Correct. NPR sends its stations an advance listing of stories covered for both ME and ATC, updated as warranted. So yes they know what's coming and can act accordingly. The segment times are all firm.
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National Public Radio Journalist Believes That NPR Listening Demographics Have Changed And...
- Thread starter Daryl Lynn L.A.
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Correct. NPR sends its stations an advance listing of stories covered for both ME and ATC, updated as warranted. So yes they know what's coming and can act accordingly. The segment times are all firm.
I'm curious about where you draw a line between "editing" and "bias."
The COVID-era press briefings you're talking about weren't "press conferences," per se. They were the usual daily WH press briefings that Trump decided to attend personally, instead of (as is usual) letting the press secretary conduct them.
Unless you're C-SPAN and you carry everything live, those briefings aren't typically broadcast live. Because it was the early days of the pandemic, everything was upended and there wasn't much else to cover, some networks and local stations carried those briefings for a while.
I am pretty sure, four years later, that NPR provided them to stations at a pretty low priority level - they didn't interrupt the live shows (Here and Now, in this case) that were airing in the early afternoon, Eastern time, and for the most part they weren't even offered as live anchored coverage.
This is VERY different from something like a live prime-time presidential news conference or address, which is a much more rare event and gets more extensive coverage. If it's an 8 PM ET event, the 5 PM PT rollover of All Things Considered gets replaced by live anchored coverage that's also being fed on the "Breaking News Channel" to member stations in the east. (And even then, it's entirely at the discretion of each local station to decide whether to take the live coverage or not.)
This wasn't that. It was a feed of a daily event that some stations took and others didn't. That's what any news editor does, by definition - no station has the airtime or staff to cover every event, and we ask listeners to trust our editors to make informed decisions about what stories are most worth our limited resources and our audience's limited attention.
After the first few days, there were plenty of reasons for editors to decide either to keep carrying the briefings live or to do what we do with almost all events - keep an ear on their content and provide a summary for listeners in regular newscasts. I don't think we kept carrying them live at my station, either. They were lengthy, they weren't breaking urgent news for the most part, and we often had state or county briefings taking place at the same time that were of much more immediate relevance to local listeners.
It being the 2020s, we were also guided (as I expect KUOW was) by the reality that listeners who really wanted the full live WH briefing feed had plenty of ways to get it, whether on cable news, C-SPAN, tons of streaming feeds, etc.
You can certainly disagree with that editorial judgment. But it seems to me like you're sort of disagreeing with the entire concept of editorial judgment. Nobody, whether it's the President, the governor, or the CEO of the station has the automatic right to unlimited live airtime. Preempting daytime programming is a delicate dance, because the regular programming has an audience that wants to hear it, too. That's why you have news directors and editors. Otherwise, we'd all just be C-SPAN - and there's already one of those that does what it does pretty well.
Trump is running a shadow government with some members of the House.
I think your example of the NPR station in DFW is a good point. NPR generally does OK even in "red" areas. Even relatively rural or red region markets like Boise can have NPR stations with decent ratings (4.2 for the NPR station in Boise, 6+). Obviously there is a market for NPR radio nationwide, and not just in blue areas.
How does Uri know? He worked in the organization for 25 years. If you worked at a media organization for 25 years as a veteran journalist, don't you think that you would know about how the organization is operating vis-a-vis their listeners?
That said, I don't understand all the heat against Uri Berliner. The guy is a veteran journalist, a liberal, and he worked behind the scenes at NPR for 25 years. So what if he's been interviewed on conservative media. It's not like he refuses to be interviewed elsewhere.
He obviously knows what he's talking about. He's concerned about the network where he worked for 25 years. And as he says, "to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization." He's providing a peek inside the organization, along with his concerns. He obviously holds NPR to a higher standard than some of the others in the organization who seem to be running or directing things.
It's highly probable that his concerns are valid. In his article he mentions a Harris Poll that only 30% of NPR listeners find it trustworthy. Was Harris lying?
One poll that Berliner linked in his article was the Pew Research poll on public broadcasting that showed that while NPR's revenues have continued to go up, their audience, nationwide, has dropped from a high of 30 million in 2017 to 25 million in 2022. It's possible that the drop was due to the pandemic, but the drop already started 3 years before the Pandemic hit. The study results can be found here..:
Public Broadcasting Fact Sheet
Hundreds of local and regional radio and television stations comprise the U.S. public media system.
www.pewresearch.org
It's obvious that there are issues with NPR. Doesn't mean that the network is invalid or doling out propaganda, but there are problems there. Some of the problems may be due to NPR being part of "radio", a legacy media. According to Berliner, some of the listeners apparently expect more than they're getting from NPR, but at the same time, revenues are up, the core listener obviously is happy enough to part with their money, and that's what really counts. The network obviously is delivering to the core listeners, who like what they're hearing enough to donate more money.
