Goodbye Fair Game?
Public Radio Program Directors News is reporting that PRI is pulling the plug on Fair Game. I don't have any inside info to offer, other than that this is a dissapointment. It certainly speaks to how hostile the environment out there is to new public radio programs.
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posted by Jesse Thorn at Wednesday, May 21, 2008
5 Comments:
I couldn't stand to listen to more than a couple of episodes, but Fair Game kinda stunk. Its features were shallow and simplistic compared to other stuff on NPR, and its humor was on the level that you'd expect from All Things Considered, where I recall a segment where the host spent five minutes quoting lines from Airplane! and tried to pass that off as humor. Fair Game's humor segments struck me as borderline racist, on occasion (e.g. "People in New Orleans eat ALLIGATOR! Isn't that WACKY?").
To be fair, Faith Salie wasn't the perpetrator of these crimes against humor and/or journalism, but they somehow passed the muster of somebody with editorial control.
Rats. I've been trying to get my J-school buddy to intern at WNYC and get me a date with Faith.
I always thought of Fair Game as the Daily Show of radio. An hour every day is too much for me, but I wish they'd keep it around for the occasional listen.
I, too, always felt like the show would have benefited from being on less...but not like this, not not at all. When I listen, it's via podcast, which always left me wishing it was a weekly one or two-hour show instead of on every day. Especially since it seemed like they repeated segments and interviews often throughout the week. I liked the show quite a lot, and I'll be sorry to see it go, but I think it's at least partly a case of less being more.
That's too bad- I really enjoyed the show. I always considered it kind of like TSOYA in that it really seemed to embrace the internet/podcasting and wasn't afraid to bring a less somber attitude to public radio . I agree with Fred that the daily format was probably its downfall- I never listened on a daily basis, but from the program descriptions they seemed to repeat segments from day to day.
I wouldn't call the atmosphere hostile, at least not from the stations I'm familiar with. More like complacent, but for anyone trying to squeeze new program in front of public radio PDs it probably feels plenty hostile. And, yes, a daily hour of funny is a lot. Even the Daily Show doesn't go that far, and look how many two-week breaks they take.
Of course, I'm sure this isn't the last we'll see of Faith.
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