I listen to NPR most days driving into work, probably because I'm a damn liberal. I really angers me when I hear the conservatives in Washington going after NPR, because I rely on their broadcasting to get my World News.
So I was prompted today, with the news regard Gbagbo in Cote d'Ivoire, to figure out how exactly to spell Ofebia Quist-Arcton.
And I ended up here.
NPR folks
Look at the resume of Ms. Quist-Arcton.
in 1990, Quist-Arcton won one of the BBC's coveted foreign correspondents posts, moving to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to head the corporation's West Africa bureau. From there, she covered 24 countries, straddling the Sahara to the heart of the continent — crisscrossing the continent from Mauritania, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali, to Zaire and Congo-Brazzaville, via Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. She contributed to all BBC radio and television outlets, covering the flowering of democracy in the region, as well as the outbreak of civil wars, revolutions and coups
Or Sylvia Poggioli.
In 2004, Poggioli was the inaugural recipient of the WBUR Foreign Correspondent Award, presented to an outstanding public radio foreign correspondent. In 2002, Poggioli received the Welles Hangen Award for Distinquished Journalism from Brown University. In 2000, Poggioli received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Brandeis University. In 1994, Poggioli was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences "for her distinctive, cultivated and authoritative reports on 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia." In 1990, Poggioli spent an academic year at Harvard University as a research fellow at Harvard University's Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.
Or Jack Speer.
Over his two decades of reporting, Speer has won numerous awards. They include American University's 14th Annual Journalism Award for "Excellence in Personal Finance Reporting," Best News Feature in the AIR Awards, Best Editorial Commentary from the Washington Journalism Society, and a Best Newscaster award from the New Jersey Associated Press. In 2004, Speer was awarded a National Press Foundation fellowship.
Or Louisa Lim.
Lim has been part of NPR teams who multiple awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Peabody and two Edward R. Murrow awards, for their coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics. She's been honored in the Human Rights Press Awards, as well as winning prizes for her multimedia work.
Or virtually any name you might have heard on NPR.
These people are hardcore journalists, with ridiculously strong resumes.
Don't let those teabag clowns in Washington make the false equivalence between private (for-profit) news organizations and NPR. It isn't even close.
Who does Fox have?
A former shock jock, an Entertainment Tonight guy, an Arkansas Governor. And some eye candy blondes who know how to nod.
The quality of NPR reporting is worlds apart from any of the for-profit news outfits.
That's why corporate news is out to get NPR. NPR runs circles around them with real journalism. And the big money that pulls the strings on corporate news doesn't like the fact that NPR doesn't follow the spoon-fed narrative.
I understand that this is preaching to the choir, but NPR deserves our funding, because publicly-funded news is in the vital interest of an informed populace.