I have it on excellent authority that today is the anniversary of NPR firing Bob Edwards from the host spot of Morning Edition.

In reviewing my notes (mostly on this blog), I first learned about his leaving the show much later, on March 24th in the evening when I went to the KUOW website and saw a small note pointing to an NPR press release. When I first blogged about it, I seemed a little lost. It wasn’t until the next day when I discovered the removal wasn’t Bob’s idea as the press release seemed to imply, and I got ticked off about it. (FWIW, I’m still miffed.)

Over the next few days, stretching into weeks, my electronic clip file of news articles and commentary about the bone-headed move grew larger than I could have imagined, and I griped and posted pretty consistently about it. But all this means that for at least two weeks, Bob and his family had to deal with his removal alone, not realizing that shortly a literal army of NPR listeners would storm the castle d’NPR in outrage over the injustice. For those weeks he wouldn’t receive the job offers, the cards, letters, and emails of his devoted listeners. He had to feel a deep depression, sorrow even, and yet none of it was apparent to those of us who listened to him daily. He had no way to know that over the next few months he would learn what a powerful hold he had over his listeners, and how much respect and affection they would show him on his book tour. Those weeks must have been terrible.

Of course, it’s been quite a year. His new show on XM Satellite Radio is enjoyed by those of us who simply cannot imagine starting our mornings without his understated voice to guide us gently into the day. I doubt many have gone as far as I have, no longer listening to NPR’s “Morning Zoo” and instead listening to the BCC World Service (in the same block on Channel 131) at 7:00am eastern to get my fix of news around the world while getting the Katester ready for school, then switching to XMPR to hear The Bob Edwards Show with my first cup of coffee or tea. I haven’t bothered with All Things Considered for quite a while, long before the year past, because I found it to be bland, boring, and, frankly, I got tired of the whole “host reporting from some place a working reporter would better serve” mentality…especially when hosts I could trust left the show to voices and personalities I didn’t care for (unlike Bob, they weren’t honest enough to tell me they were removed against their will). I’m literally down to listening to three NPR-produced programs every week (and even those shows I’m paying less attention to than I used to), a mear five hours, and another smattering of NPR-distributed programming (although my sources for those shows don’t involve NPR).

More and more, I’m listening to quality public-radio programming from non-NPR, sources; Here and Now at noon is one show I rarely miss. As It Happens, the CBC show I listened to many years ago over shortwave now comes to me with crystal clarity on XMPR. The aforementioned BBC for a global perspective unrivaled by the much smaller operation of NPR. What NPR desperately needs is serious competition in the domestic public radio market…it needs to learn that it cannot continue to think of itself as “public radio,” because it ain’t. It’s just another corporation looking for ratings and money by taking the “short-attention-span” approach to news reporting. If I wanted that nonsense, I’d listen to my local Clear-Channel station.

And the “Ombudsman,” Jeffery Dvorkin, who is referenced in this article as a “journalist” but should instead, I believe, more accurately be described as a “news organization executive,” keeps side-stepping the issue. He consistently says NPR “mishandled” the Edwards dissmissal…but that’s not at all accurate. The dismissal wasn’t “mishandled,” it was a mistake. This is a huge semantic difference, one the chief apologist for NPR cannot bring himself to admit.

No, I doubt many people have managed to ween themselves from suckling at the NPR teet the way I have, but then they managed to alienate me completely a year ago today, when they decided that a Barbie-and-Ken happy-talk team could possibly fill the shoes of a Radio Hall of Fame inductee. Bob has been overly-generous talking about how we need to support NPR and its member stations…but I strongly disagree with him. We need to support the upstarts, like XMPR (think about it a second…a commercial public radio station - what a radical concept!); stations who are willing to supply an alternative to NPR’s nonsense. I feel no differently than I felt almost a year ago - NPR no longer serves me, and indeed has decided they don’t want me as a listener. So I sure as the devil have no intention of financially supporting an organization so cheerfully eager to slap me in the face.

I just hope in this past year Bob learned how important his calm voice is for so many of us first thing in the morning. Even if we still deeply miss him intoning, “The time is nineteen minutes past the hour…”