On Sunday, October 30, 2011, for reasons yet unclear, Tom Keith collapsed in his home. Keith's passing robs us of one of the most enjoyable personalities ever to occupy a Minnesota Public Radio studio. Most Americans who knew him probably did as Garrison Keillor's sound effects guy, the one who lent Prairie Home Companion sketches that all-important extra dimension. Others—Minnesotans—knew him as Jim Ed Poole and Doctor Larry Kyle, characters he created for his hosting gig on The Morning Show, which he inherited from Keillor, and which he left in 2008.
I had an opportunity to speak with Keith when he agreed to a "high concept" interview of mine. [...]
When Andrew Breitbart commandeered Anthony Weiner’s admission-of-digital-lecherousness press conference earlier this month, just seven minutes elapsed before he began to recount the tale of how America was first introduced to his strange media empire. In 2009, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles approached Breitbart with footage of low-level ACORN employees apparently offering to abet the proprietors of an illegal immigrant child prostitution ring. “To those who say your journalism here is suspect,” a reporter asked, “what do you tell those folks?” Breitbart snickered.
“'You're going to be held to a different standard,'" Breitbart said he told O’Keefe and Giles at the time. “But I said, what we're going [...]
NPR is afraid to make its people's email addresses accessible to the public. So, here you go! It's almost always in the form of first initial and last name—like FLast@npr.org.—at NPR dot org. Easy!
According to people who are actually listening to NPR (okay, it's Abe Sauer), bereaved listeners are phoning in to their ombudsperson, and sobbing about the contract termination of Juan Williams.
Recently, NPR aired the word "goddamned" again, this time in a quote from a Tom Cruise-in-character-as-Les Grossman appearance, and boy howdy is America upset about the taking of the Lord's name in vain. But don't worry, NPR's ombudsman (who is a woman! Which gives me pause that she should be opining on language usage!) is on the case. She writes: "I'm seeing the question through a different lens-one that is not based in the New York-Washington corridor, where this example of offensive language often goes in one ear and out the other." While it's surely true that in "real America" it is sometimes considered offensive to Christians to use [...]
