Not wanting to be belong to the club to which I belong

As much as I value the ABC, I have always recognized that its listeners and watchers can be extremely pedantic and nitpicking. Remember when they used to have that feedback program on TV, and how trivial many of the complaints could be? I have a vague memory, from perhaps the 1980's, of hearing a plummy voiced woman complain on radio about the use of "kids" for children (that word refers to young goats, she pointed out.) But then, it was only last year (maybe the year before?) they had a long session on Geraldine Doogue's radio show about computer font changes, and the listener response was large and opinionated. (Worrying excessively about fonts is, in my books, close to the most trivial of obsessions that exist.)

So, I was amused to see at Slate that public radio listeners in America like to make pedantic and snobbish complaints too. They annoy Farhad Manjoo, to put it mildly. He writes of his fellow NPR listeners:

Oh, I hate them, hate them, hate them. Every time one of their narrow-minded, classist letters makes it on the air, I contemplate burning my tote bag in protest. The problem, for me, isn't just that some people don't like some things NPR covers. It's that these reflexively snobby pseudo-intellectuals see NPR as their own—a refuge from the mad world outside, a "safe," high-minded palace that should never be sullied by anything more outré than James Taylor (whom, of course, they love).

I understand where he is coming from, although I have to say, they sound quite a bit worse than Radio National listeners in Australia.