All's Fair in Journalism & Media

Let me just say, I think I might want to be Faith Salie.

The woman went to Harvard, is a Rhodes scholar, and is now doing the news her own way on Public Radio International's Fair Game with Faith Salie.

What makes Salie so special? For one thing, she's smart as a whip, having earned her bachelor's degree from Harvard and then going on to Oxford to obtain a master's of philosophy in modern English literature. Still, there's something else about Salie that stands apart. As one of her fan sites reads, "Faith Salie may be the only Rhodes scholar intentionally doing comedy." And in this generation of Stewart and Colbert fanatics, we all know what this means . . .

While Salie's show does bring on highly-respected experts and big names in the news, she makes the effort to cut through the "nicities" jargon of mainstream journalists. Her interviews are peppered with straightforward questions that refuse to acknowledge the possible discomfort of her interviewee. The show has been described as, "the quirky love child of 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' and 'All Things Considered.' It's smart enough to slake the traditional public-radio fans' thirst for intellectual programming but satiric enough to catch the attention of the prematurely cynical Gen X and Gen Y sets." We wouldn't expect less from a woman who also moonlights as a pop culture pundit for Vh1.

The radio show's website has a lot to shout about as well, featuring blogs done by professional writers about prevalent (and sometimes not so prevalent) stories in the news. And for those who believe that radio is dead, her show can be streamed off the website or copied onto your computer's MP3 player. Web 2.0 overkill? Definitely, but in the finest manner possible. If at the end of the day I can listen to a highly educated woman who shares my "useless" major give the news in a no-holds-barred sometimes satirical format that plays on my iTunes with the greatest of ease, I can go to bed happy.