NPR’s Intelligence Squared
Sometimes I love NPR, and sometimes those folks drive me nuts. But with Intelligence Squared they’ve come up with wonderful programming. I accidentally tuned in one night and found I couldn’t turn the radio off.
What they do is bring together articulate experts, half who argue for a motion such as “Guns reduce crime?” or “Is the government responsible for health care?” and half who argue against it. The nice thing is that they make enough TIME to allow full statements. These aren’t roundtables of knucklehead pundits spouting sound bites. These are long discussions.
Of course, so much depends on the presentation skills of the various experts. But being able to listen to both sides of an issue, at the very least, gives much to think about.
In this debate they argue for and against the motion “The US is winning the war in Iraq”.
They convinced me (I won’t say which side, however). Take some time and listen to this while you do monkey work for the day job.
Radio and TV have incredible power. But until the last decade they were always constrained by time and signal power. You had to listen when the station broadcast it, and you had to listen where you could pick up the signal.