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Ira Glass: “Newspapers and network news deserve to die”

Christiane Amanpour attended the DuPont Awards Winners’ Circle inside the Lecture Hall this year to talk about her winning documentary “God’s Warriors” but also to react to criticism by earlier remarks from Ira Glass who said he could have never voted for this years winners.

Amanpour: “Yes, we are serious about that. The world is a serious place. The things that confront us are serious things. We don’t want to make fun or make light of the serious things. That does not mean that we cannot create compelling, interesting television.”

(Click more for full Ira Glass remarks)

Ira Glass: (listen here for full Winners’ Circle audio)

“Opinion has taken over the market share that used to be held by journalism. And I think where opinion still kicks journalism’s ass on a daily basis is that it talks to us in a normal tone of voice. It’s somebody saying I’m going to talk to you the way we talk to each other, whereas even seeing the winners at the DuPont ceremony last night, I was struck by how many of them, especially the TV ones, are stuck in this kind of presentation that seems so old-fashioned and outdated and I would never ever watch on TV - ever.

“It seemed horribly corny. And if I would have been one of the judges I would not have been able to choose those things. I would have just thought this stuff is corny, I can’t watch this stuff, because of its form. I think journalism is loosing on its merits, actually, because it has failed to keep up with the way that we talk to each other. And it’s funny because for years I was saying to friends in TV news that if someone would do something that is like a news show but is has the tone of the Daily Show and you feel like ‘oh they are normal people and they talk about the news the way I talk to my friends about the news’ but not build it around jokes but build it around…

“I thought that would be an incredible thing and then Rachel Maddow came along on TV and is doing as close to this as you are getting. Truthfully, I think it is still too opinionated for me. I would still appreciate it if it was more journalism. I still feel like there is a space for that and I feel like the people that are trying to fill in that space to have a normal tone of voice but have the kind of judgment of real journalists, where you are trying to be fair to people and you are trying to figure out what is going on.

“I still think that needs to be exploited and I still think that newspapers are mostly really terrible and they deserve to die. And network news is mostly really terrible and it deserves to go down and I mean the amount of network news that I have watched in my entire life is probably the actual 6 o’clock, 10 o’clock, I don’t even know what time they are on - is perhaps less than 10 or 15 hours.

“I have just never watched it, it seems completely irrelevant, the tone seems horrible. They are news robots talking to other news robots in their specialized news language and that is all of what we must destroy.”