[Swprograms] Fwd: 'Good, Gray NPR' from The Nation

[David Goren <dbgoren@xxxxxxxxx>]

>
>
>      Good, Gray NPR
>      by Scott Sherman
>
>
> In January 2002 National Public Radio launched The Tavis Smiley Show, a
> daily one-hour magazine program featuring a high-velocity mixture of
> commentary, reporting and analysis, and hosted by one of the most
> energetic and ambitious young media personalities in the country. The
> first new daily program produced at NPR in a generation, The Tavis
> Smiley Show was directed at an audience poorly served by public radio:
> African-Americans. According to NPR, it did quite well in terms of
> ratings. But the honeymoon didn't last: Smiley felt that NPR was not
> doing enough to promote his program among nonwhite listeners, and his
> contract negotiations with the network collapsed in late 2004, after
> which he went on the offensive against NPR. "It is ironic," he informed
> Time, "that a Republican president has an administration that is more
> inclusive and more diverse than a so-called liberal-media-elite
> network."
>
> Smiley directed his firepower at an organization that has accomplished 
> a
> great deal in recent years. Thanks in part to NPR's comprehensive
> foreign coverage, its listenership has soared since 9/11: In the wake 
> of
> the attacks on New York and Washington, NPR gained (and has kept) 
> nearly
> 4 million new listeners, and the network's various programs now reach 
> 23
> million listeners a week on more than 780 member stations. Morning
> Edition is now the most listened-to morning show in the country. As the
> listenership grew, so did the philanthropic largesse: In November 2003
> NPR received a stunning $236 million bequest from the estate of Joan
> Kroc, the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc.
>
> But Smiley ruined the party both by calling attention to the
> shortcomings of an institution that emerged from Lyndon Johnson's Great
> Society and by underlining the gap between NPR's rhetoric--in this 
> case,
> about racial inclusion--and reality. The entity that calls itself
> National Public Radio, he reminded us, is not serving the entire 
> public.
> "You'd be amazed," he told Salon, "at the number of people of color who
> do not know what NPR is."
>
> In its journalism and its financial structure, NPR has indeed evolved
> into a somewhat different entity from what its founders envisioned. On
> May 3, 1971, it went on the air with the first broadcast of All Things
> Considered. The program began with a kaleidoscopic account of a major
> antiwar rally in Washington, DC, at which more than 6,000 people were
> arrested. "Excuse me," NPR's reporter asked a police sergeant 
> attempting
> to quell the protests, "Is that a technique? Where the men actually try
> to drive the motorcycles right into the demonstrators?" Three decades
> later, rough-edged, in-your-face reportage has largely been supplanted
> by conventional punditry from the likes of Cokie Roberts, Daniel Schorr
> and David Brooks, and by consciously mainstream news reporting by
> correspondents whose voices are often indistinguishable from one
> another.
>
> To some extent, financial and political pressures help to explain NPR's
> turn toward mainstream respectability and high-minded professionalism:
> NPR's founders had every expectation that public funds would cover the
> budget, but Republican hostility to public broadcasting thwarted those
> early hopes and dreams. Three decades after its creation, NPR now draws
> a significant portion of its funding from corporations such as 
> Wal-Mart,
> Sodexho and Archer Daniels Midland. Likewise, NPR had sound 
> journalistic
> reasons for turning away from its edgy, countercultural roots. Over the
> past decade, as media conglomerates dumped public-affairs programming 
> in
> favor of "infotainment" and tabloid trash, NPR recognized the void and
> moved to fill it with high-quality news reporting. That news-oriented
> model, by drawing in listeners hungry for substantial coverage of
> politics and public affairs, has enabled NPR to thrive: Today, it
> continues to add correspondents and bureaus at a time when most other
> major news organizations are trimming them. A fair-minded evaluation
> must conclude that if NPR has turned its back on some of the values
> enshrined in its original mission statement, it has also, in other ways
> and despite enormous political pressure from its detractors, remained
> true to them as well.
