I just realized that I've never gushed about Brook Gladstone's and Bob Garfield's excellent show On The Media, which has to be some of the best news reporting* you can hear on NPR.

The interviews are nuanced, hard-hitting, and fair. They get people who are interesting to hear from, they ask pretty straight-forward questions, and they don't stop until they get their answers. They also don't suffer posturing or sidestepping, and both of the main interviewers have a rich history of calling bullshit on the crazy crap that their guests sometimes spew. I love it.

The topics are always media-related, but they interpret their topic broadly enough to keep the stories from being esoteric; in addition to the obvious first-amendment topics, they frequently touch on privacy, government, law, war, and economics. Even when I don't feel like hearing depressing news at 1:59pm on a Sunday, I'm always glad I listened by 3:01pm.

Today's show, for example, was a pretty good discussion of several privacy issues with YouTube and Google, and they finished up by discussing an extremely interesting obscenity lawsuit that potentially set precedent for judicial action on Orwellian "thought crimes." When was the last time the BBC had a discussion about thought crime?

That's what I thought.

(* - I still think that This American Life is the best thing on the radio, but since it's not always news I can safely hold up OTM along side it.)