I knew something was wrong before I heard any actual words about the subject.<\/p>\n
It had already been a rough morning. My kids had missed their bus, so I had to drive them to school.<\/p>\n
Then, I\u2019d had to slog my way through traffic on I 94 to try to get from the north end of StPaul out to my job, near Ridgedale. But things were finally picking up; I was listening to PJ O\u2019Rourke doing a book interview on the KQRS morning show. They got to a commercial break, and I flipped over to \u201cMorning Edition\u201d.<\/p>\n
And I knew something had to be terribly, terribly wrong even before I heard a coherent sentence.<\/p>\n
The NPR hosts were trying to ad lib.<\/p>\n
Maybe you never think about this \u2013 the way people sound on the radio is pretty easy to take for granted. But even though in 2001 I hadn\u2019t set foot in a radio station in nine years, that sound \u2013 NPR hosts trying to ad lib \u2013 grabbed me like a hand reaching for my throat out of the dashboard.<\/p>\n
Remember in \u201cHunt for Red October\u201c, when Fred Thompson says Russians \u201cdon\u2019t take a dump without a plan?\u201c Public radio air staff don\u2019t put a bagel in the toaster without a script. Everything you hear on the air on public radio is written out, and doesn\u2019t get anywhere near a microphone until a chain of editors has picked it over. Those \u201cspontaneous \u201c questions that the newscasters ask of the reporters when they\u2019re talking about news stories? Scripted. Even the rare, occasional program that is made up of unscripted material \u2013 think \u201cWait, Wait, Don\u2019t Tell Me\u201c and Teri Gross and the like – is edited to a fine sheen before it gets anywhere near broadcast.<\/p>\n
NPR people never ad lib \u2013 and when they have to, they are pretty much always terrible at it.<\/p>\n
And so when events move too fast for the editorial process to keep up, and they have to ad lib, it stands out like Ozzy Osbourne at a Rotary meeting.<\/p>\n
So when I flipped over to Morning Edition, and heard nothing but stammering and people trying to express the unthinkable in real time, I knew something had to be terribly wrong even before I actually heard anything.<\/p>\n
And so while the news got worse and worse all day, I don\u2019t know that anything really triggered my sense of alarm more than the gaping, stammering, confused not-quite-silence on NPR that morning. And of all the things that happened that day, that feeling \u2013 driving down 394, thinking \u201cthis has got to be real, real bad\u201c without knowing anything concrete about it at all \u2013 is still the memory that sticks with me when people asked \u201cwhere were you that morning?\u201c<\/p>\n
Remember when your grandmother said \u201cnothing good happens at 2 AM\u201c? Nothing good happens when public radio people go off script.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I knew something was wrong before I heard any actual words about the subject. It had already been a rough morning. My kids had missed their bus, so I had to drive them to school. Then, I\u2019d had to slog my way through traffic on I 94 to try to get from the north end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67941"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67945,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67941\/revisions\/67945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}