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NPR wants to be cool

This video was produced to introduce NPR President & CEO Vivian Schiller at the All Things D conference, June 2010.

Morbidly obese Ohioans starving on food stamps

“For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach” is the title of a recent NPR topical personalized report. Not because people in Ohio are getting shorter, but because they don’t have a job and are suffering the squeezes of a tight budget.

“The Nunez’s van broke down last fall” begins the sob story. Now, Gloria Nunez’s 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.

Nunez and most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps, says NPR. “Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation” they report, which doesn’t sound quite right in the context of the full story which is an attack on the state of the economy.

Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.

NPR does’nt say if the reason 19 year old Hernandez has a different last name than her mother because she is married to some bum who can’t support her already or what, so who knows, but this part of the report is… interesting:

People tell Nunez her daughter could get more money in public assistance if she had a child.

“A lot of people have told me, ‘Why don’t your daughter have a kid?’”

(more…)

Triumph on NPR, channels O’Reilly on NPR

From November 2003:

O’REILLY: We’ve spent now, all right, 50 minutes of me defending defamation against me in every possible way, while you gave Al Franken a complete pass on his defamatory book. And if you think that’s fair, Terry, then you need to get in another business. I’ll tell you that right now. And I’ll tell your listeners, if you have the courage to put this on the air, this is basically an unfair interview, designed to try to trap me into saying something that Harper’s can use. And you know it and you should be ashamed of yourself. And that is the end of this interview.

Some time later, Robert Smigel appeared in-character as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on the same show and blasted the host. “Did you treat Kermit the Frog like this when he was on your show?” Triumph the Insult Comic Dog asked NPR’s Terry Gross last on “Fresh Air.”

After Gross suggested that his use of the word “bitch” was controversial, Triumph went off on an extended spoof of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s smackdown of Gross’s selectively combative style (mainly when she gave Al Franken a 100% pass while giving O’Reilly a 100% grilling) on the show.