50 years of NPR!!! Love it or hate it.... when did you start listening to their programs??

[mitch96]

I don't remember listening to it in the early '7o's but defiantly in the later 70's... If I don't like whats on I just switch. Now with apps on the phone I can listen to NPR from different citys around the country...YMMV, works for me
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[TlalocW]

1. College in the early 90s

Was a factor of things - felt like the "college" thing to do for a (pseudo) intellectual like me. I enjoyed the news shows but really liked the comedy stuff on weekends - What D'ya Know, etc. and then the jazz shows. I kept a pretty hectic pace so sitting/lying around in my dorm room on Saturdays was a good way to relax.

TlalocW

[EYESORE 9001]

2. I started soon after its inception

but I’ve since given NPR its walking papers. Too much solicitation of opinions from repuQs and both-side risk for my liking.

[LAS14]

11. I appreciate their attempt at being even-handed, without falling into...

... the "both and" trap. I think all of MSM has learned something on that front from the 2016 experience.

[appalachiablue]

3. I appreciate NPR and should follow it more.

We need public radio and TV even with some corp funding. It provides a small balance to widespread Hate Radio programming.

Don't forget that LBJ started these important media services and supported funding for the arts and humanities like FDR- the NEA, NEH to name two.

[Hoyt]

4. When I used to drive across rural areas, often late at night, I cheered when I found an NPR station.

[Shrike47]

5. 1980. Had a roommate from Minnesota who introduced me to A Prairie Home Companion.

[lpbk2713]

6. It's a break from constant annoying commercials.

They will identify who some of their corporate sponsors are occasionally but that's about it.

[Throck]

7. Big fan in the 80s

Programming has changed and I've lost interest.

[Brother Buzz]

8. KPFA (Pacifica radio) was my go-to station fifty years ago but I slowly migrated to KQED (NPR)...

maybe forty years ago. To this day, NPR is my bedtime radio station (Capitol radio in Sacramento these days).

A boatload of DUers bash NPR, but I find it curious that DU and NPR mirror each other almost seamlessly; if something is breaking on DU and I tell my wife, and more often then not, she just smiles and points to the radio.

[LAS14]

9. If it's "only" fifty years old, I must have started at the very beginning. I still...

... think of Susan Stamberg when I think of All Things Considered. I'm in the "love it" group.

[TreasonousBastard]

10. Don't remember when, but a long time ago. Used to drive a lot, and if I could find an...

NPR station, it was a great relief from local musical tastes and talk radio. Of course, it's been on Sirius for years now. Along with a lot of other stuff.

I do not understand the complaints about it. A lot of the programming is in depth reporting which you just don't get much of any more. Once in a while they have to have the other side show up because, well, they exist. One-sided news frm the left isn't any better than from the right.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

12. By the mid-80's for me.

I certainly wasn't going to listen to the growing right-wing propaganda on AM radio, except during random and periodic curiosity regarding their latest examples of crazy.

Often listened to Diane Rehm during lunch breaks in my car. I appreciated NPR for never releasing Diane because of her Spasmodic Dysphonia too. The content was far more important than her speech impediment anyway!

[mwooldri]

13. 2000. Year after I moved to the US.

Didn't listen much earlier as all I heard was classical music on those NPR affiliates and I'm not a big classical music aficionado. So it was to the commercial outlets I initially listened to for news and I was hearing the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura. Being a Brit I was hoping for real news and for me real news = BBC. Trying to listen to Radio 4 via dialup Internet was no fun. Found WFDD and Morning Edition. That's when we began part time listening, and when Bob Edwards was booted from ME, we kinda followed him to satellite radio (XM sent us a deal for a radio because we participated online to bring him back to ME). When WUNC went full on news that's when we became NPR junkies. Nowadays since I'm all over the place satellite radio and BBC World Service is my go-to but still will listen to WUNC when at home.

[MineralMan]

14. I've been listening to NPR for fifty years.

In fact, I began listening to a local public radio station before NPR existed. I wake up every morning to NPR on my clock radio. It starts at 6 AM with the national and local news. Then, I get up and have my morning coffee. I've been doing that since the 60s.

My station is KNOW in St. Paul, Minnesota. I KNOW PUBLIC RADIO!

[NewHendoLib]

15. late 70s for my wife and I.

