Ira Glass
Ira Glass
Ira Jeffrey Glassis an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth3 March 1959
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
thinking people radio
But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
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Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.
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I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
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But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
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Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
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The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.
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Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations.
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Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.
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I've actually done events at radio stations where I feel like I've had to give a little talk in behalf of television as a medium.
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For most people when you say - public radio - they automatically think it's like medicine. We only do stories that amuse and interest us. For people who haven't heard the show, we describe it like a movie where there are characters and you're interested in what's going to happen to them.
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I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.
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You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out.
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Often they don't take advantage of the latitude they have. They spend a lot of their early career trying to be the - official version - of a reporter. It's all about replicating a kind of stodgy form that already exists.
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Any journalist who doesn't stick to the day's news is sort of part journalist, part anthropologist. Once the excuse for the story stops being - it happened today - then you're square right in the other territory of journalism, which is just straight up documenting of how we live, and what we think of each other.