America This Week, April 12, 2024: "NPR's Greatest Hits."

Well, now.

Well, I was in Times Square with the most diverse crowd of UFO viewers, probably in the United States, and one of the most massive. I mean, Eclipse viewers, excuse me. And I seemed to be maybe one out of a thousand people who was actually, in my midwestern way, willing to buy Eclipse glasses. So if I break out in a deadly eye infection, it's because I had to lend my Eclipse glasses to maybe eight.

Why would you not buy Eclipse glasses? That's not something I understand.

They held them over their cameras lenses so they could take pictures of the eclipse. That doesn't really work. Yeah, I mean, they barely got back to me after, you know, 40 minutes of standing there.

They finally cycled back and I was able to see it. But I did see it. And it was only 85 percent in New York City, but I think 85 percent is enough. Who needs total eclipses?

It's when you first see that big chunk coming out of it that I think you get the real spooky feeling. And after that, it's just a kind of regression. But it's that startlement that comes of knowing that the sun can be eclipsed, right, right?

Yeah.

This one was pretty cool. I was in New Jersey. I would say we got a little bit, you know, it seemed like a little bit. More than 85 percent, it was almost total, but.

But it was cool, very cool.

And it was their weather team that they assigned to the eclipse, which I found interesting. I mean, you don't expect them to have an astronomy team, but weather is, to me, something that occurs on Earth. Not, you know, far, far out in the vacuum of space, where there actually, by definition, is no tides, right? Yeah, are tides, weather.

I guess maybe it's unclear what weather it really is, Zach, but somehow the eclipse didn't seem like it was weather to me, right? But weather reporting is its own special genre. I love it. Yeah, exactly.

Getting excited about things that have no real human content. I mean, disaster weather is different when you're standing chest deep in a hurricane surge or something. But this kind of weather, which is just a mathematical progression of one lunar object over a solar object. Making that into a kind of colorful thing is a real skill. Not sure they managed it.

A couple of days ago, I don't know if this happened to you. My phone suddenly blew up with texts from politicians, other journalists, all sorts of people who.

Normally, I'd be talking to about real news stories, but the subject was NPR. And it was because the Barry Weiss's Free Press had an article by a fellow named Yuri Berliner. And we'll just show the let's, let's show the actual screen here.

And he's now being described as a whistleblower, by the way, which is interesting. I don't know. Do you think whistleblower applies? I'm not really sure if that's the case. Maybe it is because they'll want to fire him, probably.

But but anyway, the headline is, I've been in NPR for twenty five years. Here's how we lost America's trust. And he.

He has a lead that's very provocative. You know, the stereotype of the NPR listener, an EV driving world playing tote bag carrying coastal elite? It doesn't particularly 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. So this is the person who's been driven too far by working at NPR, and he talks about how the NPR has always had a liberal bent.

But in recent years, it's changed. You know, we were nerdy but not scolding. Today, those who listen to NPR read its coverage find something different the distilled worldview, a very small segment of the U.S.

Population, an open minded spirit, no longer exists within NPR. And now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. This talks about how there's been this dramatic shift in its listener, in its listenership. So, in 2011, 26 percent described them as conservative, twenty three percent is middle of the road.

37 percent is liberal now, it's 67 percent liberal, 21 percent middle of the road and 11 percent.

But how could 11 percent of NPR listeners think that it's a conservative broadcast? Well, no.

Maybe they hate listening to it. I mean, that's the howard stern model of media. Well, I'll tell you what? Something that people don't.

But then he went on and did two things that I think were really interesting.

He said that he cited specific examples of areas where the station had made a mistake. One was putting Adam Schiff on the air too many times during the Russiagate thing. And this, this paragraph right here is, I think, pretty significant, I should have highlighted it before. It's one thing to swing and miss on a major story.

Unfortunately, it happens you follow the wrong leads.

But then he, then he says, what's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no manicopos, no self-reflection. I mean, that's a big, big thing to say. And then he goes on to say it happened also with the Hunter Biden story, and so on, and so on. And there was a great gnashing of teeth after this came out. And we can talk about the response to this.

But Walter, what did you think first when you read this? It was a significant thing to come from someone who, ostensibly, I guess, is still employed there. First of all, I think it's a.

What did I think? Well, I used to be an avid NPR listener, mostly because I lived on a farm way out of town. And it was the strongest signal and it was the only source for news and discussion. AM Radio has talk radio, call-in shows and so on, but those are of limited use in trying to understand stories for the first time.

