The first employee of National Public Radio (NPR), Jack Mitchell, summed up the relationship between the public radio network and its core listenership in his memoir: “Public radio has a symbiotic relationship with its listeners, who are well educated and societally conscious and who feel so connected to their medium that they are willing to support it financially.” Mitchell is candid about the fact that public radio is molded by white, highly educated, well-off baby boomers, and has been consumed most consistently by that same demographic.
This core listenership profoundly shapes the programming that public radio stations produce. Shows must always be framed in a way that is not too controversial for this audience, which is seemingly well intentioned but unwilling to be uncomfortable. Catering to this audience restricts the perspectives of journalists of color, if they make it into the newsroom at all. While bringing in nonwhite voices to public radio is important, doing so does not change the white-dominant mindset that has set the standard for the medium.
Though people often conflate public radio with NPR National, the organizational picture is more complex. The public radio industry is a system of independently owned and operated stations. Individual stations receive funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and these stations can opt in or out of National Public Radio membership. NPR member stations air a combination of NPR national programming, their own local programming, and programming distributed by other public media distribution companies, like American Public Media or Public Radio Exchange. The stations pay licensing fees to the various distributors to air the programs.
NPR has been self-critical about its diversity efforts: A 2018 report found that 83 percent of all voices on weekday news programs were white, and 67 percent were male. The network has made explicit efforts to increase diversity in the newsroom. However, there has been less sustained attention on the experiences in local newsrooms.
Over the past six months, I interviewed 70 people of color who have worked at one or more of National Public Radio’s member stations. Some preferred to remain anonymous out of concern for their relationships with present or future employers in the industry. After over 120 hours of conversation about how racism manifests in their workplaces, it is abundantly clear that in the creation of local programming, the prioritization of the public radio network’s core audience remains alive and well at NPR member stations. As one employee from a local affiliate told me, “whenever we do public-facing, marketing things, it’s very much signaling to a college-educated, middle- to upper-class white audience.” This orientation reverberated as a common theme across employees across local member stations.
How does framing stories for this audience shape how public radio stations tell stories? At every stage of story production—from the reporter’s “pitch” to their editor, through the process of reporting, editing, and airing—powerful figures within the newsroom invoke “the audience” and effectively restrict stories that challenge prevailing notions of racial progress.
Will the Audience Get It?
The editorial process begins much earlier than in postproduction. Most producers and reporters run story ideas by their editor, which the editor then either green-lights, rejects, or asks them to revise.
Over half of my interview sample gave examples of concrete resistance they encountered when proposing stories that made white people feel uncentered or uncomfortable. When producers and reporters pitch stories for air, if “the audience” won’t like or understand it, the pitch is typically a nonstarter. “The audience” is invoked vaguely, but when named it is always white and middle-aged or older. This demographic also reflects the bulk of public radio’s news editors and station managers across the country. Employees who do not keep this core audience in mind often hear that the ideas they pitch do not match the tone the station wishes to set. Editors have told their direct reports to consider an audience listening on the way to work or with their kids in the car. What about a woman listening in the suburbs? Will she understand or relate to the story?
Some rejections are more ambiguous. “I just don’t hear it” can serve as an adequate reason to pass on stories. The patterns of rejected pitches detailed to me show that overwhelmingly, editors do hear stories in pitches that follow fun, quirky particularities of white subjects, and in pitches that show some sort of struggle or uplifting of people of color. Editors do not tend to hear stories in pitches that follow fun, quirky particularities of nonwhite subjects in nonwhite spaces, or in pitches that highlight intragroup complexity in a nonwhite community.
“The audience” is invoked vaguely, but when named it is always white and middle-aged or older.
One producer recalled a meeting where someone had pitched something around the significance of hair: “It was a Black woman pitching a story about Black hair. I remember we had to explain to the editors why it mattered. There was this idea of it’s just hair, who really cares? That stands out to me as a lack of understanding of the depth of racial history.”
Another reporter suggested discussing the controversies over Confederate monuments in the region in 2017. When the host argued that people wouldn’t be interested, the reporter countered, “I’m interested in it. If we were looking at this as this table, and this is why diversity matters—I’m Black and from the South. This story matters to me.” His editor leaned in and said, “How does this matter to you? You were never a slave.”
About a third of those interviewed went on to say that they have severely restricted their own efforts on pitching stories that might run up against these tensions. Jimmy Gutierrez, a reporter from a local affiliate, indicated a direct causality in this shift, remarking, “I withdrew from trying to pitch anything because I didn’t feel valued or seen.”
Another reporter pointed to this dynamic at her station, noting that she shifted away from any topics that would engage with racism, migration policy, and power in order to preserve her energy. “The more I fought for … doing something that really mattered to me, the more pushback I received. I got tired and I stopped pitching those stories. I don’t have the energy to argue about so many different pieces. And so I started pitching lighter, less controversial pieces about the arts.”
“Good Talkers”
When a story is approved for production, the producer or reporter must line up sources to speak on air. My respondents pointed out the need for the source to be a “good talker.” This subjective rule of thumb has practical implications: It disproportionately excludes those with thick accents. Respondents noted how their editors put extra scrutiny on guests or features with “ethnic” accents. These voices were often from immigrant or low-income communities of color. Reporters struggled to get sources with Chinese accents on air, for example, even if the source’s perspective was highly salient. One reporter often heard that “you have to be able to understand [the accents] while you’re driving down a highway or on your morning commute.” The “you” presumably belonged to the imagined white, upper-class public radio listener.
Producers and reporters of color cited clips of sources who were unintelligible to white editors, but whom they could understand without strain. Even when such clips were unclear, producers and reporters in my sample found ways to work around this issue by adding narration and conducting follow-up interviews.
