Smokin' Klose: NPR Prez in Madison

National Public Radio President/CEO Kevin Klose was on the UW-Madison campus this morning as a guest of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He appeared on a panel at a public forum on “Accuracy, Fairness, and Balance” with regard to NPR’s coverage of the U.S. escapade in Iraq.
Klose didn’t say anything terribly remarkable about the practice of journalism and NPR’s role in truth-telling. He compared trying to cover the fighting in Iraq with “circling an intersection at a fender-bender” with the hope of reconstructing what actually happened. But Klose did exhort the undergraduates to stay engaged in the democratic process, and as journalists-to-be they should always strive to maximize the diversity of voices given play in the media.
Klose makes trips like these quite often. For the head of NPR, he’s a pretty accessible guy.
When Klose stopped into Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in March 2001 to visit the public radio and TV stations there – just a couple of months after NPR and the National Association of Broadcasters teamed up to neuter a new low power FM (LPFM) radio service via an act of Congress – Mediageek’s Paul Riismandel took the opportunity to quiz Klose during the taping of a public TV program on his opposition to LPFM. After the taping, Klose tracked Paul down to explain that he wasn’t really anti-LPFM: he was simply concerned about interference to NPR stations, espcially to those FM affiliates that run reading services for the blind on subcarrier channels.
A little over two months ago a Congressionally-mandated report on LPFM completely exposed the fallacies of these interference concerns, so I decided to pull a Mediageek and needle Klose publicly on LPFM.
The entire feature follows here.