Longer answer, no.

You ever notice how young children speak clearly and with good diction? (Well, except for the ones who use baby talk or who have speech impediments or who suffer from ASD or other speech disorders.) The goal of the national operator or newscaster or emergency announcer is to speak with the same clarity and diction as that child, with inflections that are essentially a kind of average across regional accents but also conform to some extent to an ideal form–ie, many English speakers drop or elide t’s, but the operator must pronounce them clearly.

As people become adults they tend to adopt a sort of shorthand kind of speech and regional accent will determine which syllables get whispered, elided, and dropped.

There actually is a standard for no-accent American English. You don’t hear it often because it costs money to learn. (And I don’t count voicemail because the inflection used in that industry is simply bizarre. Nor do I think it maximizes comprehension.) There’s also one for Spanish–you’ll hear Columbian Spanish held up as the standard for least accent and maximum ease of comprehension across Spanish-speakers. (Mexican’s acknowledged as one of the worst.) The British situation is more confusing because of the elitism in that society–you’ve got an idea of the Oxford accent or the BBC accent, so while clarity was very important, so was branding. (The idea of looking to newscasters in the US is also somewhat problematic. NPR, for example, very definitely has its own accent.)

A purely regional operator can, of course, speak completely in some sort of regional patois and be completely intelligible to the intended audience unless there are some recent in-migrants in the mix. But I think even in that context, the listeners know and understand that to be their native accent (which they respond positively to) as opposed to the accent of another region (which they may dislike or simply find hard to understand) or to neutral English.

Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzles!

Operators had no accents. My Mom’s first job ever was as an operator. Being Andalusian she spoke only Spanish till she was 10 years old but had NO accent when on the phone with customers.

Uhh… dude, just because you can’t perceive the accent, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Dumbest comment ever?

So government control of the press, right?

This reminds me of the guy Substance linked bemoaning how much we’d changed since de Tocqueville’s tour while forgetting most of what happened in US history and some of de T’s own opinions, if wiki is to be trusted: “As critic of individualism, Tocqueville thought that through associating, the coming together of people for mutual purpose, both in public and private, Americans are able to overcome selfish desires, thus making both a self-conscious and active political society and a vibrant civil society functioning independently from the state.” Heh heh heh.

You can tell that he likes it to be just so.

“Life starts to look like a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces that no one is bothering to assemble into a coherent picture.”

In other words, “Nobody is listening to me anymore!”

This idiot and his individual liberty would have wandered out into the woods at Plymouth Colony and been eaten by wolves before the first Thanksgiving.

Also, limpets tended to cut the blades too close to the bone of Ma Earth.

You certainly have a way with words. Wink wink; Starbursts!

Bass-ackwards. The blower will most want a cleansing smoke afterward.

If you give a goat a blowjob,…

Dude, that was one of my favorite books as a child.