Recent NPR ombudsman piece

A recent piece by NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin reminded me of how the big East Coast media outlets patronize smaller markets and their news outlets. In this piece he criticizes NPR for "slamming the yokels." This is one of the worst aspects of the "East Coast mentality" that life solely revolves around Washington and New York (and to a lesser extent, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston). After returning to DC from library school, people were imminently curious about what life is like in the "great flyover." I may be from Pennsylvania, but I'm from western PA which is a lot closer in values with the Midwest than the East Coast. I'm glad Dvorkin wrote this piece. Hopefully it'll help remind NPR that they provide content for local stations, and are not the end-all-be-all of non-commercial media. He concludes by writing:

NPR does very solid reporting on national issues. But it doesn't have a monopoly on good journalism and David Greene's report seemed to imply that it does.

This plays out on a larger scale when you think of NPR and the bigger media conglomerates's efforts to disenfranchise low power FM stations. Along that line I recommend a local blog on Washington independent media, called DCIndymedia. Dave Hughes' DCRTV aggregated news on the local broadcasting scene is good too.