BOSTON. The cuts have been swift and deep, and no one knows it better than Sam Wursthaus, a former reporter who follows comings and goings in Boston-area media on his blog “Scene and Heard.” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says as he scrolls through stories of mass layoffs at WUNE, a public radio station, and WCAM, a public television station across the river in Cambridge. “Forty-five layoffs at each, which is 14% in the former case and 6% in the latter,” he says as he scribbles on a pad of paper. “That’s 20% total, I think, although I went into journalism because I was no good at math.”
“What if I sent one of The Three Tenors to your house with a tote bag?”
Trying to wring a news angle out of those grim figures is hard for Wursthaus, since smaller media outlets means less for him to write about, but he got a tip this morning from Abe Gotshal, who runs one of the few remaining print newsstands in the area. “Abe is great,” Wursthaus says. “Since I don’t travel much I can’t rely on cab drivers to give me quotes the way New York Times reporters used to,” he says.
The lead that Gotshal provided Wursthaus turned out to be fruitful. “I don’t know what it is,” he tells this reporter, “but all of a sudden we got a lot of panhandlers with accents like they stepped right out of Downton Abbey or somethin’,” he says. “Used to be they just mumbled, now their diction is crisp, and they use oddball expressions like ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘chuffed.’ I can’t figure it out.”
Neither can Wursthaus, although he’s starting to notice a pattern. “In the past, if you wanted to get a job at NPR or PBS, it helped if you sounded like a twit out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, or Monty Python,” he says. “If you wanted to advance within the organization, you had to lay it on pretty thick, like saying ‘spot-on’ in every business meeting.”
Public television and radio have been criticized for their snobbery over the years, a natural reaction to the minuscule number of low-income members in their respective audiences, and the fact that they are funded by tax dollars taken from people who would rather listen to country music and watch stock-car races. “It’s entertainment that makes you feel smart without studying or having much grey matter,” says Clive Kane, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching Masterpiece Theater or Pants Off Dance Off when you fall asleep in your armchair, you’ll have the same I.Q. when you wake up.”
But that’s no consolation to the many now-unemployed men and women who worked both on-air and behind the scenes to bring thoughtful news and entertainment to the unreceptive masses, including Austin Atwood, who covered Third World sports for WUNE. “I’m going to collect unemployment for a while and see what’s out there,” he says. “Right now I’m absolutely knackered and it won’t be a case of Bob’s your uncle, but I’ll catch on somewhere.”
“All Things Considered” would be way more exciting if broadcast from the back of a car during a NASCAR race.
A friend of mine used to listen religiously to “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.” I suppose that’s as close as NPR will get.