Ira Glass explicates empathy, then hangs up on you
Ira Glass of public radio’s This American Life hangs up on reporters. But only, in this Columbia Journalism Review interview, to parody Robert Novak—and it’s all in fun, fun of the sincere kind that we’ve come to expect of Glass.
Glass fascinates at least three separate times in this piece. First, as he reflects on his pending TV deal:
Glass: Just from making this little pilot, I feel like there are characters who come off better on the radio than they do on the TV, and then there are some characters who come off better on the TV than they come off on the radio—simply by virtue of seeing their face….
Reporter: But isn’t there something about not seeing someone’s face, on the radio, that allows you to sort of project a lot into whatever you’re hearing? On TV, I don’t know, I just feel like a little of the mystery just disappears.
Glass: No, that definitely is true. It’s easier to make someone in the audience love someone on the radio. It’s just easier, because the number of factors you’re dealing with are fewer. You can do it on TV, but you just have to be careful how you handle it. On the radio, because you don’t see the person, you empathize. It’s easy to imagine yourself as them really, really quickly. Whereas on the television, from the get-go they are somebody else, and you have to kind of build up a different sort of bond with them. You can have a very fond feeling for them on the TV, but the first fact you know about them is they are not you, whereas on the radio, they appear to you for the first time as a voice in your head.