to say nothing of a movie, warrants a sequel means that the moviegoing public belongs in a museum of things so ridiculous they're almost worth staring at.

A possibly more putrid example is a story from May 6 about the economic effects of the Sichuan earthquake a year later. On the face of it, it seems an exciting story for me, as it combines, potentially, two of my favorite subjects: geology and economics. Naturally for NPR these days, though, it is five minutes of aural torture. M. Block and A. Kuhn talk to two workers who are working very hard or trying to find work and come to no conclusion whatsoever. They can't come to any conclusion that you or I couldn't come to by tooling around China for a couple of days, because all they do is talk to two people. And then they admit, 4:11 into the piece, that they indeed have nothing to say except "Wow, China is big!"

Now, there's something to say for honesty, but there's even more to say for the editorial gumption to admit that uhh, I don't have anything to say about the economic impacts of the earthquake, so let's run a different story.

It's a good thing I am not paying for this.