What are my thoughts on Uri Berliner’s latest piece about partisanship and too much focus on race at NPR?
Considering Berliner piece, did you know that NPR never interviewed Nancy Pelosi’s general election opponent? I have italicized that part of the story below.
This piece looks slightly different than usual, but I wanted to express my thoughts here.
***I teased in the last piece that I would write about the meaning of free media this week, but I decided to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming and format for this more timely and relevant post.***
Today’s Takeaway: The conversation about political ideology and race in media is nuanced. We need to focus on systemic changes rather than performative ones and stop having a duty to the status quo over the American people.
I often think that the stories told in the press are worth noting, but the ones not told are even more descriptive of racism and political bias in the media. I have considered running some pieces here on stories that were not picked up. Does that interest you? Let me know.
This week, senior business editor at National Public Radio (NPR) Uri Berliner wrote an essay about changes in NPR over the last 25 years. Having started my career there, I wanted to weigh in on the changes I have seen personally at NPR and in the media atmosphere over the last two decades.
My journey with NPR began in 2004, fresh out of college with a degree in electronic media production. I boldly moved from Ohio to D.C. for a highly competitive unpaid internship at the National Public Radio (NPR) headquarters, where I served as the media relations intern.
From there, I went on to have a career in media relations over the last twenty years, working on media relations for other media outlets, journalists and organizations representing them, racial and social justice organizations, and political candidates. Aside from NPR, I also worked for radio stations in D.C., so many experiences have influenced my background.
I AM NOT trying to proclaim myself an expert based on a junior-level position at NPR 20 years ago. That would be ridiculous. My observation is based on my experience working with NPR and other media outlets and the changing landscape, which overlaps and differs from Berliner’s piece.
My career in public interest public relations is unique, a field often shrouded in mystery and misconceptions. In this piece, I aim to illuminate my role for a broader audience, which can be encapsulated as facilitating media outlets' booking of more diverse sources on behalf of various organizations. This distinctive background underpins the observations I am about to share, providing a dual perspective of what it entails to book a source at NPR.
As part of my consultancy now, one of my duties is to call or email NPR and other journalists and suggest stories for them to cover and people to interview. My latest on NPR were pieces about Black men in the criminal justice system that aired on All Things Considered.
In my career, I have arranged thousands of news articles and booked media interviews with various sources.
Over two decades, I have called and emailed NPR to book all kinds of stories and sources.
A search of my email inbox over the last few years notes that I reached out to Berliner himself, offering sources on the following topics on the business desk: unemployment, business elements of the international climate agreements, the moral compass of microfinance, corporate tax dodging, a major tech corporation partnering with an environmental group, a republican environmental leader who wanted clean tax reform.
He decided to overlook all those stories. Compared to others there, I have never been able to pitch him successfully.
When I entered and left NPR, I had no political leanings. I would describe my political observations then as null and void—tabula rasa. I was a moldable young person. I identified as independent and had no interest in politics at all.
I grew up working class, which I will describe in the StoryCorps element of this piece below. My time in D.C. shaped my political leanings, which grew into “someone who liked to challenge the status quo.” I still don’t define my political leanings as Democrat or Republican. Both parties do not represent me at all. I feel politically without a home.
I think definitions of terms can also be misleading. For instance, Berliner describes himself as the stereotypical NPR listener because he drives a Subaru. This would make my father’s head explode. My dad worked at Ford Motor Company—based in the town I grew up in. His dad worked at Ford Motor Company. Rather than work at NPR or even go to college in the first place, my dad wanted me to work for Ford Motor Company.
My dad told me I should do the media for UAW. He was proud of his job at Ford. In fact, that same plant my dad worked at just announced that it will be making commercial electric vehicles.
My dad was not a very outspoken political man, and he passed away when I was young, so I can’t ask him about his politics today. However, I know for certain that he was a blue union-supporting voter.
My husband and I saved forever to buy a Ford electric vehicle sold to me by my aunt in Ohio. I know Subaru now makes American cars, but not anywhere near the number of Ford cars, and it brings in far less union labor. Upon leaving NPR, at one point, I worked for an organization that called on the American automakers to make greener cars and did public relations on that subject. My definition of liberal is a little different based on that life experience.
Labels and definitions are exactly the point of confusion as we continue in this piece.