Journalists of color often found themselves acting as cultural brokers between fellow journalists and communities of color. One respondent put it plainly: “All the nonwhite voices: All the nonwhite people are bringing them to the station.” Even transplants to new locales are looked to to find “diverse sources.” One reporter pointed out this dynamic, stating, “I’m not from here. There’s no reason for me to know these communities of color any better than anybody else.” Yet it was incumbent upon her to build trust and relationships with communities of color, not just Latino communities, because the source list was otherwise overwhelmingly white.
Journalists of color often found themselves acting as cultural brokers between fellow journalists and communities of color.
A Black reporter’s experience building contacts at a new station indicates that sources are hard-earned across communities of color. She explained that she did not see the same effort by her mostly white colleagues. “I was the only one intentionally trying to do it on a consistent basis. I really did try to intentionally sit down with communities that I’m not a part of, like the Asian American community, and just to get a sense of what’s going on for them and how can we do better. I don’t feel that was an across-the-board effort.”
Respondents who produce reports for white hosts often have to think twice before inviting a community member of color onto the program. One producer recalled dealing with this through “apologizing for the shit that [guests of color] would have to endure for actually coming on and sharing their story.”
Another producer, Cerise Castle, lamented that “there are stories that I just won’t do because I know that they won’t do it in a way that is fair to the interview subject. A lot of the times I’ll stay away from these stories with white hosts or reporters because they can be very patronizing … There’s a lot of explaining that you have to do ahead of time on really basic things that I feel I shouldn’t have to be explaining.”
Comfort and Risk Aversion
Soon after Gutierrez was hired as a reporter at a local affiliate station, he was sent to cover a high school that was showcasing songs and storytelling from their refugee students. While reporting, he found that “there were three pretty overt instances of racism amongst white boys targeting the girls of color that were there.”
Gutierrez wanted to highlight this dynamic within the story, but his editor at the time wanted to leave these instances out, instead urging the reporter to indicate “there were ‘challenges’” without specifying and naming the overt racism. Stories about race and racism are often limited in this fashion, through editorial decisions to remove parts of the story that might alienate public radio’s core audience and donor base, in favor of a more comforting tale of progress and achievement.
I reached out to NPR Chief Diversity Officer Keith Woods for comment on the relationship between reporter and editor in news coverage. As an employee of the national organization, he does not have complete knowledge about the day-to-day operations of local stations, but spoke more broadly about this relationship.
The editor’s resistance set a tone for what he could expect at the station—editorial pushback when racism was a salient factor to report.
Woods acknowledged the prevalence of the experience Gutierrez describes, not just in public radio newsrooms, but in the journalistic profession in general. He speaks to a pattern experienced by reporters of color within newsrooms, wherein “an issue arises so close to the surface of their lives, the impact of which is sometimes not shared by their white colleagues. That’s a reality of being in this profession. There’s this wrestling over whether or not a quote or an anecdote or an adjective gets put into a story can hinge on whether or not the editor has the ability to stand in the shoes of the reporter and understand.”
Woods noted that the role of the editor is an important consideration across the journalistic profession. In any newsroom, “you can easily find yourself as an editor not certain whether this value that you’re wrestling with a reporter over is a function of a more universal sense of what is news, whether it’s a function of it now in this of your understanding of the news. For the thoughtful editor that is the, the arena for growth as leaders is to figure out when you’re defending a true, legitimate journalistic value and when you’re defending an unexamined and narrow definition of news.”
Terry Gildea, Executive Director of Public Media Journalists Association, stressed the importance of leadership in shifting the situation. When asked about the experiences cited in this piece, Gildea noted that "stations and their editorial leaders need to help their reporters connect with all potential audiences in the communities they serve. To do so, white editors need to move beyond their own unconscious bias and not discount the work of those reporters because those stories don’t specifically speak to them." In this case, Gutierrez pushed back on his editor’s suggestions and managed to include two of three racist incidents he encountered in his reporting. Still, the editor’s resistance set a tone for what he could expect at the station—editorial pushback when racism was a salient factor to report. When told to consider the audience, Gutierrez began asking, “Are these people I want to even make stories for? How will those stories be heard when they air?”
My “Aha” Moment Was to Leave
The symbiosis between public radio’s management and the core audience is a consistent hindrance to rigorous journalistic practice, and the creative freedom of journalists of color. Struggles to get a story to air are compounded by broader interpersonal workplace struggles, which run the gamut from being mistaken for the other “one” of their race in the newsroom, to conducting extra sensitivity checks or translations for their colleagues without additional compensation.
The accumulated experiences over time can push people out of the industry for good. John Sepulvado, a Latino reporter who worked for 15 years in public radio, described his move out of public radio on NPR National’s show It’s Been a Minute: “I realized that no matter what I did—no matter how good I was, no matter how hard I worked—I would always be seen as something that is not white. And my aha moment was to leave the industry.”
Jack Mitchell, the NPR veteran, is clearheaded in a conversation with his colleague Michael P. McCauley about what public radio’s white listeners want. “Public radio and the broader academic world are liberal or progressive in their thinking, but are not radical. They are not about to jeopardize their own comfortable situations by fostering fundamental change.” This characterization may make the listeners themselves cringe, but it is consistent with my findings of how public radio stories are filtered through the pitching, reporting, and framing of the editorial process.
Within this well-established system of public radio, bringing on “more diverse voices” is not enough. This white, highly educated core—both listeners and managers/editors—will have to give up their entitlement to these airwaves. Otherwise, the relationship of NPR member stations to their employees of color will continue to be parasitic. And people whose perspectives are already sorely lacking will leave for spaces with more opportunities to tell stories to their own communities.
This story has been updated to include the response of the Public Media Journalists Association.
