Britain’s media landscape is quite different from America’s. In the UK, radio is still the prime source of news for most people – especially those who comprise Britain’s political, academic, and intellectual elites.
I have appeared on many BBC programs (both radio and television) for more than twenty years and co-written programs for BBC World Service (minimum audience 156 million) and BBC TV.
When I moved to New York in 2011, I was keen to find a replacement to which I could listen. The natural choice was WNYC.
WNYC has had quite a turbulent history since it launched on July 8, 1924, using a second-hand transmitter from Brazil. It was set up by what was called the New York City Board of Estimate and Appointment.
(That worthy body was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court because the city’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, had no greater representation on the board than the city’s least populous borough, Staten Island.)
As a Public Service broadcaster owned by New York City, the station suffered from frequent attempts on the part of the city’s mayors to make it a vehicle or mouthpiece for themselves. In 1995 Rudolph Giuliani, a mayor unlike his predecessors on many levels, decided the city no longer needed WNYC and it eventually was sold at a controversially low figure to the WNYC Foundation.
Today the group owns WQXR, the classical music station, as well as New Jersey Public Radio through a sale encouraged by Chris Christie. There is a certain irony there, as WNYC has been running a thinly disguised campaign against the New Jersey governor for some time.
Tuning into WNYC, which is part of the National Public Radio family, allows one to hear some excellent programming. WNYC broadcasts the major daily news programs produced by NPR, including “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” among others. WNYC also broadcasts an hour of BBC World Service News at 9 a.m. –though you can get that and the rest of BBC Radio’s output free with an app on your smartphone.
WNYC’s non-news programs are an altogether different story – particularly “The Brian Lehrer Show,” which the station’s website informs us “leads the conversation about what matters most now in local and national politics, our own communities and our lives.”
Perhaps Lehrer’s show suffers from airing immediately after the BBC World Service. The BBC is hardly without criticism, but none of its programs would claim to be a “conversation about what matters most now in local and national politics” without offering equal access to all sides involved in those issues.
“The Brian Lehrer Show” consistently has only one side of any debate sitting with Brian Lehrer in the WNYC studio. That person, almost without exception, reflects Lehrer’s own worldview.
The host makes almost no attempt to hide his political bias, which is fine, as he is a talk show host rather than a newsman. But he simply cannot contain a patronizing and disparaging tone, as when he speaks of people who “get their news from FOX News.”
A BBC colleague was dumbfounded when I asked him to listen. He told me he could not believe this passed for journalism, even in a talk show format, on WNYC. As he put it, “No balance, no broadcast!”
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Balance is crucial. It goes a long way toward guaranteeing that what you are broadcasting is accurate.
Brian Lehrer has tripped himself up in that way several times. Take the appalling story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely of an alleged rape at the University of Virginia.
Erdely’s website states she is an award-winning feature writer and investigative journalist. Her now infamous story in Rolling Stone magazine claimed that members of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity raped someone called “Jackie.” Not a single detail of the allegation was true.
