Ich Bein Ein

Uri Berliner is an NPR Veteran, so am I. We spoke about what's going on with the network.

A radio announcer who is crying because her ratings have declined so steeply

Public radio has experienced a crippling 30% drop-off in listeners. The official explanations focus on general changes in radio listening patterns, which while true, don’t go far enough in grappling with a decline that is worse for National Public Radio than almost all other broadcasters. In the previous posts I examined the rising use of the term“white supremacy” on NPR to describe stories and incidents which might be better understood with less loaded framings and jargon-laden phrasings. I then chronicled how the questions of which Americans disprortionately died during the pandemic and overall influenced coverage. Here I discuss the overall picture with Uri Berliner, former Senior Editor for NPR.

The San Fransisco broadcaster KQED cut 34 jobs this week. This on the heels of Chicago broadcaster WBEZ laying off 14, Boston’s WBUR cutting 20% of its staff , WNYC cutting 20 jobs and getting out of the original podcast game, Colorado public cutting radio 15, Los Angeles public radio cutting staff, and the DC public radio station killing its web site and firing reporters.

The decimation of public radio in general is intertwined with the cratering of listenership to National Public Radio. It’s as if an asteroid hit the world of public radio; there is carnage all over the ecosystem. Different experts will name the asteroid different things. Some will say its changing listening patterns. Others will blame the rise of podcasts (which public radio used to dominate, but no longer does). I think that the programming, specifically the commitment to framings, topics, and jargon was, after a while, off-putting to the existing audience.

Uri Berliner has a similar but slightly different explanation. He blames ideological rigidity and a lack of viewpoint diversity. In his view conservative world views were either denigrated or more often flat-out ignored. One of Berliner’s contentions was that that affinity groups within the network exercised outsized influence. In the contract negotiated between NPR and the SAG-AFRTA union, produced below, that role affinity groups and a DEI council play in language choices on NPR is spelled out.

Including Diversity Equity and Inclusion language in contracts isn’t unusual, though when I put this clause in front of journalists who worked or worked for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and two cable networks the reactions ranged from unsurprised to a declaration that there would be a riot in the newsroom were this language to be adopted in their particular workplace.

The NPR union has been public about their desire for change: “while NPR has made some progress in diversifying editorial staff in the past several years (reducing the percentage of white editors from 81.5% to 74%), there is much more to be done.” They’ve largely achieved their goals. Diversity is know within NPR as “The North Star”. That’s laudable, but, as Berliner points out, when diversity is your number one goal then definitionally covering the news and engaging the audience is pushed down the priority list.

The full interview can be heard of Friday’s Gist , here’s an excerpt…

PESCA: (in trying to pinpoint why attitudes towards viewpoint diversity changed within NPR changed)…was the work staff at NPR younger, or went to a journalism school that learned different definitions of objectivity? 

BERLINER: I don’t know whether they went to journalism school or not. But I do think there is a sense among some staffers and that journalism is a place to fight systems of power to right social wrongs, to fight for social justice or to hold the powerful- in your definition- accountable, and help the less powerful.

So do you think it shouldn't be? Do you critique them? 

I think that you should hold the powerful accountable, but we should also have some kind of common definition of who the powerful are, and then we shouldn't play favorites like, we'll hold this group of powerful people accountable but not others. 

Right. And so even if the journalist is sympathetic to the cause of the activist, they really shouldn't approach their job differently when it comes to scrutinizing the righteous activist, even if the journalist themselves believes that person is righteous. 

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think it's very hard to to to get your personal feelings and opinions out of reporting. We're all human and I don't think pure objectivity like a robot is possible, but I think you should really strive for it. 

And did more of the people doing the journalism in the last few years disagree with that? Did they think that it was an ideal to keep one's personal opinions out of journalism as much as they did 10 years prior? 

Well, you know, like there were lots of public conversations about that, the end of objectivity being over. There are lots of conversations within journalism that objectivity is outdated, it favors the powerful and that there's a new model needed, which is to fight for justice in your view of what justice says. 

So what was your take on that? Did you disagree with that publicly? privately? 

 I disagreed with a lot of the ways that I thought the coverage was going and and I think a lot of this has to do with my training, I'm obviously older, but also I come out of covering business and economics and in economics there are lots of models and data and all sorts of jargon, but really one thing stands out in covering economics is that everything is about a trade off. And I think if you allow your reporting to acknowledge that and to deal with the trade-offs because the trade-offs are difficult, but if you have that in your underpinning of your reporting, I think it's going to be a lot healthier and a lot better. 

Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. So can you give me an example, maybe a specific story where there was a trade-off inherent in the story and the trade-off wasn't acknowledged? 

Student loan forgiveness. I'm sympathetic to people who got overextended and face these huge debts that will prevent them from buying a house. And the impulse to help them is understandable. But what are the trade-offs? Who's paying for that? People who didn't go to college paying for that. I think these are the kinds of things that you really need to honestly acknowledge and deal with. 

How did NPR cover it? And how do you think they should have? 

I think a lot of it was sort of just “this way that student loans are going to be forgiven, and here's how you can get your loan forgiven” Or that it's generally a positive thing, rather than something where there are severe trade-offs and it's not pure benefit. 

(NPR’s coverage of student loan debt forgiveness was, as Berlinger describes almost completely sympathetic to those with student loan debt. The comics they commissioned portraying the stories of those with student loans could have come straight out of a brochure published by a student loan advocacy group, which is fine, but it’s harder to conjure an image of those who represent the trade-off.)

So what would you do in terms of pushback to try to raise these points? 

I think the one thing is to take these trade-offs seriously. You know, sometimes people say that objectivity is over. It's squishy or it's fake balance. But I think (with) the trade-offs, that's reality. That is reality. So I think that that should be inherent when you're covering an event or a policy, that may seem clear cut to you, but you should try and be completely honest and fair to the side that says there are trade-offs. The fact is that there are trade-offs. 

 

What do you think should happen with Congress and investigations into NPR and funding intent?

As I said (in The Fre Press) , I am against defunding NPR. I I do think that the the funding is especially important to the small member stations in smaller towns and rural areas than they are often a primary or source of news and also a sort of sense of community around those stations. I think they play a critical role, so I'm not in favor of defunding NPR. I think that instead that NPR needs to to fix things from the inside in a pretty significant way. 

Do you think that your essay will help them do that, or will there be a circle-the-wagons mentality? 

That's a really great question. I am very hopeful. It's difficult and painful and maybe a little awkward and cumbersome and maybe I you know I. But I think if if there are these things are taken more seriously that would that would be great. 

But it also could be circle-the-wagons, but and you know, I think that this will mostly come from the top, what the priorities are. But I also feel like that the the CEO's response to my essay was in the circle-the-wagons camp.