Get your news. You might listen to them, you hear it analyzed or opinion or opined about anyway. I stopped listening to NPR many years ago and for a very simple reason it got incredibly repetitive and incredibly boring, and incredibly smug and almost unlistenable. The parts of it, you know, there was back when car talk and various jazz or classical music shows and so on.

But the current events segments?

Were unendurable for me, not because I disagreed with them, but because they were just so monotonous. And they were like anything that goes on too long and becomes too comfortable with itself. They became self-parodic, and once the hilarity of the self-parody had worn off, it was just exhaust.

It took a lot to chase me off from NPR because, let me tell you, I was positively disposed. Not only did I like the fact that they broadcast clearly into the country, but I'd grown up in Minnesota. I've probably mentioned this before. I knew Garrison Keillor a little when I was a kid. And I lived in one of the towns that faces for Lake Wobegon. And my mom lived next door to an NPR producer and an NPR personality in a little town called Marine, Minnesota.

Minnesota Public Radio is a producer of a lot of content for the national Public Radio. In those days. Not just Perry Home Companion, but a music show called From the Top, I Believe, and a cooking show, and so on. And I, as a writer, had used NPR's hyper-literate audience many times to publicize my books. And was quite grateful that they would do these long-form interviews with me and other authors. And I benefited from that many times, and the interviews were often great, really well prepared and searching and thoughtful. So for me, to stop listening to NPR was not an easy thing.

But when they started injecting their pet obsessions into every single story, much like I just said about the weather, weather was always about race, suddenly so was sports, so was everything. And they had this new form of story in which they could take a pretty interesting story and then turn it upside down and balance it on its tip. And using the subjects of race, social justice and so on. And it wasn't that it just all became such an editorial trick that one got tired of it.

It became a kind of rant, as though I needed constant edification from them. Like you made your point yesterday and the day before and the two minutes ago. And this is becoming a kind of like a re-education program or something. Don't worry, I understand some of it, I agree with.

But no one who listens to NPR is just few who are doing it, are doing it for the first time. You don't have to keep converting me to your.

Insular, enlightened point of view. You can just talk about things and when they stopped doing.

I had to go on NPR and massively benefited from the long form interviews that I used to do on those stations. Not just for the national shows, but regionally. And they were always incredibly well prepared and really got to the heart of the matter. I mean, one of my favorites was Leonard Lopate here in New York, in the New York area, and he actually read the book and he would do these very, very elaborate.

Interviews that were challenging. I mean, he would push you on certain points, but he would do it quickly and there wouldn't be any wasted time at all. And I thought, this is really professionally well done, you know, and it was a real help. But then they just sort of over and almost overnight turned into this other thing. And now what Berliner is describing is this thing that started to be whispered about in newsrooms. I would say, sometime between, I don't know if this is your experience, sometime between 2015 and the end of the Trump presidency.

This idea that newsrooms are not diversified enough, so we have to change the composition of the newsroom. And I know of several other places where this exact debate that he's describing took place, he's saying that, yes. They made a great effort to try to bring in more minorities and to have more stories that were about identity issues on the air. But they narrowed the viewpoint diversity on the channel. And I know there were other newsrooms, particularly in 2020, that were having this exact debate, for instance, there's one site I know of where they were having a question of, shouldn't we have more veterans on the air?

You know, it's not just about having more conservatives, it's should we have more people who are not from the upper classes, should we have more people who served in the military? Should we have more of this and this and this? And the answer was always no, let's opt for this other sort of diversity.

And that's why it's so fascinating to look at the response. After this story came out, NPR published its own response.

The author was David Falkenfick. And let's just take a quick look at some of these quotes because they're kind of amazing. And I think, speak to, you know, the degree to which they were not understanding the point. So, headline NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust. Now, remember, this is going on alongside a major decline in audience share, which I think is pretty much always your fault as a reporter, but whatever.

They do this story.

And there are some amazing quotes in here.

You know, the supervising editor for Digital News says, As a person of color who's often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me. The efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate, given the news industry's longstanding lack of diversity. Now there's some truth in that, so let's just keep that in mind for a minute. And then, he says, I never criticized NPR's, Berliner replies. I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce. In terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, I have not denigrated its diversity goals.

