GEO BEACH - a human host for public radio

Some PRTQ listeners asked about my goals for new, compelling hosting. Put simply, it’s time to let art -- our humanity -- return to journalism.

At transom.org, I presented a more detailed discussion on the topic with Guest Rick Moody. [The Transom Review, Vol 5 / Issue 3 / Posts 15, 16, 17; Excerpted:

Moody: I find that I have come to disbelieve public radio somehow, for the simple reason that I cannot believe that all of human life and psychology, all of human events, all of human history (not to mention the lives and environment of our animal friends), can always be rendered in exactly the same way..

Beach: That "exact way" is precisely the triumph of form over content, just as the humanism Moody parses is the "emotional content" that rules what makes its way past gatekeepers and onto public radio. We need what Nieman Foundation curator Robert Giles identified as "fresh idea[s as] an unfailing caution against the structure of daily journalism, where the tendency is to sum up today's news with a neat conclusion".

What's curious is that the public radio audience is perhaps more adept than any other at erasing artificial boundaries between journalism and art…

But most cogently, Mike Janssen writes on "Art vs. journalism" and declares, "There is room for art in journalism. There had better be." This of course is the mantra which underpins the narrative journalism movement. In his wonderful book about "fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth" in Fulton Fish Market (Old Mr. Flood ) Joseph Mitchell clarified that he "wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts. I am obliged to half the people in the market for helping me get these facts."

Truthful rather than factual. Those who know Joseph Mitchell's detailed reportage at the New Yorker understand there's more fact in his fiction that in most contemporary journalism. And, now that Fulton Fish Market is vanished, what will you read to know the truth of the place? No recitation of data will tell the story like Old Mr. Flood. Could it possibly happen today in public radio? Evidently not nearly enough - hardly at all, else Moody wouldn't critique and others concur.

See also http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200512.review.moody.html ]

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