Kim Kardashian appeared on NPR and listeners are outraged - The Washington Post:
Last weekend, the producers of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” — the NPR quiz show known for its cheeky, wonkish humor — committed a horrible, no-good, sacrilegious faux pas:
They booked a particular celebrity for an interview.
The outrage was instantaneous.
“My first impulse after her introduction on the show was
to question the meaning of life,” one commenter wrote.
Another listener angrily informed NPR’s ombudsman, Elizabeth Jensen, that they found the show “so misguided and offensive,
I fear I will never be able to listen again.”
“I think three horsemen of the apocalypse are now fully mounted,” a third commented.
The interviewee in question?
None other than Kim Kardashian, television personality, mobile-phone game mogul, selfie aficionado, wife of Kanye, mother of North and apparent harbinger of the end of the world...
...The man who helped precipitate that shift, a researcher and radio consultant named David Giovannoni, had a
name for this particular persnickety brand of NPR listener: monks.
“These types are different from the regular news consumers, the typical news consumers who like debate and ideas, depth and logic.
This different type of listener, not so dissimilar demographically, is vastly different psycho-graphically,” he said, according to Pesca.
“Sharply differentiated by their needs and gratifications,” monks seek “to escape from the troubled exterior world and seek an interior serenity.”
People who only wanted to hear classical music on NPR?
Monks.
People who find Kim K. joking about Kim Jong Un so offensive that they fear “contamination through the speakers?”
Also monks.
Here’s what Pesca had to say:
There is a type of NPR listener — and it’s a type of media consumer, it goes way beyond NPR—that
defines themselves by what they are not.
To some extent, we all do this.
The bands we like, the foods we don’t eat.
But with them, it’s a much huger deal.
They’re closed-minded, they use affiliation with NPR...
A news consumer might not like the vapidity of Kim Kardashian on her e-show — but at least if they are a fan of this news comedy show, might be curious enough to see what a comedy show does with this figure, in the context of comedy.
The Monk, on the other hand, is driven by a desire to achieve the inner state that allows him or her to make sense of the world.
NPR or whatever media,
for the Monk, is an escape from the sullied world.
It’s crabby, it’s snooty and it hates the big booty.
