‘On the Media’, Behind the Scenes
What I learned while seeing how the sausage is made.
The logo for the WNYC / NPR show ‘On the Media,’ which I listen to every week and was part of during this past week.
My favorite NPR show is On the Media. I’ve appeared on it as an interviewee from time to time. This past weekend, I had a stint as “guest co-host,” with its real host, the eminent Brooke Gladstone.
If you’d like to share the drollery of hearing me, as guest, say “This… is On the Media,” or welcoming listeners back to the show after a break, you can find the full-episode recording here, and go to, say, time 2:20. Another such segue comes around time 13:20.
Of course you should listen to the whole thing. I mention this week’s episode for three reasons:
1) Seeing craft in action. This is both humbling and inspiring, and it never gets old.
My first discovery from this week was another glimpse of the artistry and engineering that go into parts of modern life we take for granted. In this case, putting together a news-related radio program, under fairly tight deadline.
I’ve written a few zillion times about the quiet competence of controllers, dispatchers, pilots, weather experts and other players in the modern air traffic system, who together have made U.S. commercial air travel so phenomenally safe.
I know first-hand about the chaotic-but-controlled ballet that goes into getting newspapers and magazines put together before press time. “Deadline” has a real meaning in the journalism world. Things have to happen on time, and they do.
After Deb and I were paired with the great filmmaking team of Jeanne Jordan and Steve Ascher to make the Our Towns movie for HBO, we were in awe of the way a movie crew combined images, sounds, music, words to convey in a few seconds concepts that took pages in a book. And to convert 100 days of dawn-to-dusk multi-camera filming into less than 100 minutes of carefully chosen on-screen time.
I have done a lot of NPR work over the decades. Regular commentaries for Morning Edition in the 1980s and 1990s. News-wrapup slots with my dear friend Guy Raz when he was host of Weekend All Things Considered a decade ago, before his podcast fame.
But I’d never been in the kitchen, so to speak, seeing how the shows got put together—the way I had been for newspapers, and magazines, and political-speech presentations. Even the sidelong glimpse I had this past week was enlightening.
The OTM editors and producers needed an idea early in the week of what their show was going to be “about.” But they needed to be ready to change that idea based on how the news unfolded, and the way guests and themes came together, or fell apart.
They’d do extensive research on guests and themes. They’d do extensive “pre-interviews,” and then also lengthy “real” interviews. Then some things would be thrown out, and others patched in. And as the clock ticked on they’d have to stitch things together—sentence by sentence, in the case of an hour-long interview that had to come down to a dozen minutes, and segment by segment, for overall flow of tone and story and argument.
They also dealt with all the audio-equivalents of the proof-reading and copy-editing I know from the print world. For instance: In my part of this week’s show, I used without thinking Donald Trump’s term “shithole countries,” which of course he had actually said while in office. How much of this did OTM send out over NPR’s air?
Every time I learn about the clockwork competence on which the rest of us depend, I am inspired and humbled. That was why, in my sign-off for this episode, I told Brooke Gladstone how grateful I was after this week to have joined her “little team.” She and they understood that I really meant, “small but mighty.”
2) A Theory of Life: ‘We Live for Struggle.’
This week’s On the Media had three segments. One was my discussion with Eric Levitz, of New York magazine, about his recent piece on how the Department of Justice had gone unusually easy on Donald Trump, rather than the reverse.
The second was Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Jeff Sharlet about his new book The Undertow. It’s a look at the people who are pushing extremist and violent views around the country, and how they could be fomenting a “slow civil war.”
I’ve read this book. I recommend it. It’s well written and thoroughly reported, and I think that what it conveys is important and true.
The third segment was a discussion between Brooke Gladstone and me. It was mostly about the eternal themes in American politics and press coverage. But also it was about the question Jeff Sharlet raised: whether America was finally coming apart.
In the part of the show that starts at around time 47:00 of the broadcast, I end up giving her part of my view of America, which is also my Theory of Life. Here is the gist:
I have lived through a lot of American history firsthand, as part of the dreaded Boomer generation….
One of the ongoing themes is that America is in trouble—and always has been. So the question at any given moment in American life, is how the forces leading to trouble match the forces that are resisting that trouble.
