Robert Garfield is an American journalist and commentator, and the host of Bully Pulpit from Booksmart Studios.[1] He is former co-host of On the Media from WNYC.[2] He is also the host of The Genius Dialogues from Audible.[3] Until 2010, he wrote the "Ad Review" TV-commercial criticism feature in Advertising Age.[4] From 1986 to 1999, Garfield was a roving correspondent for All Things Considered and was a longtime advertising analyst for ABC News.[citation needed]
In October 2007, Garfield launched Comcast Must Die, a customer-service platform of last resort for disgruntled Comcast subscribers.[10]
Garfield co-hosted the radio program and podcast On the Media with Brooke Gladstone from 2001 until 2021. It covers journalism and media criticism. He also hosts the podcast The Genius Dialogues, presented by Audible Inc., in which he interviews winners of the MacArthur Fellows Program (often called "Genius Grants").
In 2012, Garfield co-founded a podcast about the English language called Lexicon Valley, presented by Slate, with producer Mike Vuolo. In the January 2, 2013, episode on "creaky voice" in young females, Garfield criticized the phenomenon in emphatic terms.[11] The episode was the most listened to by a factor of ten[12] and brought strong disapproval on Garfield from some sources.[13][14] Garfield and Vuolo hosted the podcast until 2016, when both left the podcast to pursue other projects.[15]
In 2015, Garfield founded the Media Future Summit[16]atWharton, an annual gathering of high-level executives, owners and academics aimed at addressing the flailing media economy. He is a senior fellow at the Wharton Future of Advertising Program, SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management[17] at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Professor of Practice at Penn and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty in Media Ecology at Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
In 2021, New York Public Radio fired Garfield, saying he had violated the station's anti-bullying policy. Station officials cited a pattern of behavior uncovered by an independent investigator. Station management issued Garfield a warning in 2020 but the behavior persisted, officials said. Garfield said the behavior amounted to two instances of yelling at meetings, in both cases as a response to "provocation [that] was extraordinary and simply shocking".[18]
Garfield was raised in a Jewish family[19][20]inBala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, "a hometown of my youth". He lives in Potomac, Maryland.[21][22] He is married to Milena Trobozić; they have three daughters.[23]
^Iwasaki, Scott (February 15, 2018). "'Ruggedly Jewish' follows NPR's Bob Garfield's musings regarding happiness". Park Record. I grew up in a Jewish household. I got a Jewish education and 90 percent of the population of our neighborhood and schools were Jewish. And from the moment I left for college, I have been running as fast as I could to get away from that scene