In his piece, Berliner described a shift in the outlet when John Lansing took over as the new CEO of NPR. Frankly, I will explain below that from the outside, I also started seeing a change in response to my pitches in 2020, which might be attributed to multiple causes, including a pandemic and a massive technological shift. However, I will add that I also saw the same shift when Lansing took over at Voice of America.
At the time, I had been booking people with international development and aid organizations, primarily people of color living in poverty from the Global South. I noticed a change in how frequently they were booked after the structural changes.
Berliner's assertion that NPR always had a “liberal” bend is a point of contention and was picked up the most as a salacious heading. I believe this observation is oversimplified. He relies on self-reported data on NPR listenership, which I find inadequate for measuring such complex information. Let's delve deeper into this debate.
While at NPR, the most critical element I learned about was its structure. In my daily work outside of NPR, I have observed that most people—including journalists — do not understand NPR’s structure.
NPR is a great model for how nonprofit media should work, unlike some of the newer emerging journalism nonprofits that appear more like scams to me. I will discuss this later in other posts.
I often describe NPR as a content provider rather than one outlet. Their content and style for what runs is more like “a slice of life” or a human-interest story, which is often apolitical. Some of it is news, and some of it is not. It’s more of a nuanced, storied perspective on the life around us told through the views of everyday people. That’s the NPR brand of content.
I often explain to others that NPR works like a wire for audio content. They produce programs distributed to their member stations, which pay a fee to use the content.
It reminded me of when I worked for my college radio station, and we would have access to the Associated Press wire content. If I pulled that Associated Press content and read it on my news show on college radio, the source was the Associated Press, but the medium for where you heard it was my college radio station. However, my college station was not the Associated Press. The distinction is a rather important one to make when evaluating the content.
To put this into perspective, you could sometimes turn on an outlet to listen to NPR—let’s say WAMU—out of American University in Washington D.C. Sometimes you would hear NPR content, and sometimes something completely different that had nothing to do with NPR. The distinction is unclear to most people and is generally confusing for the masses.
What is the difference between NPR and WAMU? NPR is the national content distributor and WAMU is a local member station. NPR does not own WAMU. In fact, WAMU pays NPR to use their programming. NPR is not located in the same building as WAMU. They are not funded by the same sources.
Why is this distinction important?
It helps clarify some common misconceptions that people have about the bias coming from NPR—particularly in regards to how funding influences the editorial content.
Unless you listen directly to NPR programming online or on a podcast, it can be challenging to identify that you are listening to it. However, listening directly to NPR did not happen 20 years ago because, in most cases, there was no accessible platform except the website. This changed with the evolution of new technology.
Berliner offers self-reported data from people listening to NPR as their insight into whether their audience is liberal or conservative.
I don’t necessarily think this is effective because, in my experience inside and outside of NPR, I have found that people can’t tell the difference between NPR's programming and something else. In the same regard, working-class people may be listening to NPR and not knowing that they are, in the same way, reading the Associated Press content in their local newspaper and not recognizing it either.
This problem gets to the heart of distrust in the news. How can you tell me something is biased when you do not know what it is?
By design, journalists are often removed from the “business” or audience relations aspect of the field. I wanted to write this piece and explain why media literacy is critical. It is our American right but also helps us make more informed decisions.
While at NPR, one of my duties in the media relations department, which was on a different floor than the news editorial department and kept entirely separate, was responding to “listeners” who wrote in to give feedback or suggest they heard something offensive, racist, etc., on NPR.
I learned that many people who took the time to write in had no idea their criticism was, in many cases, not part of NPR programming.
I would politely thank them for writing in, but NPR did not offer or produce that program. I quickly found that listeners assumed that they were listening to NPR any time they heard talk radio, and a large part of that was because of how it was structured. Listening to talk radio often just caused people to assume it was NPR because of the brand name recognition. This was a marketing and media literacy issue and not an editorial one.
But I found this to be true outside of NPR as well. For instance, when taking cabs around Washington, D.C., back then, the cab driver would ask me if NPR was okay and then presume to play something other than NPR. Having worked there, I probably was the only one who noticed. That said, many cab drivers in D.C. did play NPR content sometimes. That doesn’t precisely describe the liberal elite, whom Berliner suggests are the audience.
