Re-upped

& Entry & I renewed my KQED membership some weeks back, entitling me to a whole other year of snooty, self-righteous indignation for the low, low price of $11 a month. I waited for them to do the New Yorker DVD-ROM offer, which should contain everything that magazine has ever printed since its inception. New Yorker's been a tad spotty for me, but the beauty of a searchable DVD-ROM is that if any particular writer catches my attention off-line, I can look 'em up directly on that there disc. This was in addition to my choice of the standard gift, which ended up being that emergency crank radio again. I really don't need any more umbrellas or mugs, but I do find some appeal in having one of those crank radios on every single vehicle and at every location I spend my time in.

I also take it as an opportunity to bitch about KQED programming some more. There's isn't much to gripe about, actually. They've picked up two terrific shows right when I'm paying attention, during the 11pm-2am weekday slot. " Day to Day" targets the busy 20/30-somethings with slicker production and younger hosts. " News & Notes" brings the Black perspective to current events. (Yes, their show descrīption says 'Black', not 'African-American'. Very refreshing.) It's pointed without coming off like some SNL skit spoofing cable-access 'Black Power' shows. While the uninitiated would mark the show as colloquial after hearing a few slang terms tossed around, the more astute would realize that similar terms are thrown around by your McLaughlins and Lehrers all the time. It's just that your 20/30-something years of experience with the American media have acclimated you to the latter and not the ones that perfectly intelligent people from different backgrounds use.

And then there's the third hour.

I had once tried setting an alarm on my radio to send me to bed at 1 am. But now simply keeping it tuned to KQED until that hour has the similar effect of making it the most loud and obnoxious thing in my room. That's when the breathy voice of pompous gasbag Christopher Lydon introduces us to " Open Source", a show which attempts to reproduce the level of discourse on Internet blogs. In many ways it meets its goal. Like most blogs, the show is inflated, recklessly opinionated, biased, and tragically uninformed, squandering the resources of a valuable medium through a crippling lack of craft.

I actually remember Lydon from a long drive back up the grapevine some years ago surfing Central Valley radio stations (furiousg was there). It was memorable for me because of some bit he was doing where he had some historian/actor on pretending to be (I kid you not) the ghost of Thomas Jefferson. Besides the hubris and sheer hokeyness of the concept, I just saw absolutely no need for it. It did nothing an informed interview on Jefferson wouldn't have accomplished, and only served to muddle things by speculating on issues that Jefferson couldn't have possibly imagined. This was apparently a different show that Lydon was doing, but as I heard a few weeks ago, he's brought the bit over to Open Source as well.

If you, like me, never really had any notion of the difference between good and bad interviewing and discussion moderation, you will after Open Source. Listen as Lydon astounds you with an impressive lack of understanding of both his guests and their arguments. He'll make spurious assumptions, ask disgracefully leading questions, interrupt guests, goad them into speculation, take quotations radically out of context, and phrase queries like pompous high school essay topics. At times I really wonder if he's actually listening to his guests all. Compare and contrast this tripe with the damned near symphonic orchestration of interviews, debates, and listener call-ins by the likes of 'local' talents like Michael Krasny (or even his many understudies), to say nothing of other NPR interview/call-ins like " Talk of the Nation".

The irony, of course, is that I'm writing this all in a blog entry as somebody who does not study media as a career. Which kind of is the point -- it's great that there's this resource for expression and talk-back, but unless proven otherwise, it's really no more than listener call-in. Shows like Open Source would have you thinking otherwise if you're not careful.