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It's funny. Laugh. The Media News

8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories (npr.org) 115

Posted by msmash from the hah dept.
An 8-year-old from Minneapolis recently pointed out a big problem with NPR's oldest news show, All Things Considered. Leo Shidla wrote to his local NPR station: My name is Leo and I am 8 years old. I listen to All Things Considered in the car with mom. I listen a lot. I never hear much about nature or dinosaurs or things like that. Maybe you should call your show Newsy things Considered, since I don't get to hear about all the things. Or please talk more about dinosaurs and cool things.
Sincerely,
Leo
 NPR: Leo has a point. All Things Considered is about to turn 50 years old. NPR's archivists found the word "dinosaur" appearing in stories 294 times in the show's history. By comparison, "senator" has appeared 20,447 times. To remedy the situation, All Things Considered invited Leo to ask some questions about dinosaurs to Ashley Poust, a research associate at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Leo wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up.
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8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories More

8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories

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  • Kid will get his wish for the next 4 years. ;)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, Trump wasn't old.

      Now do "Ha ha Biden is senile because he's been stuttering and making gaffes since *checks notes* the 1980s" because Trump wasn't showing any signs of mental deterioration at all.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why are you bringing up Trump? He's not President nor relevant.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by isomer1 ( 749303 )
          The OP is no longer available. However we should be clear: the damage done by Trump will impact our society for generations. We will continue to bring him up as it pertains to realizing, and hopefully repairing, this damage.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • By your logic, Hitler was beneficial to the world because he taught us that we should never have another person like Hitler in the world. ...ignoring, of course, all the horrific shit that was caused by Hitler the first time around.

              Thankfully, Trump was nowhere near as intelligent or effective as Hitler. But that doesn't mean that he didn't cause an awful lot of death and destruction we could very bloody well have done without.

              Comparing Trump to Hillary is like comparing Hitler to Stalin. Which would be bet

    • NPR doesnâ(TM)t do stories that donâ(TM)t further the progressive agenda. You will need a minority trans illegal immigrant Dinosaur with a touching story about how they oppose the fossil fuels created by the decayed bodies of right wing nationalist dinosaurs.

  • All things considered... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by satanicat ( 239025 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @10:39AM (#61047412)

    All things considered... with all the crap we've been seeing/hearing reported on lately, this submission is a refreshing change for today, and I approve of it.

    Right on Leo! =)

  • They sure are brushing with a broad stroke. If they want to live up to their name, they better diversify.

    Do they take all viewer requests? I for one would love to hear a detailed analysis about the mating habits of the three towed sloth. And with a name like "All Things Considered", they better deliver!

  • He must make "Dinosaurist discrimination" a thing (Score:5, Funny)

    by poptopdrop ( 6713596 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @11:03AM (#61047524)

    He just has to start a few campaigns, get some angry young people on board, get a few courses in Dinosaurism going at Universities, and before you know it there will be law requiring 10% of the NPR's budget to be spent on Dinosaur programs and the next VP will be chosen based on their Dinosauriness and not their merit.

    • We do not want to encourage more of the lizard people in politics, or we may end up with Zuckerberg winning an election next.

  • Dinosaur Senator (Score:5, Funny)

    by akunkel ( 74144 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @11:09AM (#61047560)

    How many times did Senator and Dinosaur appear in the same search result?

  • Sorry kid (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @11:10AM (#61047562)

    Can't spare air time for dinosaurs. Far to many obscure jazz 'musicians' need to remind us all how terrible their life has been in the US . That and urban grazing; it's absolutely necessary that we interview every wierdo urban grazer in the country first.

  • Dinosaur age (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @11:23AM (#61047618)

    Some schoolkids in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One boy, about 8, asks the guard, "Can you please tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"

    The guard replies, "They are 65,000,017 years old."

    "That's an awfully exact number," says the boy. "How do you know their age so precisely?"

    The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when I started working here, and that was seventeen years ago."

    • Man thanks for that I needed a good laugh today. Im sure 17 years guarding some bones probably felt like being there 65M years.

    • It's like the classic story about advanced scouts. The commander sends soldier to scout out the enemy forces and report. They come back and report there was a force of 1002 men advancing to their position. The commander is impressed about the accuracy and asks how they counted them, so the soldier goes "well, there were a couple riding up front and I'd say like a thousand in the back".

      • While these 'accuracy' jokes are funny, it is very sad that our professional news media journalists and even statistical pollsters do not understand accuracy. How many times are were presented with 'facts' that 45% of people think A & 35% of people think B, with the stated conclusion that more people think A. Well if accuracy/tolerant/error/margin of the numbers at +/-5%, than the two numbers are the SAME. 45-5=40 and 35+5=40. Their margin of error overlaps meaning there is NO DIFFERENCE.

        Either the

  • NPR's archivists found the word "dinosaur" appearing in stories 294 times in the show's history. By comparison, "senator" , a synonym for "dinosaur," has appeared 20,447 times. [ Emphasis added ]

    There, fixed that for you.

  • Never work with Children or dogs. You always get upstaged.

  • The old one isn't cute anymore.

  • The kid's right, of course . (Score:4, Informative)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @12:56PM (#61048012)

    I listen to PBS/NPR/BBC radio at various times of the day and they are all about politics and pandemic. The clickbait issues. Interviews with 'important' people who want reelection or publicity. And don't get me started on their fawning over athletes, actors, musicians and chefs. BBC isn't much better with about 30 percent of their news coming from Africa, 30% from the US, 10% sports, and 30% is just smalltalk. Almost nothing about the rest of the world.

    But my real gripe is my own NPR station. They take in hundreds of millions as a result of their constant nagging for money. They use it for insipid stories about peoples' personal experience with the virus or heartbreaking cases of school withdrawal. Never, never, never do they explore corruption in the city by elected officials or local monopolies or others. We pay the highest electric bills in the country, but the privately owned utility is a major donor to the station, so the public is never informed. All the criminals donate and thus they will never be investigated.

    • Yeah but let's face it, everything interesting about dinosaurs was dead and buried 60 million years ago.

    • Another NPR listener here. While I think your criticism is fair, it really needs a pile of salt. What needs to be remembered is that NPR is but one small piece of a journalistic puzzle in America. So while it may be nice if NPR was critical of local power utility prices or local business corruption, they do not bear the sole blame for its lack of reporting. IFF NPR was alone in not reporting on these issues while (say) the local news paper ran a series of excellent articles on it then maybe you would have a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by isomer1 ( 749303 )
      I'll grant you NPR et al could do a better job on depth of content. But for the issues you pointed out: it's not reasonable to expect our journalists to lead the charge for public change. The concerned public (i.e. you, me, people angry at the corruption/injustice) have to do the bulk of the work. The journalists primary role is to communicate the ongoings in pockets of society to the public at large. We have been spoiled by very insightful investigative journalism, and this has made most of lazy and compla

    • Well, that's how they operate. They find one person affected by some issue and tell a sob story about them expecting their listeners to generalize to the whole which is what usually happens. They're usually wrong but that's beside the point. They have a narrative *cough*propaganda*cough to push. NPR in the late 70s and early 80s wasn't anywhere near as useless as it is today.

  • Why does it seem that dinosaur and senator are pretty much the same beast, only one is not yet extinct?

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