Bob Garfield Biography
Bob Garfield is an American journalist and commentator. He is a co-host of On the Media from WNYC, alongside Brooke Gladstone. He is also the host of The Genius Dialogues from Audible. Until 2010, he wrote the “Add Review” TV-commercial criticism feature in Advertising Age. Garfield was a roving correspondent for All Things Considered from 1986 to 1999, and for ABC News he was a long-standing advertising analyst.
Garfield began his career as a reporter for the Reading Times from 1977 to 1981. He has been a columnist for USA Today and contributing editor for Civilization and the Washington Post magazine. He wrote the “AdReview” column in Advertising Age from 1985 to 2010. He has also written for The New York Times, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Wired, and many other publications.
In 1997, Scribner’s released a compilation of his work, titled Waking Up Screaming from the American Dream. A second book appeared in 2003, And Now a Few Words from Me. Garfield co-wrote an episode of the situation comedy Sweet Surrender, “Tag, You’re It,” a country song performed on NPR by Willie Nelson. He released a book on the crash of the media landscape call in 2009.
His first novel, Bedfellows, was published in October 2012. In 2013, he co-authored a non-fiction book called Can’t Buy Me Like with Doug Levy. In October 2007, Garfield launched Comcast Must Die (no longer updated) as a last resort customer service platform for the disgruntled subscribers of Comcast.
Since 2001, Garfield has been co-hosting the On the Media podcast with Brooke Gladstone covering journalism and media criticism. He also hosts Audible Inc.’s podcast The Genius Dialogues, in which he interviews MacArthur Fellows Program winners (often called “Genius Grants”).
In 2012, Garfield co-founded with producer Mike Vuolo a podcast on the English language called Lexicon Valley. In the episode on “creaky voice” in young women on January 2, 2013, Garfield emphatically mocked the phenomenon. The episode was the most widely heard by a factor of ten and brought powerful disapproval from some sources to Garfield.
In 2015, Garfield established Wharton’s Media Future Summit, an annual meeting of high-level managers, owners, and scholars to address the flailing media economy. He is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Future of Advertising Program, SEI Center for Advanced Management Studies. He was a Penn practitioner and a distinguished visiting Faculty in Media Ecology at Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
Bob Garfield Age
He was born in 1955. He is currently 64 years. Garfield was raised in a Jewish family in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, “a hometown of my youth”. He lives in Potomac, Maryland.
Garfield Bobs Family
Information on his family members to be updated soon.
Bob Garfield Education
Information is under review.
Bob Garfield, Co-host of NPR’s ‘On the Media,’ to Speak Here April 7
Bob Garfield, co-host of National Public Radio’s “On the Media” program, will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, April 7, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.
The program is the third in Minnesota Public Radio News’ 2013-2014 Broadcast Journalist Series, which is co-sponsored by the St. Thomas College of Arts and Sciences, its Communication and Journalism Department, and by Thomson Reuters. Garfield will be interviewed on stage that evening by Tom Weber, co-host of “The Daily Circuit” for Minnesota Public Radio News.
In addition to co-hosting “On the Media,” a program heard on more than 300 public radio stations, Garfield has been an author and columnist for 30-plus years. He currently is writing about media and marketing for The Guardian and MediaPost. He has been a contributing editor for Washington Post Magazine, Civilization and the opinion page of USA Today. He also has written for The New York Times, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Atlantic and Wired, and has worked for ABC, CBS and CNBC.
Garfield has written five books, most recently Can’t Buy Me Like. His first book, Waking Up Screaming From the American Dream, was published in 1997. His 2003 manifesto on advertising And Now a Few Words From Me is published in six languages. His 2009 The Chaos Scenario, about the supposed collapse of mass media and advertising, has mostly come true. Garfield co-wrote “Tag, You’re It,” a country song performed by Willie Nelson, and wrote an episode of the short-lived NBC sitcom “Sweet Surrender.”
Students, staff, and faculty from the five Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities (including St. Thomas) are admitted for free at the door on the day of the program. Just present your college or university ID to the usher at the entrance of the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium.