I wonder if those people are captured in the data. Having studied how radio audiences are determined, they likely are not measured. If they are, it would be self-reported, and again, I think it would be skewed on the brand recognition of the listener. How we measure this listening has also been an ongoing issue for the last twenty years.
On a side note, at the time at NPR, I observed that the most legitimate complaints were often about something Juan Williams had said when he hosted Talk of the Nation, which held a conversation on red and blue voters back in 2005.
Yes, Fox News’ Juan Williams. The one who was dismissed in 2010 for inflammatory remarks about Muslims. If we want to dive deeper into them, these are all part of the changes, especially regarding race and religion, over the last twenty years. Intersectionality was often an issue.
Worse yet, it’s not just consumers or taxi drivers who are confused about NPR. I worked with legitimate D.C. elites—people who worked in my field or were elite-educated lawyers or politicians—who had no idea when they were listening to NPR, WAMU, or something else. Let me explain.
When I left NPR, I went on to do media relations pitching for others. I often would get frustrated—a bit of a pet peeve—when someone told me they heard something on NPR and wanted me to pitch that reporter or show about them. Or they would like me to correct NPR. I would then have to decide whether to explain that what they heard had nothing to do with NPR.
Did they want me to pitch them to NPR or this reporter? Because the two things are not the same. I wish I could say that happened a few times, but I would say sometimes it happened every week. People had no idea when they were listening to NPR.
What is picked up and distributed by NPR is constantly changing, making it even harder to determine.
I often heard them in the D.C. area tell me Kavitha Cardoza was their favorite NPR reporter. She was a business reporter for WAMU, and sometimes, she would get picked up nationally, but not often. Diane Rehm and Kojo Nnamdi were not always nationally syndicated but produced out of WAMU.
In fact, the Kojo show used to be called Public Interest on NPR, but when the name changed in 2002, long before I arrived in D.C., it stopped being syndicated by NPR. It was purely a locally based program. Any criticism related to Kojo Nnamdi being biased because of NPR funding made no sense at all.
At any rate, Rehm and Nnamdi are now both retired, but this is an example of how confusing it can be. If you have never heard of these hosts, that is probably because you are not listening to WAMU in D.C.—an outlet that plays some NPR programming and some other content.
If you want to determine whether a reporter is part of NPR’s distribution network, I highly recommend checking their website. Most of it does not contain political content.
In addition to thinking they are listening to NPR when they are not, there is also not knowing they are listening to NPR when they are.
Farmers are a vast audience I often tried to reach at NPR in my work pitching stories on food security—pitching people like Dan Charles, who usually covered agriculture. Farm radio is vast and has a strong NPR listenership. I don’t know if they would say they are listening to NPR or not when they turn on farm radio.
At the same time, I did a lot of environmental pitching in 2007-2010. I used to pitch the Great Lakes Radio Consortium to get environmental stories on public radio. It can be heard on some public radio stations, but it is not NPR. I can’t recall if it was distributed through them at some point. My early career success in getting environmental stories picked up by “NPR” often came from pitching them. The program used to be nationally syndicated, but now it is only local to the Great Lakes region.
I later discovered, mainly as digital media evolved, that people were not just confused about NPR. They were confused with many media outlets and often made assumptions about them based entirely on inaccurate information about the source.
Social media and most digital platforms didn’t exist 25 years ago, but the more they grew, the more confused people got. This has created a brand crisis among most media outlets, which has led to a lack of trust. The situation is dire.
For this reason, I wrote a recent Substack Post on the three myths about media that people consume today. I am writing about media literacy because much of what I observed in D.C. media would clarify much of today's distrust.
This seems like insider baseball. However, it is not! It’s our American right and obligation to know! The problem is that it looks insider.
If most people understood how the newsroom structure works in correlation with audience relations and branding, the criticism, for instance, of NPR being funded publicly would be obsolete.
When I was at NPR, the general point was that less than one percent of the funding was from federal dollars. That funding went to news stations in areas where there was no other source of news, and those stations were free to use any content other than NPR as well. Additionally, the content was not always produced by the areas that had federal funding.
You may feel free to pour into the details of NPR’s funding here, or you can take my word from it, as someone who has extensively studied it that federal and advertising influence is not the case at NPR. Journalists do not make decisions on content based on audience numbers at NPR, because it is simply not how the structure of the outlet works.
