I don’t know about the bcc, but as for NPR are their any transcripts from the shows November of 2000? I really hated having the radio on in the office that month, because their slant was very clear, and every one of their guests annoyed the hell out of me. To be fair, however, while they never let anyone who supported Bush speak, there were a few Nader supporters allowed to talk for a bit before being out-shouted by the Gore guest speakers. Or were they debating? It was hard to tell because they were high-strung either way.
I suspect Milum is in the decemberist camp of misinterpreting balance for bias. It’s an easy mistake to make if one is strongly on one side of the political spectrum. For example, if the Beeb interviews the Israeli victims of a suicide bombing, but then interviews some Palestinians about the situation, december considered the latter to be bias. I consider it balance.
Since the Beeb gets slammed for bias by the far left and the far right, I’ve always considered it to be doing a good job.
I guarantee you that they pay for ther BBC feed.
Fo comparison’s sake I have XM in my truck. I get NPR (WAMU out of Washington DC) via FM and BBC WorldService, CNN. Fox News, and others via FM.
Clearly the BBC has the greatest coverage of world news…though the cricket scores are a little dull. (And the soccer scores are mind-numbing. Arsenal 1, Devonshire Nil, ManU 2, Woodbridge 1. No kidding, they do that for like 5 minutes…just the teams and the score. Jazz it up guys!)
NPR does exploit their web of affiliates very effectively when events break in the US. And they do have international reporters when events are big enough. They sent teams to Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. But worldwide stringers? Nope.
I suspect that’s a tradition derived from when people relied on the radio to get the results of the football pools (form of gambling on the match results) - clear and comprehensive result announcements were required. Anyway, if you think that’s bad, you should hear the 3-day non-stop cricket coverage - on the radio!?!?
I think that NPR uses the BBC and other reputable and reliable world sources for news, because those sources actually have more to say, and accurately, about world events than the commercial american mainstream networks and press these days whose veracity is suspect at best anymore.
For my taste, I actually prefer most of the newcasting on NPR these days to what is offered on the regular networks. One of my favorite segments on NPR is All Things Considered.
I think that the commercial network news (as broadcast by ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) in this country has become incredibly censored, slanted and biased and tabloid level sensation seeking. And sadly that there are too many people in this country that don’t or won’t look for or listen to anything beyond those networks…believing that what they are seeing and hearing every day in that forum is the most accurate and factual and complete information. Not realizing that our media/networks have been gobbled up by certain business interests in order to control it for their benefit…
The station that I listen to NPR on here - carries the syndicated feed from regular BBC newscasters. They also use other sources from around the world and the country for their stories. I enjoy NPR because they cover many kinds of stories that you won’t get in the commercial network news anymore, and they actually tackle real issues and report on them with the facts, rather than opinionated /slanted and censored sound bites that seem to be the mainstay of the commercial networks both national and local.
I feel like, if you really want to be well informed on national and world events, you have to search for news and information in alternative places because the mainstream media in this country is no longer giving it to us straight.
Quite frankly, I don’t feel that the NPR is pretentious in carrying news from the BBC and other credible world sources -rather that they are a notch above the commercial mainstream offerings.
For me it is nice to have a source or 2 whose broadcasts target an audience at higher than the 8th grade education level, which is the level that our mainstream media to include newspapers and news magazines like Time and Newsweek report to.
One-niiiiil, to the Ar-se-naaaaal!
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Anyway, I take a perverse pleasure in listening to the scores (they will often add the names of the scorers to “jazz it up” a little), read in a matter-of-fact monotone. Before the internet, international radio was one of the few ways American football fans could follow the game. While a local library might have a subscription to a British newspaper, the paper would usually arrive several days (if not weeks) after the publication date, so you’d end up reading week-old news. The radio was the only way to get real up-to-the-minute sports news.
So I guess I get a little nostalgic when I hear the words “And now, turning to sport…”
Plus, I find the straightforward tone to be quite refreshing, in contrast to the overblown machismo that I detect in American sports coverage (say, ESPN). That’s just a personal opinion, I suppose.
However, it does seem that the American style of sports broadcasting is making some inroads into British news–Sky Sport, for instance, is much more “American” in style than BBC’s “Match of the Day” ever was.
Still, I don’t think I could get through a radio broacast of a cricket match, as jjimm describes–though I can imagine that listening to a radio broadcast of an American baseball game would equally bore the socks off a Brit (or any non-baseball fan, for that matter).
I’d prefer the more somber tone of BBC radio sport reporting as an alternate to the “Sportcenterization” of sports anchoring that has even filtered down to American local newscasts. Every pudgy guy with a funny hairdo dressed a blazer seems to be working on his audition tape for ESPN every night whether he’s reading scores from NBA games over the highlights or reporting the scores to every little 1A football game within a five county area.
Our main NPR affiliate rarely carries BBC News beyond what gets used nationally by Morning Edition and All Things Considered. I wish they’d carry a couple of hours overnight rather than their idiotic self-produced 12am-4am New Age show.
Although I’d try listening to an entire cricket match over the radio rather than suffer through another minute NASCAR on the radio that some of the commercial stations carry locally, since I get stuck hearing it at work sometimes during a night race. Two guys trying to explain what the leaders of a 40-odd car race are doing, along with occasional crashes or other happenings all with one long sustained engine growl in the background. Even the usually excellent Alabama football radio host Eli Gold can’t make that crap interesting.
<small hijack> This baseball fan prefers listening to baseball on the radio to watching it on TV. There’s a lot of subtle stuff happening on the field that frequently doesn’t get mentioned on TV (e.g., defensive players shading one way or another depending on the hitter) because there’s a TV bias in favor of following the ball to the exception of all else. And because “a picture is worth a thousand words,” the TV commentator doesn’t usually bother describing the action in detail; he’s nattering on about how the hitter is 2-for-5 career when hitting from the left side versus this pitcher in day situations with runners in scoring position after the seventh inning in July. On radio, by contrast, a good announcer can bring the whole field to life: batter comes to the plate, left fielder adjusts back, right fielder comes forward, batter shows bunt, third baseman comes up a couple of steps, pitcher glances at the man on first, etc., etc. Often, I’ll have the TV and the radio on, and I’ll listen to the play-by-play and watch the screen only when there’s a spectacular catch or the pitcher hits the batter or something else happens that’s specific and visual. This might all be because I’m a baseball fan, though; I can see how somebody else would prefer otherwise. </hijack>
It’s less relevant to World Service coverage than for domestic, but one of the reasons the football scores are read out in that steady, “I-speak-your-weight” style is because listeners are writing them down to match against their pools coupons (football pools being a way of gambling on the outcome of all the matches).
I concur with Cervaise about the value-added nature of radio commentary. In fact cricket fans in the UK are often so fond of the radio commentaries that they have been known to watch a game on TV with the sound off and the radio on.
I don’t think the BBC make their programmes available to anyone for free and they also have a commercial arrangement with ABC to share resources and some programming. We get a few words from Peter Jennings in the small hours on BBC1 and BBC News 24, for instance.