General Admission tickets are $12 for Minnesota Public Radio members and $15 for nonmembers. Ticket information, along with directions for parking on or near the St. Thomas campus, is available here. Now in its 19th year, Minnesota Public Radio’s Broadcast Journalist Series commissions renowned journalists for a 24-hour residency four times a year. They share insights on their craft and issues that affect our world.
Melissa Block, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” since 2003, will be this year’s fourth speaker; her talk is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, May 1, in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.
Bob Garfield Wife
He is married to Serbia-born Milena Trobozić Garfield.
Bob Garfield Npr
Bob Garfield, who will be bringing his one-man show “Ruggedly Jewish” to Berkeley later this month, was in Los Angeles a while back when he bought a mezuzah for his parents’ new house. As he walked out of the Judaica store, someone asked whether he was going to buy a scroll. “‘Don’t you want the scroll for the mezuzah?’” they asked. “And I said, ‘What, it isn’t loaded?’ They said it was sold separately.”
Garfield said that encounter sums up his life as a mostly secular Jew, and goes to the heart of his show. “I guess you could say for most of my life I’ve been a mezuzah without a scroll,” he told J. Garfield, 62, has taken to the stage after a long career as a media analyst and commentator on everything from politics to talking cats. He is the co-host of “On the Media,” a weekly show that originates at WNYC in New York and can be heard locally on KQED 98.5 FM at midnight Mondays and 2 p.m. Sundays.
The author of five books and a commentator who has spoken at venues ranging from the Smithsonian to the Grand Ole Opry to a kickboxing ring in South Africa, he made the move to performing after giving up on writing a memoir.
“It is the harvest of an attempt to write a memoir that was funny and surprising and entertaining, and did not work as a memoir partly because I’m just not quite famous enough and partly because I don’t have some incredible life challenge that I’ve overcome to become a hero,” he said.
“I gave up the memoir halfway through because I just did not have the standing. But I was approached by a booking agent… and it made me think that the memoir really did have a place, not in print but on stage.”
The show is in large part a personal therapy session in which Garfield talks about his childhood and decades of his “attempts to be assiduously secular.” But it also mixes in comments on American culture and politics in the age of Trump, as well as stories about the oddballs he’s met and written about over the years.
“Ruggedly Jewish,” which already has played in Philadelphia and Chicago and will hit New York before it comes to the UC Theatre in Berkeley on Jan. 27, touches on everything from a woman with a talking cat to Garfield’s bris to the right-wing rally in Charlottesville in August. Since it’s a self-exploration, much of it involves his Jewishness — or lack thereof. He said the title of the show is a joke because “I am so not rugged” and because he has spent years trying to not be identified as a Jew.
“There has been this lifelong struggle for me to figure out who exactly I am, what kind of Jew I am, and much of which involves running away from Jewish culture as fast as I could for 35 years,” he said. “I don’t care about the Torah, but I do care deeply about lox and bagels.” Garfield has been married twice — first to a Catholic and then to a Serbian Orthodox. He begins the show with a story about going on a hunting trip with his Catholic in-laws. He won’t say how it ends, because he said that would ruin the punch line.
“The stories are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious,” he said. “There’s gunplay, singing, and dancing. It’s all me. I think the consensus is that I’m far and away from the best, and the worst, in the cast.” Though he said he doesn’t devote a lot of time to President Donald Trump until the end of the show, Garfield said “Ruggedly Jewish” could not have been written in an earlier time.
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Bob Garfield and Glenn Beck
First on TV and now online at TheBlaze.com, Glenn Beck has spent more than a decade preaching about a variety of Byzantine plots and political demons, from theories of FEMA concentration camps to Obama’s “deep-seated hatred of white people.”
Yet, since his departure from Fox News in 2011, the conservative firebrand has found himself increasingly at odds with his base. Beck has vehemently disavowed Donald Trump and expressed empathy for the Black Lives Matter movement, all amid reports that his media empire is faltering.
Now, Beck claims to be a new man. For the past few months, he has been on a sort of mainstream media apology tour, talking with Vice, Charlie Rose, MSNBC, and the New York Times to pronounce himself chastened and call for partisan reconciliation. Bob speaks with Beck about the sincerity of his new apologetic, introspective persona.