Considering that the public funding essentially went toward member stations, particularly in areas with news deserts, suggesting that the programming was linked was confusing because the two did not correlate. That doesn’t even make any sense. Due to the way it was set up, it was impossible for federal funding to influence the editorial decisions.
NPR doesn’t have ads, either. It has corporate underwriting, which is different from advertising in many ways. Working at my college radio station, I learned that the FCC says corporate underwriting can’t have a call to action. If you ever need someone to write your PSA and underwriting content, I am good source, as I had endless training in how to do it. I found a good summary online here. Here is another description from an NPR member station, WAMC.
Critics who say it is liberal or conservative are also irrelevant for many reasons. From a media literacy standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to call NPR liberal or conservative. It is simply a content distributor.
Are there people there who have a bias? Yes. Berliner just told us he does. But it is simply not designed that way. We need better and more educated news consumers who can dissect the presented content and even know where it comes from before calling it biased.
Pitching Media Stories
I have spent my entire career pitching news stories to the press, and my experience at NPR taught me that my career even existed in the first place.
As part of the media relations department, I was the only intern at NPR allowed a seat in the morning full editorial meetings. At the time, the top leadership of each show and desk pitched and discussed what was going on that day and was expected to run. This meeting was where every story running that day was discussed in a large, crowded room.
My job was to listen in to see if anything newsworthy came out of those meetings so that I could promote the breaking news story to the press or promote any journalists who had good stories coming up.
Do you ever watch a panel on another show and see a reporter on to discuss their latest breaking news story? This is how the process goes on behind the scenes. Someone like me will listen to identify the opportunity, and then I would call the other outlets to arrange it.
Sometimes, it was just as simple as Carl Kasell being in Houston today. What if we had him speak to the Houston Chronicle about why he is there? Then, I would call the media reporter at the Houston Chronicle and make that happen. This effort was intended to gain a more diverse listenership at all levels.
However, it also gave me an eye-opening window into how stories were decided at NPR, which ultimately helped shape my current career in pitching guests and stories to them later. I got a direct seat to observe how it was done twenty years ago.
As I read Berliner’s piece and throughout my career, I think about this experience back then. I am unsure if it is still how things are done, but this gave me an idea of what news and what can be booked. It was an experience that not many people had at my age.
With pure, young naivety about our political system, I would often call up and ask some of the most conservative figures in our country to cover the latest NPR story, often by accident, and they would usually do it.
I have been pitching reporters covering the media industry for two decades, and the political bias people tell me exists is not what I have ever observed. Once, I even called Howard Kurtz, who is now at Fox News, but he was then working at the “very liberal” Washington Post, and I spoke to him about NPR.
When you look at the musical chairs in D.C. media, I find it laughable when someone tells me about the political bias at the different outlets. I wonder how people think that works.
I believe the D.C. political tension between liberals and conservatives is inaccurate—that’s not the point of contention. It’s a dedication to the status quo, classism and racism. I have worked many jobs since NPR, but I wanted to outline a few that make the comparison.
Shortly after NPR, in 2006, I worked at a large corporate public relations firm. While I did not last long there because my values were not aligned, it gave me some eye-opening experience.
My assigned mentor at the firm was Frank Mankiewicz, the former head of NPR. One of my many clients was a well-known conservative media outlet; another was a Republican member of Congress who was expected to run for the presidency eventually; others were formerly inside the Bush Administration. I went from pitching the conservative news outlet about NPR to vice versa. Now I was pitching NPR about the conservatives—no problem!
I want to stress that I constantly made these interviews happen across the political divide and got a reputation for being good at it. I don’t think I was good at it. I believe that I was naïve enough to ask. I was tabula rasa.
I have also pitched Bernie Sanders and aligned groups and candidates with NPR. No problem.
I can tell a story about how I once offered to book a bunch of Trump supporters from Ohio on MSNBC in 2016 ahead of the election. The Trump supporters insisted on telling me how MSNBC would not interview them, when I was trying to set it up. Many of people's existing biases about our media are not reality-based.
The interview never happened because they preferred to call me crazy for the suggestion rather than consider that their worldview that MSNBC won’t interview Trump supporters might be false. Hence, their entire basis for supporting Trump in the first place—the mainstream media was out to get them—was not real. Yet, they insisted on believing it.