>
> But a price was paid on the road to respectability. With growth and
> stability has come stodginess, predictability and excessive caution. 
> NPR
> was founded as an antidote to the mainstream media. Its founders had a
> unique journalistic and cultural vision that contrasted sharply with 
> the
> values of establishment publications like the New York Times and the
> Washington Post. As NPR began its transformation into a
> middle-of-the-road, "hard news" entity in the mid-1970s, some of the
> founders warned that the experiment could end badly, with NPR sounding
> like an aural equivalent of The Congressional Record. That didn't
> happen, but today's NPR does, at times, seem quite empty and soulless,
> very much like the eminent daily newspapers its executives venerate.
>
> Some NPR veterans are acutely aware of what has been lost since NPR's
> birth in 1971. "Over the years, we've become much more sober," says
> Susan Stamberg, who was an early co-host of All Things Considered, and
> who remains a lively and mischievous presence at NPR today. "We've
> become the good, gray Times. They've put color on their front
> page"--Stamberg pauses for her trademark cackle--"but we're upholding
> the gray. We're not nearly as quirky as we used to be. And I miss it."
>
> NPR came into existence almost accidentally. The 1967 legislation that
> gave birth to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was intended
> solely for public television, but a small group of 1950s-era
> professionals from the world of educational radio managed to slip the
> phrase "and radio" into the legislation. In doing so, they displeased
> the power brokers in the new universe of public broadcasting and
> contributed to their own exclusion from the new public radio entity,
> which fell into the hands of a younger generation of educational radio
> managers, a few of whom had direct ties to the 1960s counterculture.
>
> Chief among them was Bill Siemering, who ran WBFO at the State
> University of New York at Buffalo. Under Siemering, WBFO provided
> coverage of the campus antiwar movement and the student strikes that
> were broken up by the police. But Siemering was interested in the world
> beyond the university: He set up a storefront studio in Buffalo's 
> ghetto
> and encouraged local residents to learn the art of radio. He viewed
> public radio as a grassroots, bottom-up, somewhat anarchistic
> phenomenon.
>
> It was Siemering who wrote NPR's original mission statement in 1970,
> which called for "some hard news, but the primary emphasis would be on
> interpretation, investigative reporting on public affairs, the world of
> ideas and the arts." NPR's mission statement was not a radical document
> but a liberal and populist one. And the founders had every desire to
> serve an alternative audience: "urban areas with sizeable nonwhite
> audiences," "student groups studying ecology," "groups with distinct
> lifestyles and interests not now served by electronic media."
> Siemering's document was something of a blueprint for NPR in its first
> decade, but as the years went by, management lost interest in it. Not
> long ago, outside archivists requested the document from NPR
> headquarters, but no copy could be found.
>
> The first broadcast of All Things Considered led with the segment about
> the protest rally, followed by a zesty array of stories: a roundtable
> discussion with reporters from the Christian Science Monitor, which
> segued into a reading of two antiwar poems from the era of World War I;
> a dispatch from a barber shop in Iowa whose proprietor was reeling from
> lost income as more men chose to wear their hair long; a portrait of a
> nurse turned heroin addict; and, finally, a discussion between Allen
> Ginsberg and his father, Louis, about the merits and shortcomings of
> drug abuse.
>
> That quirky mix more or less characterized NPR through the mid-1970s,
> when the arrival of president Frank Mankiewicz laid the groundwork for
> NPR's transformation into something much closer to a "hard news"
> organization. Mankiewicz brought financial resources and visibility to
> NPR, but he also brought conventional journalistic practices--for
> example, editors. Until 1975 or so, reporters at NPR had worked on 
> their
> own, with minimal supervision and editorial guidance.
>
> Of the changes ushered in by Mankiewicz, Jack Mitchell, in his new 
> book,
> Listener Supported, writes, "Gone was the notion, so central to the
> thinking of the first NPR board, of public radio as the people's
> instrument. The vox populi became the voice of the best professionals."
