Ubiquitous
2024-04-11 01:05:02 UTC
You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-
playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn't precisely describe
me, but it's not far off. I'm Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a
lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my
listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I'll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior
editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we've
covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media,
and AI.
It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my
tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy,
but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to
NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled
worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always
been this way.
But it hasn't.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned
in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds
singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that
exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically
different from our own-engaging precisely because they were unguarded
and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the
farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it
still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of
listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of
the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent
described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as
middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or
somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also
losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now,
predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn't be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving
a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things,
it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald
Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR
with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I
eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him
fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a
belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage
or topple Trump's presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the
election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our
wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee,
became NPR's guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR
hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many
of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of
collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news
reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion,
NPR's coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our
programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it
happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you
trusted, you're emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of
circumstantial evidence never add up. It's bad to blow a big story.
What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea
culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards
of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't
practice those standards yourself. That's what shatters trust and
engenders cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR's only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about
the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop
containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election
only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here's how NPR's managing
editor for news at the time explained the thinking: "We don't want to
waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't
want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just
pure distractions."
But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian
disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials
suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed
his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence
peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of
following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with
colleagues, I listened as one of NPR's best and most fair-minded
journalists said it was good we weren't following the laptop story
because it could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post's reporting were confirmed and the
emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could
have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we
didn't make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR's Covid coverage, most notably in
reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects
of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story
lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin-supporting the
hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan,
China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that
the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately,
dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci
and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health
establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for
NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring
that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn't the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of
leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a
lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in
January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been
declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and
Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential
scientific paper known as "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Its
authors wrote they didn't believe "any type of laboratory-based
scenario is plausible."
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn't die. And understandably so. In
private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing
it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an
evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his
colleagues, "I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape
or natural."
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists
made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR,
we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with
which we backed the natural origin story. We didn't budge when the
Energy Department-the federal agency with the most expertise about
laboratories and biological research-concluded, albeit with low
confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the
emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28,
2023, by asserting confidently that "the scientific evidence
overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus."
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so
dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague
compared it to the Bush administration's unfounded argument that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won't get
fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related.
Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that
ought to have been driving our work.
I'm offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe
we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can
read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly
understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step
inside the organization.
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in
2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America.
Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired
primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with
hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR's programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible
and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It
was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so
for NPR staffers. Floyd's murder, captured on video, changed both the
conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Given the circumstances of Floyd's death, it would have been an ideal
moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive
activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s-in law
enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a
very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism
that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America's infestation
with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our
mission was to change it.
"When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism," Lansing
wrote in a companywide article, "we can be agents of change. Listening
and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed
by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself
accountable for this."
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In
confessional language he said the leaders of public media, "starting
with me-must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white
privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we
bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves-body
and soul-to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions."
He declared that diversity-on our staff and in our audience-was the
overriding mission, the "North Star" of the organization. Phrases like
"that's part of the North Star" became part of meetings and more casual
conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the
workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed
their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to
enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious
bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings
imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were
offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of
color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR
Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they
were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots-among
producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning
number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color
mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir
(black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR;
Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and
Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre
(Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees
at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people
clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If,
as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a "great
way to meet like-minded colleagues" and "help new employees feel
included," it would have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside
NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR's union, SAG-
AFTRA-an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a
section on DEI, requires NPR management to "keep up to date with
current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups"
and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those
groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI
Accountability Committee.
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying
member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table
in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are
common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what's notable is the
extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced
around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the
absence of viewpoint diversity.
There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and
how they should be framed. It's frictionless-one story after another
about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate
apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of
Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called
NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance-disseminated by news management-we're
asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was
prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for
Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories-on how The
Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are
alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about
crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose
affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its
spillover onto streets and campuses through the "intersectional" lens
that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus
oppressed. That's meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at
almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7,
overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in
peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate
around the world.
For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great
pride. It's a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of
American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.
I can't count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I
do, and they'd say, "I love NPR!"
And they wouldn't stop there. They would mention their favorite host or
one of those "driveway moments" where a story was so good you'd stay in
your car until it finished.
It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is
different. After the initial "I love NPR," there's a pause and a person
will acknowledge, "I don't listen as much as I used to." Or, with some
chagrin: "What's happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?"