[tenderfoot]

16. I listened regularly until W when Talk of the Nation devoted a show to cosmetic surgery on Earth Day

eom

[Diamond_Dog]

17. Mid 70s.

My first job was at a commercial printer. Everyone in my department had to alternate working 1 week per month afternoon shift which was 2:30 to 10:30. This afternoon shift you were the only person in the department. Listening to NPR on the radio then kept me company with a voice that kept me up on current events in an intelligent manner. I would have been lost without it.

[ColinC]

18. As child with my parents. I guess the first time I remember it

1989 maybe? Or 1990? I was 4 or 5.

[NNadir]

19. I started about 50 years ago, stopped about 20 years ago.

I checked them out during the insurrection, but was happy I'd stopped listening to them 20 years ago when they started interviewing a racist insurrectionist to see how he feels.

I have, on occasion, tuned in Terri Gross, and a few times Prairie Home Companion when it was on, but only rarely.

[Tndem615]

20. I used to regularly

Tune in, but when Garrison left prairie home companion, I just drifted away from npr completely. How prairie home companion met its demise is so sad and disappointing.

[betsuni]

30. I just read Garrison's new memoir.

He was fired over the phone by the CEO of MPR, a less than two minute call.

"Viking-Penguin has cancelled your book, the Washington Post has dropped your column, your upcoming tour is cancelled and all of your dates from the lecture agency. Your daily show The Writer's Almanac, which you did gratis for twenty-five years, with a poem a day, young poets, old, newcomers, classics, to millions of radio listeners, is gone, in the trash. It was like what happened to Studs when Ed Clamage called him a commie, but I could also see a rough justice behind it: all my life I'd used subterfuge to avoid uncomfortable situations, and it had worked, and now someone else's subterfuge had defeated me.

"What grieved me was the silence. Bill Kling called me and other friends, but none of the hosts of national talk shows where I'd been a guest in the past, and none of the station managers for whom I'd done benefits, nobody. ... The University took my picture down from its gallery of distinguished alum."

Very sad and disappointing.

[Mad_Machine76]

35. Wasn't he caught up in a sexual harassment scandal

During the heyday of Me Too? Whatever came of those charges?

[betsuni]

36. Here's what he says about it:

"I got kicked out of public radio in November 2017, accused of an email flirtation with a freelance researcher, a friend who'd worked for the show for thirteen years, a woman of 55 who worked from home and who came to the office often to tell me about her troubles and who wrote me notes about my monologues, which she said were works of art, notes signed, 'I love you' and 'I miss you.' A man whose job had been 'eliminated' by MPR accused MPR of doing it because he knew some dirt about her and me and he demanded a larger severance payment. They declined to pay it, so the man got a lawyer and persuaded my researcher that he'd been eliminated on her account and she joined him in his demand, asking for an enormous sum of money with the implied threat that otherwise they would drag my name in the mud and put stones in my mailbox. They drew up a list of allegations against me and MPR, demanding cash and confidentiality. The flirtation was not the classic #MeToo story of a powerful bully trying to extort intimacy. She wanted to go on working for me past my retirement, and I had said no, but she persisted.

"MPR was named in the allegation, though she worked for me, and this may have made the CEO uneasy, knowing that, in December, 1989, he had been accused of sexual harassment in Ramsey County District Court by his development director at KSJR where he'd been station manger. The case never came to trial and I assume he was innocent, but in the atmosphere of 2017, an accusation was the same as conviction, and certainly he didn't want the story to be MPR SLAMMED AGAIN FOR SEX OFFENSES and it wasn't. He threw me under the bus, and so it was not his picture that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in a story about men brought down by the #MeToo movement, but mine: the writer of flirtatious emails thereby linked to rapists and brutes who exposed themselves and threw women against walls."

There were no other claims of harassment.

[SYFROYH]

21. Early 80s as an adolescent; listening to Prairie Home Companion.

It works for me, too.

Let's face it -- it is the most liberal radio in Red America and a lot of Blue America, too.

Not perfect, but still doing what no one can do.

[nuxvomica]

22. Must've been the '90s

Prairie Home Companion sucked me in to listening to WAMC, which also carries NPR programming, so that's where I got introduced to All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terri Gross. I mostly enjoy WAMC's local programs like Roundtable, Vox Pop, and The Media Project. I don't listen to any other station in the car unless I'm traveling outside of signal coverage.

[Xavier Breath]

23. Probably the mid-90s.

I started turning it on as background noise when I would clean my apartment and soon became hooked on the programming. Sunday was chore day, so I'd have it on as I did my weekly cleaning.

I continue contribute to our local NPR station. I have my issues with NPR, and I know by contributing to the station I am supporting NPR, but our local station is just too much of an eclectic gem to be lost.