Beyond Politics and Into Race
Berliner outlined in his piece a shift in how NPR looked at race, culture, and politics during Lansing’s takeover in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, which is precisely when I started to experience a shift from the outside as well. One that I noticed and was disappointed in when it was happening.
Some of the elements I noticed from the outside might further enhance Berliner's piece.
In early June of 2020, in response to George Floyd’s murder, while volunteering to help get press on solutions as part of a political campaign, I pulled together a press conference with a group of Black Lives Matter activists who were running for Congress on a platform regarding qualified immunity and criminal justice reform.
Our press conference, featuring four candidates who were running for Congress as former Black Lives Matter activists, including one who was eventually elected, attracted press attention from CBS News, BET, The Guardian, USA Today, National Journal, ABC News, Black Enterprise, Newsy, Associated Press, Seventeen Magazine and Politico.
Yet, NPR could not be bothered to show up or even offer to interview any of these candidates based on the event we threw in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's death and the policy solutions we were recommending.
Yet, in the meantime, Berliner describes a woke atmosphere in which reporters were made to log the race of who they spoke to in the direct aftermath. The whole thing seems performative and frankly infuriating. If NPR had been trying to make attempts to cover these issues better, they could have just shown up at the press events that any of the racial justice organizations I was working with were throwing.
If NPR went full BLM woke, I certainly didn’t see it. I saw the opposite.
Back to Politics
As I mentioned in my headline, NPR failed to interview Nancy Pelosi’s election opponent in the 2020 or 2022 elections. That is outright malpractice. It is the job of NPR to interview these candidates.
I know they didn’t cover his campaign because I was personally involved. As one of the top media bookers in this country, I sent emails requesting interviews to many journalists there, especially the Congressional reporter.
Yet coverage continued as though Pelosi had no election opponent whatsoever.
Does this show a conservative bias? No. Liberal bias? No. Racism? Yes! In so many ways, this shows racism.
It just so happens that in California, two people of the same party can run against each other in the general election. Her opponent was a Democrat running to the left of her. Not a Republican. If there was a solid liberal bias here, I have yet to see it.
I believe it shows a bias dedicated to the elite status quo. As outlined in earlier experiences, I had no problem pitching the press to cover status quo politicians on both the Democratic and Republican sides, regardless of race. No bias was detected when I did that.
I have represented D.C.-based civil rights groups. I had no problem booking them on NPR. However, when I went outside of D.C. to those not part of that elite network that supported the establishment, I found issues booking them. Crickets. People who were responsive to me all the time—nothing.
I had issues when I started working on the ones who challenged the status quo or did not have money or class structure. When someone worked on the roots of racism and structures of systems, then they were not usually likely to have a seat at the table when it came to NPR.
On NPR Culture—My StoryCorps Style Story:
Looking back on who I was before I joined NPR would make me want to cringe. I was ignorant, did not know much about my career field, politics, or the world around me, and made terrible judgment choices. I will describe some of them below. To my credit, I was in my very early 20s.
But I am told that looking back and cringing is the ultimate sign of growth for NPR and me.
I tell this part because I want it to demonstrate the working-class learning curve of entering somewhere like NPR.
At any rate, with no money in my pocket and no idea how I would make it happen, I applied for the internship program on a whim, thinking it would be a dream opportunity, and I got it!
Optimistically, I accepted the position, but I had no idea how I would even afford gas to get to D.C., let alone live there, until the very last minute. The night before, I went to the Bingo Hall with my mother and prayed for a miracle. Sure enough, I won!
If I recall correctly, I won around seven hundred dollars in Bingo that night. I took that money and went to a payday loan place with my last check from a local newspaper, where I had been working for little money.
I often tell people who are against the payday loan system that I owe my entire career to one. Of course, I paid it back. Please don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It allowed me to be where I am today.
With that money, my mom drove me to D.C., and I put the minimum amount down on a student housing rental. I had no idea how to pay next month’s rent, but I would find a way.
NPR’s old headquarters was blocks from D.C.’s Chinatown and nightlife scene, where I often worked evenings from 6:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. at an upscale bar right next to the media headquarters following my 9:00-6:00 shift at NPR. Sometimes, I would walk home late at night after the metro shutdown with stashes of cash in my pockets from tips, and I would see rats run across the D.C. streets. That was how I ended up paying the rent.