People who work at national radio companies don't interact with listeners. They're a long way from the listeners. Their clients are the stations, and the stations interact with listeners. The most he knows about is Washington, which is a biased sample to begin with. Uri is in editorial, not affiliate relations, not in research, not in any part of the company that really knows who the listeners are.
That's a funny comment. I looked up that Harris poll, and there wasn't a single traditional media company in the top of half of their poll. The highest rated media organization was Spotify. That's really all you need to know.
Do you know a poll that shows listenership to radio is increasing? ANY radio? Not just public radio. That's a silly poll. The fact is that listenership to NPR isn't based on NPR, but rather its stations. If the stations are doing well, then NPR is doing well. If the stations are in liberal cities, then the listeners are liberals who live in those cities. That's how a national organization works. It's very different from being in local radio. And if you look where NPR is biggest, it is in big liberal cities like Boston, San Francisco, and Washington. THAT has more to do with the polls than covering Hunter Biden's laptop.
What NPR has to do is no different from anyone else in traditional radio. They need a digital strategy, because that's where the audience is.
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People who work in news departments for 25 years are probably more qualified to comment on the journalistic quality of the news produced by the national organization. And the original article that Uri wrote is about what he perceives as a loss of objectivity in the NPR newsroom.
Sure, he extrapolates that to the decline in listeners. And maybe the loss of journalistic integrity has nothing whatsoever to do with the decline. It's probably not helping, though.
Point taken. A majority of younger demos get their news from TikTok. They're not a traditional media company, either.
As I said in my post, 'some of the problems may be due to NPR being part of "radio", a legacy media'. Legacy media has issues. Online newspapers are still losing circulation, except for the bigger national ones, and even they are often losing money. And yes, NPR stations in the big 'blue' metros are doing better, but as Pew discovered, even their listenership is down from 2017.
Either way, silly poll or not, NPR is gradually losing listeners. And as you said, all legacy media need a digital strategy, although that's no guarantee that any particular news medium will remain viable. The other Pew Research polling on digital news media isn't incredibly encouraging.
But digital media -- as a replacement for other mass media -- is still in development. By 2040 I suppose we'll see which platforms survive, which radio networks and stations successfully transition to digital, and which ones fail and disappear.
So yeah, as you said, they need to have a strategy. It's not just going to happen as if by magic.
I'm trying to stay out of this conversation as much as possible, having made what I think are the essential points in my post on page one.
While I can't claim Uri's 25 years in one organization, two of the newsrooms I worked in add up to 20 years of my career (until my retirement on January 31).
I think it's the reverse of what you say, boombox4. There's a huge "forest for the trees" factor involved. The experience of gathering, fact-checking, editing, producing and broadcasting the news is very different from hearing the finished product as a listener.
In that environment, a person is simply too close, and in a news organization as large as NPR, also too far removed from it as a whole to provide informed and objective comment on that organization's journalistic quality.
I think it would require an outside observer---the Columbia Journalism Review, perhaps---doing a deep dive on the past five years of NPR's coverage to eliminate the variables and biases (conscious and unconscious) that come from someone on the inside.
And even if the CJR chose to release such a report seven months before the general election, the motives of the report and the timing wouldn't be subject to question the way they are when it's one individual in a company of 700 (ish).
So you've backed off on his knowledge about listeners. OK. As for his opinion about objectivity, he does so by naming several OLD examples, each one of which was addressed publicly by the company at the time. So he has an opinion about the coverage, none of which falls under his purview as an editor of business content. Where he falls apart is connecting that coverage to loss of listeners and revenue, because every other news organization is losing listeners and revenue. Even Spotify, Sirius, and Amazon have been laying off staff.
When you look at the broader picture of trust, people trust the media they agree with. Conservatives all trust Fox and don't trust the New York Times, and the graph points 100% in the opposite direction for liberals. And yes, that change has happened since 2016. He's right that the demographic has changed. But the change has happened with the audience. The audience has become more polarized. We see that every day. We know that's true. The polarization of the audience was not caused by NPR's coverage. And there's nothing NPR can do in its coverage to change that. NPR has to decide how to cover the news based on the facts, and not on the politics. Because following the politics means reporting on stories that are not always factual.
He says NPR has lost trust. He works there. He's one of those liberals. Why should we trust HIM? Why is he trustworthy now? Because he's critical makes him trustworthy? Is his editing of NPR business to be trusted? He's basically parroting the same talking points as Fox News. Does that make them more trustworthy? Conservatives now love him because he has confirmed their suspicions. Those are important questions if we're to move forward from this.