I contend that if you name almost any year in American life, I can reel off the tragedy that was happening at that time. The cruelty. The people being oppressed, whose hopes were squashed…
This is our national story. Our national story is never resolved. Our national story always requires a force of progress, against the forces of destruction. It always requires some sort of idealism, against the venality. It requires leaders who are pushing up, rather than punching down.
That is our ongoing predicament…. Life, in my personal and political view, is an ongoing effort and an ongoing struggle. You're never coasting.
Not rosy-hued, that’s for sure. But it sets out a purpose for citizens, and for leaders, and notably for the press.
3) Another Theory of Life, ‘How the World Works.’
This is not related to On the Media, but it’s on my mind. So here we go:
Thirty years ago, I wrote a long cover story for the Atlantic called “How the World Works.” It was a critique of what would now be called “neo-liberal” finance-minded economics.1 At the time I called it “Anglo-American economics” —to distinguish it from both continental-European and East Asian practices.
Cover of the December, 1993, Atlantic Monthly. From our household bound volumes.
By whatever name, I was arguing against the one-dimensional view that short-term profit maximization, obsessive focus on immediate shareholder value, and a simplistic belief that lowest price-in-the-store would automatically lead to the greatest social and economic good.
In those days, this was heresy. “Industrial policy,” or dreaming that governments could direct the outcomes of markets? Begone! Imagine the derision from theWall Street Journal editorial page from that era (Or, just look at the WSJ ed page now.)
This is why I find the most fascinating part of modern economic thinking to be the resurgence of “purposeful” economic policy. That, is planning for an outcome, rather than just blessing whatever the market dictates. Deliberate emphasis on creating a nationally based “supply chain.” Intentional development of specific industries — semiconductor chips, battery components, defense infrastructure, manufacturing in general. A loss of the naive faith that whatever the financial markets reward will be “right” for people other than financiers.
I am not going to make the whole case here. I am just saying that this is a truly exciting field to follow at the moment.
Some of the things I have been following:
From Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin in Noema early this year, an argument in favor of the “Designer Economy,” and how governments could steer economic growth in most sustainable and more equitable directions.
From Michael Lind back in 2012, “Who’s Afraid of Industrial Policy?”
From Dani Rodrik last year, “An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs.”
From the Council on Foreign Relations, “Is Industrial Policy Making a Comeback?”
From Clyde Prestowitz late last year, “Industrial Policy Is Inescapable” (following this article by Clyde P. on the Chips act).
From Rob Atkinson this spring, “What Kind of Industrial Policy?” He recommends following the lead of Alexander Hamilton.
And from Peter Ryan just this week, an announcement of a new “Carey Project” on the modern lessons and implications of some 18th and 19th century Irish-American economists.
There are periods when certain disciplines seem asleep. And other times when they’re exciting and coming awake. Transformations in the economy and structure of the news media are percolating now.
Life is struggle, and it’s better when it’s more interesting. Like now.
Back in the 1980s, The Washington Monthly, where I’d had my first magazine job, pioneered a vision of “neo-liberalism” that had nothing to do with the current finance-centric manifestation of that term. For more, see this piece by Martin Longman, and this by Ezra Klein.
I was driving with NPR on when you came on the air. I very much enjoyed hearing what you had to say, as well as getting to hear you with Brooke Gladstone.
As far as industrial policy, I think we should start with more humanistic policies in the mould of the Scandinavians: a solid social safety net, so that people don't face the huge stresses that come with a major car repair or a major medical bill--that according to something I heard a handful of years ago, around half of Americans can't afford. There was a wonderful article in Harvard magazine maybe a decade ago about the difficulties the impoverished have with coping with stuff when it takes every neuron they have to figure out how to get themselves to work, and how to get food, when faced with major expenses. We need to finance elementary and secondary education nationally, hiring only good teachers, so that every kid whether they live in Cambridge or Timbuktu, Alabama, can love learning as I did, and everyone who wants to should be able to go to college without mortgaging the next several decades. The justice system should concentrate on rehabilitation rather than punishment, as it does in Norway.
In a country like that, I suspect industrial policy would naturally move in better directions than it often has in the US.
You and Heather Cox Richardson keep me in fighting form with your perspectives on the past, present, and future. Without your respective abilities to recognize trouble -- how what we are experiencing now is like but also unlike the American character landscape of the past, for example, while not giving up on the ideals and intentions that brought us here -- I would surely despair of loving life in 2023. But I don't WANT to despair. By loving what you do, you help me love what I do, too. Thank you!