[Ms. Toad]

24. 1984, when it came to Cleveland. n/t

[liberaltrucker]

25. Mid 80s when I started driving OTR

nt

[Crunchy Frog]

26. When I was a kid in the 70's, in a newly blended dysfunctional family,

My stepfather would always have it playing in the car as drove us kids to our weekly therapy appointment. It was a fairly long drive so I had quite a bit of exposure, but I was young enough that it didn't really interest or engage me.

I really lost it with NPR during the Shrub years, especially during the 2004 election cycle.

[electric_blue68]

27. Early 90's. My mom found it and told me WNYC is their...

flagship station. WNYC is often more progressive than NPR in programs, and commentary.

I still love NPR, as well, but attuned to local NYC programming and now their now nationally syndicated programming:

Radiolab , On the Media , The New Yorker Radio Hour, and The Takeaway.
WNYC Adds The United States of Anxiety...

[Demovictory9]

29. mid 80s when began working in los angeles.. traffic time radio

[betsuni]

31. My parents listened to their classical music programs.

The summer of 1980 was my best NPR memory. After high school I'd gone out into the big wide world to pursue a performing arts career but found the big wide world too much to handle, returned to my small hometown feeling fragile with no idea what to do next.

Saturday afternoons were my favorite time of the week, listening to "A Prairie Home Companion" while preparing dinner (discovering that I loved cooking now that I could eat like a regular person). Stories from Lake Wobegon were funny but also sometimes made me weep. There were songs about cats and Bertha's Kitty Boutique, jokes about Lutherans and Norwegian bachelor farmers. Garrison was the only one to ever mention shy persons. Even though I don't like folk, country, gospel music or hymns, if it's on the show, wonderful. PHC made me happy. He became one of my favorite authors and a big influence. "Leaving Home" is one of my favorite books:

"When I was four years old, I fell through a hole in the haymow into the bull pen, missing the stanchion and landing in his feed trough full of hay, and was carried into the house and laid on my grandma's sofa, which smelled like this quilt, and so did a warm shirt handed down to me from my uncle. When I was little I didn't think of grownups as having bare skin; grownups were made of wool clothing, only kids were bare-naked; now I'm older than they were when I was little and I lie naked under a quilt made of their clothes when they were children. I don't know what makes me think I'm smarter than them.

"Everything they went though: the loneness, the sadness, the grief, and the tears -- it will happen to us, just as it came to them when we were little and had to reach up to get hold of their hand, when we knew them by the shape of their legs. Aunt Marie had fat little legs, I held her hand one cold day after a blizzard, we climbed snowdrifts to get to the store and buy licorice whips. ... She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, 'You don't care about me. You say you do but you don't. If I died tomorrow, I don't know as you'd even go to my funeral.' I was six. I said, cheerfully, 'I'd come to your funeral,' looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears. Every tear she wept, that foolish woman, I will weep every one before I'm done and so will you. We're not so smart we can figure out how to avoid pain and we cannot walk away from the death that we owe."

[Ron Green]

32. In October of 2004 I realized they'd jumped the shark - after decades of listening

I heard the “Morning Edition” program interviewing voters undecided between Bush and Kerry. After what had transpired since 9/11, they were giving airtime to undecided voters.

[riversedge]

33. I have been listening since early 80's. Love their shows. Variety pac.

[Mad_Machine76]

34. Probably early 2000's

I was glued to the news and podcasts (esp Diane Rehm show) for the first few years after 9/11 and became a small donor to them and our local PBS held a kids event every summer that we took our kids to. After awhile though I started to get really irritated at their "bothsiderism". I still tune in every once in a while but it still is pretty bad and some of the better correspondents have since left. Still somewhat better than most corporate owned media but it has become severely degraded by right wing control and defunding over the years. :-/

[Tommy Carcetti]

37. I'm an NPR baby.

Parents were listening to All Things Considered and Prairie Home Companion before I could even remember.

I can still hum the theme to ATC by heart.

On Sundays, during our family weekly drive to visit our grandparents, we'd usually listen to the reruns of the past night's Prairie Home Companion as well as a couple of BBC shows called My Word and My Music.

I still enjoy listening to NPR. These days I like listening to some of their quiz shows like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me when I run errands on Saturdays. Occasionally when I have a longer drive I'll take in some of their storytelling shows like This American Life.

NPR is far from perfect, but at least it's news in a civilized fashion.

[lagomorph777]

38. Started in the early 80s; stopped in the mid 2000s when they swerved right.