The student housing I lived in was mainly filled with people like me interning inside the White House, Congress, government agencies, media, and social justice organizations.
I quickly learned that most other people living with me and in my position had parents who were paying their way. I was one of the few working multiple jobs with no support. These people had no idea why I was always working.
Most of these places did not pay their interns. At the time, this was a highly competitive program to get into. You had to be selected to work for free at most of these places, and those selected came from elite backgrounds most of the time.
I recently read an article advising students not to go to journalism school but instead get on-the-job experience. I laughed because you need an elite degree to work for free, even to be considered for a job, in most places.
I seemed to recall being one of the few from a traditional working-class background among my peers. That meant I was a first-generation college student, and my parents were autoworkers and cleaners. Such a background has been a blessing and curse throughout my entire life.
Considering that the entire pathway into these organizations of the places that have the most power in our country is an unpaid internship, it is systemically set up to keep the working class out. What does this say about the working class's ability to be heard when systemically kept out?
My position is not that NPR should have paid me because I gave them value. Looking back on it, I see they gave me more value than I gave them. That is true of most interns and junior-level people I have hired.
Now, I pay young people quite well, but I also know that when I hire people who have just graduated college, they will not be providing me much value and that I will be doing more training than anything else. I do it to give back to a system that gave to me.
I recently watched a TikTok video of a young Gen Z woman. In it, she expressed anger that she could not find a job that would pay enough upon graduation. She seemed to think college was the experience. This young woman has no idea what she does not know. I have never seen a college-educated person walk into our careers and know what they are doing. On-the-job training is required. As I started the piece, you only get this hindsight when you look back and cringe.
I did not know what my role meant when I started at NPR. I was not a novice to the field; I already had a college degree, worked for a local newspaper, and interned at many other media outlets before taking on the position. I was the Program Director of my college radio station, but I still had no idea what I was doing on many levels.
I participated in the NextGen radio project, and I think I still have my old handbook. As part of that, I had an assigned journalism mentor, Steve Drummond, a renowned reporter who still works there today. My entire media relations department was staffed with reporting and media relations legends. They taught me so much—if anything, how much I did not know, I still had to learn!
I realized I loved public interest public relations—a career I never knew existed until I started doing it at NPR. I also think that the pay of the public interest public relations lures young journalists, especially those of working-class backgrounds.
Through the program, I had an opportunity to work on my journalism and audio production. I attended President Bush's inauguration and produced a story about it, which my assigned mentors encouraged me to pitch to our local newspaper in Ohio that I just left. My piece was awful, and it never ran anywhere.
I worked on a story at Pimlico Racetrack, which led to an entire escapade. I took a train from D.C. for an interview and didn’t realize the train didn’t go back the other way past a specific time in the evening, so I got stranded with no money.
Thank goodness, a random stranger—an older Black woman at the train station—recognized my situation and offered to drive me back to the student housing! That was no short trip. I hope that woman is doing well somewhere out there today. She had my back.
Another thing I learned while working at NPR was that they prepare obituaries of prominent figures well in advance.
Over a decade later, I recall working for an international aid organization headquartered in Africa that wanted to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela after his passing. They asked me if I could get that tribute covered by an American press outlet. I said probably not. They tend to compile their obituary coverage in advance. This stunned my colleagues in Africa about how the American press worked. They thought it was culturally inappropriate to create an obituary for someone before they had passed away.
I got to see NPR’s room full of books and music that people pitched them to cover, which gave me a great perspective on how exactly that is done and the level of competition when people asked me to pitch their books to them.
If anything, my time there taught me just how much I didn’t know! But it was not just my field that I didn't know about. It was the world around me. I grew up in an area that was primarily white and not very religiously or culturally diverse and entered D.C., which was very culturally diverse.
My learning curve was steep on so many levels. Everything, from what to wear to how different working in a field like this one is, from a service job to meeting people of faiths and cultures I had never even heard of, was new. Taking the bus there to work sometimes allowed me to hear many languages I never knew existed.
This is one of the reasons why I ended up supporting civil rights groups in favor of affirmative action in college education, as having diverse people in universities and workplaces benefits everyone.