In recent years I've struggled to answer that question. Concerned by
the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our
newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I
found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero
Republicans. None.
So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial
staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score
of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn't hostile. It
was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages
from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the "oh
wow, that's weird" variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random
anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that
she had been "skewered" for bringing up diversity of thought when she
arrived at NPR. So, she said, "I want to be careful how we discuss this
publicly."
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone
off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders,
sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022,
I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described
the controversial education bill in Florida as the "Don't Say Gay" bill
when it didn't even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record
straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word
that many Hispanics hate-Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a
managers' meeting to present my observations.
Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That's not the
NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I've become a
visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It's uncomfortable, sometimes
heartbreaking.
Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the
captain of ship North Star-CEO John Lansing-about the lack of viewpoint
diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no
response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate
hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On
December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing's assistant wrote back
to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said
he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would
be sent. But it never came.
I won't speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of
NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal
with. But what's indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper
management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint
diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.
Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR's
news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so.
Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly
reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a
smaller, progressive silo.
Despite all the resources we'd devoted to building up our news audience
among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023,
according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience
was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is
14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the
overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience
doesn't come close to reflecting America. It's overwhelmingly white and
progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid
off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts
following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is
dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital
stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren't
conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio-where for
years NPR had no peer-is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and
entertaining podcasts to choose from.
Even within our diminished audience, there's evidence of trouble at the
most basic level: trust.
In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly
announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New
York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It
found that "3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they
associate NPR with the characteristic `trustworthy.'?" Only in a world
where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10
trustworthy score be something to boast about.
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has
become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising.
Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we're doing, hoping it
will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building
blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we've gone wrong. News
organizations don't go in for that kind of reckoning. But there's a
good reason for NPR to be the first: we're the ones with the word
public in our name.
Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn't the answer. As the country
becomes more fractured, there's still a need for a public institution
where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith.
Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn't change the journalism at
NPR. That needs to come from within.
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who's been a
leader in tech. She doesn't have a news background, which could be an
asset given where things stand. I'll be rooting for her. It's a tough
job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don't tell people how to
think. It could even be the new North Star.
playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn't precisely describe
me, but it's not far off. I'm Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a
lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my
listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I'll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior
editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we've
covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media,
and AI.
It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my
tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy,
but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to
NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled
worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always
been this way.
But it hasn't.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned
in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds
singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that
exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically
different from our own-engaging precisely because they were unguarded
and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the
farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it
still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of
listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of
the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent
described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as
middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or
somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also
losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now,
predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn't be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving
a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things,
it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald
Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR
with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I
eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him
fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a
belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage
or topple Trump's presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the
election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our
wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee,
became NPR's guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR
hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many
of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of
collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news
reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion,
NPR's coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our
programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it
happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you
trusted, you're emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of
circumstantial evidence never add up. It's bad to blow a big story.
What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea
culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards
of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't
practice those standards yourself. That's what shatters trust and
engenders cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR's only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about
the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop
containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election
only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here's how NPR's managing
editor for news at the time explained the thinking: "We don't want to
waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't
want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just
pure distractions."
But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian
disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials
suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed
his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence
peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of
following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with
colleagues, I listened as one of NPR's best and most fair-minded
journalists said it was good we weren't following the laptop story
because it could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post's reporting were confirmed and the
emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could
have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we
didn't make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR's Covid coverage, most notably in
reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects
of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story
lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin-supporting the
hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan,
China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that
the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately,
dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci
and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health
establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for
NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring
that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn't the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of
leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a
lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in
January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been
declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and
Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential
scientific paper known as "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Its
authors wrote they didn't believe "any type of laboratory-based
scenario is plausible."
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn't die. And understandably so. In
private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing
it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an
evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his
colleagues, "I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape
or natural."
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists
made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR,
we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with
which we backed the natural origin story. We didn't budge when the
Energy Department-the federal agency with the most expertise about
laboratories and biological research-concluded, albeit with low
confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the
emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28,
2023, by asserting confidently that "the scientific evidence
overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus."
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so
dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague
compared it to the Bush administration's unfounded argument that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won't get
fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related.
Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that
ought to have been driving our work.
I'm offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe
we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can
read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly
understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step
inside the organization.
