God bless public debate

I can't prove it, but after listening to National Public Radio for two weeks, I'm pretty sure I've gotten smarter.

I'm now able to hold relatively intelligent conversations on all sorts of things from local government to finance to trapped miners in Utah. I've got to say that I'm pretty happy to have rediscovered the station with three offerings in the Twin Cities.

While two are musical offerings, the straight up news and commentary station is a step into a world of being a smartypants that I've been sorely lacking.

Still, there are plenty of questions left unanswered - I was driven crazy by the coverage of the mine collapse and the technology being used - but that is part of the appeal for me.

Especially on the heels of the bridge collapse and wall-to-wall coverage where nothing cracked the news cycle, it's disorienting to have an outlet that says what it needs to and then moves along.

More than that, the station does a good job of presenting the point - which admittedly, sometimes comes from a biased source - and leaving it with the listener to make their own decisions about what is valuable information and what is not.

Combined with a recent viewing of Control Room, it's startling to take a step back and realize exactly how much of my daily news content - especially televised news - is being given from a specific point of view.

When I hear discussions about the future of journalism and specifically the move towards a tailor-made news cycle where users would subscribe to a series of news feeds from bloggers and other gatekeepers who would compile daily links in real time, it makes me worry about how much of the news we don't want to hear won't ever reach us.

An open-ended news source leaves more to the intellect and forces the reader/listener/viewer to put more effort into the stories that interest them. At the very least, it leaves an echo that you can kick around for the day and try to come up with an answer.

While I was never really that disconnected from the world around me, I was definitely missing something by not having NPR as a preset on my radio. Besides, when you listen to NPR for a few hours straight, you don't feel nearly as guilty for watching reality TV that night.

(Image from: NBC)