I don’t remember many people of color who worked at NPR then, but there were a few, including someone I became friends with. The NextGen Radio director had made it his mission to bring more people of color into the organization, and I could tell that was very important to him. I also do not think there were very many working-class people either. The majority of first-generation college students are not white.
I think paying interns was one way to obtain a more diverse newsroom! You must level the playing field to get more people in if you want more varied coverage with less bias. Instead, I felt a strange sense of elitism or a look down upon my cultural inexperience because I was white—although most of the newsroom was white.
I often wonder now if it was because I was white, or more because I was working class and didn’t grow up in an elite traveling around the world lifestyle? I think class issues often overlap with race. Those fighting for a certain class of people were not always as welcome, and this is where they need to work the most.
While D.C. itself is very culturally diverse, NPR was diverse in a different way, especially regarding the LGBTQ movement. I address this mainly because Berliner brings up his background—having a lesbian mother and an elite university degree.
I worked alongside a transgender person at NPR—the first one I had ever met. I had to help edit a bio for that person, which presented some real learning opportunities for me, and that was twenty years ago. The way we spoke about these things in the workplace was so different. We have to remember that pronoun usage was not something people commonly talked about at that time. It felt like unchartered territory.
Alternatively, I remember writing my bio about how I was very proud of myself for moving from Ohio to D.C. to take the opportunity, and the others among me snickered at my lack of cultural travel experience out of the country. No, I had not met people from other cultures. I was a working-class person who grew up in the Midwest. And I am here because my other option is getting a factory job. I had traveled within the United States but not much outside of it. I couldn’t tell you anything about Ethiopian cuisine, which I became familiar with while working at NPR.
I recall one situation where I had gotten a local Mexican restaurant to donate food to one of our events, and a peer accused me of being anti-Semitic as a result. The event was taking place on a Jewish holiday that I had never heard about in my life. I didn’t even know many Jewish people before I worked at NPR. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she made it seem like I had made a career-ending mistake to have Mexican food sent on a Jewish holiday.
I certainly didn’t want to be anti-Semitic, so I called and told the restaurant not to bring it. That was my second lousy judgment call because the Director told me I shouldn’t have done that. I should have still had them get it and then had another culturally appropriate meal brought, too. Live and learn. But I was a hot mess, especially trying to figure out all the cultural rules.
If newsroom editors want more diversity, I’d argue that simple things of convenience make it so much easier. For instance, when I was unpaid, a team of more senior-level staff invited me to lunch to celebrate a staff member moving on. We went to a fancy D.C. restaurant.
Yikes, I looked at the menu prices and realized I could barely afford a small piece of cheese pizza. So, I ordered it. I sat there with my pizza as they ordered big meals and drinks. When the meal was done, I was ready to pay for my pizza, and they announced they would divide the bill evenly. It didn’t seem fair, but I could not speak up.
Instead, I held my breath as everyone passed around credit cards and hoped the amount would clear my bank account to avoid embarrassment. It did! Thank goodness—however, all the money I had meant I could not eat later.
From then on out, I would never, in my adult life, ask a junior person to eat with me when I did not pay the bill and let them know in advance that I was doing so. The level of anxiety was insane. These are the situations that NPR and other newsrooms need to consider when they want to diversify their newsroom and hence the sources.
These are the barriers. Small things like that are different for every type of person. Small accommodations can be made to ensure much more access.
I am not blaming any of those people. They didn’t know. I believe they meant well. However, it shows they were never in my position, or they would have considered it.
I constantly wondered why I was the only person here who didn't know what anyone was saying. In hindsight, I realized it was because I was in the working class. That doesn’t excuse cultural inexperience, but creating a more diverse newsroom means fostering all this, correcting people, and allowing them to learn. It means letting people have opportunities that help them suit their needs and overcome their marginalization in whatever way they might be disenfranchised.
At any rate, I think we can achieve better newsroom quality if we focus more on systemic issues like pay and access to education and more flexibility rather than ones like tracking identity or forming bias against young people who want to learn despite whatever marginalization they come from. We need less focus on elitism and performative values and more systemic change.
I full-heartedly believe that if we tackle the issues mentioned above, newsrooms can survive! Onwards! Let me know your thoughts.