That's wrong, he's talking about something else. Then they put in this quote from the NPR Ombudsman that I thought was really interesting. I know Yuri, he's not wrong. That's a pretty strong thing to say in the middle of all this.

Then there's this one that you and I both noticed. Others question Berliner's logic. This probably gets causality backward, tweeted Semaphore Washington Editor Jordan Wiseman. I guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for Mitt Romney have changed how they identify politically.

Walter, What do they mean by that?

I'm sorry. By this logic, NPR will be broadcasting someday to three people who believe the right things. Their job is to be the national public radio station. If America has moved in its beliefs, even stipulating that they're right with this, then they should address that. I'm afraid that their desire to be better than their own country may leave them in a very lonely phone booth someday. With three ideologically perfect broadcasters broadcasting to one perfect listener.

Blaming the audience for getting stupid or bigoted, or whatever it might be, isn't going to work. Also, though, I just went through my problem with NPR. That didn't really represent what Berliner was saying, Berliner was saying. We've gotten three of the biggest stories of the last few years wrong and wrong in the same way. First, we got Russiagate wrong, we relied on Adam Schiff.

Then when Mueller came out and didn't find anything, we just sort of drifted away and were like, Oh, look, birds over there. We never addressed that failure. Then he's saying, we got Covid wrong, we went all in on this. The lab leak idea is ridiculous.

We made fun of it, we shot it down, we really went with the establishment.

We hitched our horse to what turns out to be a very partisan, specific and probably erroneous narrative.

Then I'm not sure what the other, The Hunter Biden story, was, the third one, the Hunter Biden Story. We proclaimed fulsomely that we were not going to address something that wasn't news before the election. This wasn't newsy enough for us.

We're not even going to report on it, he says. Well, actually, what the Hunter Biden laptop revealed was newsworthy. It was a network of influence and maybe corruption scandals that were exactly what we should be reporting on. We just blew it off.

Trying to switch this and make it about diversity in the response really doesn't cover his critique. He's not drawing a correspondence between the newsroom, diversity in terms of race and so on, and their coverage. Maybe he's suggesting that there might be a relationship, but his critique is of the product, not the producers. But ultimately, he does, say. In Berliner. I did a poll of 87 people who work in the Washington headquarters, seeing who was a Republican, who was a Democrat, and the score was 87 Democrats, zero Republicans.

He suggested that maybe that doesn't represent diversity, despite it being their quote, North Star, and doesn't represent inclusion in a meaningful fashion.

As I was going to say, the NPR response in this folk flick article doesn't really get to why they got all these stories wrong. It switches the topic.

They only questioned it insofar as it may be related to this editorial failure. That this guy.

Because, remember, this is radio, the listener can't see the composition of your newsroom. I can't tell what gender and racial and other distribution you have there, I can only hear what comes out of that speaker.

And people don't like listening to what comes out of that speaker in large numbers anymore.

Well, Berliner just made the argument against that and you didn't respond to that.

Not just opinion, but sort of story selection and so on, and point of view in stories.

Yeah, and he goes on to say on radio, we were really lagging in our representation of audience. That makes us look like what America looks like today. But then that they fixed it and so on, and so forth. But I think what they don't understand is that this is exactly. What's so offensive and hard to take about NPR is that they think that they're doing stories that American minorities want to hear like.

These stories will be of interest to Black Americans, these stories will be of interest to Hispanic Americans, these stories will be of interest Asian Americans. But what they actually are are caricatures of somebody's idea of what's interesting to those audiences.

And they may appeal to a niche segment of upper class people, but they're not appealing to the sort of broad, mean of America. And we're going to get to the kinds of stories that they've done over the years. The great irony of Berliner's piece was, he said.

Let's imagine that the old NPR, which felt it was insufficiently diverse, was basically run by white people. So then white people went out and chose the minority people that they thought would diversify. So these are white people's idea of what Black people are. They do the picking, so in a way, they reify their own prejudices in the personnel choices they make.

And then they think they've finished the job.

We pick the kind of people from other races that we think represent those races, these are white people's idea of representative minorities. We brought them in and now we all agree about everything, because basically we forced the card as it were. We picked people who already.

Fit our categories. And why isn't everybody happy out there?

So rather than fixing a problem, you're actually sort of doubling or tripling it when you do what they did. NPR had a lot of broad appeal, it probably didn't pay enough attention to certain issues at once upon a time, and they were probably correct.