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in
2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America.
Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired
primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with
hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR's programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible
and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It
was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so
for NPR staffers. Floyd's murder, captured on video, changed both the
conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Given the circumstances of Floyd's death, it would have been an ideal
moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive
activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s-in law
enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a
very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism
that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America's infestation
with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our
mission was to change it.
"When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism," Lansing
wrote in a companywide article, "we can be agents of change. Listening
and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed
by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself
accountable for this."
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In
confessional language he said the leaders of public media, "starting
with me-must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white
privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we
bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves-body
and soul-to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions."
He declared that diversity-on our staff and in our audience-was the
overriding mission, the "North Star" of the organization. Phrases like
"that's part of the North Star" became part of meetings and more casual
conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the
workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed
their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to
enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious
bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings
imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were
offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of
color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR
Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they
were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots-among
producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning
number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color
mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir
(black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR;
Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and
Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre
(Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees
at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people
clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If,
as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a "great
way to meet like-minded colleagues" and "help new employees feel
included," it would have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside
NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR's union, SAG-
AFTRA-an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a
section on DEI, requires NPR management to "keep up to date with
current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups"
and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those
groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI
Accountability Committee.
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying
member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table
in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are
common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what's notable is the
extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced
around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the
absence of viewpoint diversity.
There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and
how they should be framed. It's frictionless-one story after another
about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate
apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of
Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called
NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance-disseminated by news management-we're
asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was
prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for
Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories-on how The
Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are
alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about
crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose
affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its
spillover onto streets and campuses through the "intersectional" lens
that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus
oppressed. That's meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at
almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7,
overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in
peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate
around the world.
For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great
pride. It's a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of
American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.
I can't count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I
do, and they'd say, "I love NPR!"
And they wouldn't stop there. They would mention their favorite host or
one of those "driveway moments" where a story was so good you'd stay in
your car until it finished.
It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is
different. After the initial "I love NPR," there's a pause and a person
will acknowledge, "I don't listen as much as I used to." Or, with some
chagrin: "What's happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?"
In recent years I've struggled to answer that question. Concerned by
the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our
newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I
found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero
Republicans. None.
So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial
staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score
of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn't hostile. It
was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages
from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the "oh
wow, that's weird" variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random
anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that
she had been "skewered" for bringing up diversity of thought when she
arrived at NPR. So, she said, "I want to be careful how we discuss this
publicly."
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone
off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders,
sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022,
I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described
the controversial education bill in Florida as the "Don't Say Gay" bill
when it didn't even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record
straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word
that many Hispanics hate-Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a
managers' meeting to present my observations.
Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That's not the
NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I've become a
visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It's uncomfortable, sometimes
heartbreaking.
Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the
captain of ship North Star-CEO John Lansing-about the lack of viewpoint
diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no
response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate
hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On
December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing's assistant wrote back
to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said
he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would
be sent. But it never came.
I won't speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of
NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal
with. But what's indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper
management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint
diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.
Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR's
news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so.
Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly
reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a
smaller, progressive silo.
Despite all the resources we'd devoted to building up our news audience
among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023,
according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience
was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is
14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the
overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience
doesn't come close to reflecting America. It's overwhelmingly white and
progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid
off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts
following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is
dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital
stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren't
conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio-where for
years NPR had no peer-is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and
entertaining podcasts to choose from.
Even within our diminished audience, there's evidence of trouble at the
most basic level: trust.
In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly
announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New
York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It
found that "3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they
associate NPR with the characteristic `trustworthy.'?" Only in a world
where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10
trustworthy score be something to boast about.
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has
become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising.
Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we're doing, hoping it
will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building
blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we've gone wrong. News
organizations don't go in for that kind of reckoning. But there's a
good reason for NPR to be the first: we're the ones with the word
public in our name.
Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn't the answer. As the country
becomes more fractured, there's still a need for a public institution
where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith.
Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn't change the journalism at
NPR. That needs to come from within.
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who's been a
leader in tech. She doesn't have a news background, which could be an
asset given where things stand. I'll be rooting for her. It's a tough
job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don't tell people how to
think. It could even be the new North Star.
--
Democrats and the liberal media hate President Trump more than they
love this country.
Democrats and the liberal media hate President Trump more than they
love this country.