That's probably what they'll do. NPR also has what they call an Ombudsman or public editor, who is someone who examines NPR reporting from the audience point of view. It's interesting reading posts from the period Berliner identifies.
You can see the struggle between facts and objectivity. How does a news organization deal with a government that lies? How does a news organization deal with stories that are simply politically damaging, and are placed for that purpose? What has changed during this time is that the media has become part of the story. That's usually something people in media try to avoid.
But the fact is that NPR is not alone in this situation. It's a problem for all journalists. They better figure it out quickly.
We just had a Solar Eclipse. There are still people who do not accept facts like the Earth rotates around the Sun.
The groups that don't trust the Mainstream Media are generally the Deep State lunatics. They want to hear what pleases them, not facts.
The story by Uri that NPR is "Telling listeners what to think" is not accurate...
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All true and also consider another thing these groups don't understand that some of the content NPR, PBS and their affiliates uses are from wire services like AP and Reuters.
I agree with you in the sense that I do not believe that NPR is trying to tell anyone how to think. Likewise, I don’t think they’re trying to manipulate anyone. With that being said, I do believe that they (NPR) know who their core listeners are, and I think it’s possible that some of the content is curated to fit those listeners. As I mentioned in an earlier post, that doesn’t apply to all NPR stations, as NPR includes a patchwork of stations that could be owned and operated by many different organizations. What is true on one station may be different on another.
I disagree with you in the sense that I do not believe that all of mainstream media has your best interests in mind. I trust my local newsradio station, I trust my local tv stations, and I trust NPR affiliates that run certain NPR programs (as long as they’re owned by a reputable organization and have a demonstrated history of integrity).
At the same time, I do not trust cable news networks anymore. Although it can be entertaining to watch some of these networks, getting your news exclusively from a cable network is not something I’d advise anyone to do. Essentially, every station has some sort of an agenda, and it gets more obvious with every passing year. I’m not sure if you would include them under the umbrella of legacy media or not.
I’ve had conversation with people who believe that cable network “x” is telling them the truth. Each time, I’ve felt like they would benefit from turning off their tv and getting their news from a more reputable source.
A top of the hour national news update and a few local stories on the radio is a recipe that works (in my opinion). Tell me what’s going on and keep it simple. I really don’t need a panel on tv to break everything down for me and editorialize each story.
They don't like AP and UPI either. If it doesn't come from Fox, RSBN, Newmax. Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk, forget it. I don't know how many times, when I've criticized Trump, I've been told "stop listening to te mainstream media. The only reason you don't like Trump is that the mainstream media brainwashed you". I assure you that's not the case.
I agree on Both points.
Fox and OANN know their audience well and that’s why, for your second statement,
My comment is… the people who watch them think what they’re watching is a reputable source because it fits their agenda and beliefs, so it must be true… confirmation bias.
I once had someone tell me that Fox News is evil, and that they personally don’t need to worry about being exposed to such drivel because they watch MSNBC. Well, do I have news for you….
Just turn it all off.
Or do what I do for local, US and world news, I can use this URL on my PC, tablet and phone - I cancelled cable TV about 5 years ago and I rarely watch local or national news on OTA DTV, I do listen to the top of the hour news on radio sometimes:
(I don't think I've posted this in RD.com before, looking through all of these news sources, I try to piece together what is happening)
Kirk Bayne
(I don't think I've posted this in RD.com before, looking through all of these news sources, I try to piece together what is happening)
Kirk Bayne
NPR has now suspended Uri Berliner for five days without pay for violating its work policy:
He wrote this essay for another service without permission.
He wrote this essay for another service without permission.
Oh the injustice! He's now just like a January 6th Capitol Hostage...😑
Also in the article it cited conservative pundits running with talking points to go after the current CEO of NPR. Given that it's NPR I can see a repeat of "Defund NPR" come into play on the national level given its an election year and local NPR affiliates having to confront political interference when it's related to funding their statewide NPR affiliate via funding debates to state universities.
White House: It’s ‘clear’ NPR is an independent news organization
The White House on Thursday said that it’s “clear” that National Public Radio (NPR) is an independent news organization after the outlet quit Twitter over CEO Elon Musk’s move to label …
thehill.com
Musk, Boebert call to ‘defund’ NPR after it quit Twitter
Elon Musk and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) called for NPR to be defunded after the outlet announced it would no longer use Twitter due to the social media platform slapping it with a “government-f…
thehill.com
As PBS and NPR exit Twitter, which has more value to taxpayers?
Elon Musk's slapdash decision to label PBS and NPR as "government-funded" isn't just inaccurate, it's risky
www.salon.com
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