One of the things that bugs me about the writers who claim that the Midwest accent is the standard American accent is their fishbowl view. They view their own accent as the correct one. What do you think somebody from Georgia or Texas would think of that? Is this another "to the victor goes the spoils" from the Civil War? The north gets to have the "correct" accent? The population of southern speakers is barely a minority, I'd hate to be from Louisiana and hear some egomaniac from Iowa talk about his accent being the right one. It's like the woman who says the toilet seat should be down, even though 50% of the population uses it the other way, she thinks her way is the right way. Newscasters generally speak with a northern accent, I can attest to that, but they come from all over, and how many of them are deliberately trained to speak like a Midwesterner? I can't imagine such a thing. Would a newscaster from Albany NY or Seattle, or LA, or Connecticut, where people all have basically the standarn northern accent, need to change to some sort of cornfield Nebraska twang? Hell no. The Midwestern accent is not really typical anyway, I lived in Michigan for a year and people have an unusual accent there, not the typical newscaster accent. They say everything is "the bomb," but they pronounce bomb as if it were spelled "bahm." Their accent may be the bahm, but is NOT the standard way to pronounce things in journalism. I would say that of all the places in the USA that have the most neutral speach, that journalists would try to emulate, this region where I live beats out the Midwest for neutrality. Eastern upstate NY, from Poughkeepsie to Syracuse. Also Connecticut, they hae no trace of the New England weirdness that you see in Vermont or Maine, or most of Mass. And northwestern Mass has the Vermont accent. Very little of Mass is free of the weird New England thing. Worchester, forget it...very thick there. Probably the only accent-free part of Mass. is around Springfield, or southwestern Mass in general. That's like Connecticut, which is neutral. The Vermont accent is only found among the older people. Young kids in Vermont are not carrying this on at all. The old timers with their "Pepperidge Faam Remembas" accent with all the "ayaah," well that was a Swedish accent and the grandchildren of the Swedes don't talk that way anymore. Not at all. As for the NYC accent, that only goes as far north as Peekskill unless you count all the transplanted NYC folks, especially after September 11, who moved upstate by the millions lately. As far north as Poughkeepsie, there are a good number of NYC folks that moved up, but the native Poughkeepsie people have the basic American accent, and the children of the NYC folks lose their accent in one generation. North or west of Albany, there are very few NYC transplants and no accent at all, except for the rednecks. And what can you do about the rednecks?