This American Life, an NPR program, is a wildly mixed bag of a radio show; it’s frequently excellent, evocative, and sometimes leads you to some wondrous insights.  For a show that is entirely by, for, and about upper-middle-class, college-educated, espresso-guzzling, Prius-driving white liberal hipsters, it’s very often worth the hour it takes to listen.

Still, for those of you in my audience that produce TAL, I feel I need to clarify something.

Funny: The Onion, America’s great parody newspaper.  While it’s not quite as quirky and unpredictable as it was ten years ago (the move to New York from Madison didn’t make the paper any funnier), it’s still a weekly treat.

Not Funny: Listening to The Onion’s editorial panel not only making the sausage (which is mildly interesting)…:

…but analyzing the process to death, like they’re a group of philosophy professors debating the meaning of existence itself.   A bunch of journalism profs at a Columbia forum couldn’t possibly sound more pretentious and joyless.

Note to Onion and TAL staff; you’re not curing cancer.  Lighten up already.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Deep Thoughts, Lefty "Alt"-Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.