> Some of those professionals--Nina Totenberg, Cokie Roberts and Linda
> Wertheimer--had close ties to the Washington establishment. They were
> the sort of "coolly objective journalists" Siemering and his colleagues
> had hoped would steer clear of NPR. But Wertheimer & Co. were more
> or less in control by the time NPR collapsed financially in 1983.
>
> That crisis resulted from financial incompetence and cuts in funding 
> for
> public broadcasting, which hit public radio especially hard. Rescue 
> came
> in the form of a substantial loan from the Corporation for Public
> Broadcasting (CPB), and from a vigorous fundraising drive by NPR's
> member stations. (Owing to the decentralized nature of public radio in
> the United States, the stations have a major say in how NPR does
> business. NPR itself owns no stations; it merely produces and
> distributes programming for the member stations. Some, like WNYC in New
> York and WBEZ in Chicago, produce programming that is regarded by many
> as often superior to NPR's.) Out of the crisis arose a new NPR--leaner,
> better managed, more news-oriented, more enamored of audience research
> and more eager to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer an
> alternative or countercultural institution.
>
> Indeed, NPR executives had reason to be concerned about the network's
> image in Washington. Richard Nixon loathed public broadcasting, and
> nominated the ultraconservative industrialist Joseph Coors to the CPB
> board. Financially, public radio did well in the Ford and Carter years,
> but the arrival of Ronald Reagan led, in 1983, to a 20 percent 
> reduction
> in the federal appropriation for public broadcasting. By the mid-1980s,
> NPR, still on shaky financial footing, was under pressure from 
> political
> actors like the Heritage Foundation and The New Republic, which
> published a much-discussed attack on the network in 1986 by Fred 
> Barnes,
> wherein he claimed that NPR had an inherent bias against conservatives
> and a reflexive sympathy for left-wing movements in Central America.
> Writing in Mother Jones in 1987, Laurence Zuckerman chronicled a series
> of newsroom conflicts over US intervention in Grenada and Nicaragua,
> conflicts that helped to determine the network's overall political
> direction in the Reagan era. At one point State Department officials
> complained that an All Things Considered segment was too critical of 
> the
> US-backed contra rebels. Then-news director Robert Siegel, according to
> Mother Jones, invited those officials to lunch and concluded that the
> piece was indeed problematic. Gary Covino, who produced the
> controversial segment, told Mother Jones, "The way [Siegel] handled 
> this
> story sent the message spoken and unspoken that this was not the kind 
> of
> stuff NPR should be doing.... Many people picked it up very quickly and
> began censoring themselves."
>
> NPR's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War marked the network's arrival into
> the media big leagues. With a million dollars from CPB and the member
> stations, NPR for the first time sent a team of its own correspondents
> to cover a war from the field. In the 1990s, as profit-hungry 
> television
> and radio stations retreated from in-depth reporting on politics and
> public affairs, NPR endeavored to take over that role. It did so with
> considerable integrity and professionalism. Awards were racked up; new
> foreign and domestic bureaus were created. Educated listeners 
> gravitated
> toward NPR in times of political ferment and, with few options 
> available
> to them for serious news, stayed for the long haul. By the mid-1990s,
> NPR was finally in possession of the professional recognition it had
> long desired. "NPR does a really rich mix of reporting and coverage of
> the United States," says Martin Turner, who heads the BBC's Washington
> office. "It's a pretty high standard."
>
> By and large, and with key exceptions, NPR's critics fall into three
> groups. There is little doubt that NPR is most concerned about the
> first, and most vocal, group: political conservatives. In 1994 Newt
> Gingrich and his fellow Republicans put public broadcasting on the
> chopping block, vowing to "zero it out" of the federal budget. The
> effort backfired, as viewers and listeners besieged Congress with calls
> and letters defending public radio and TV. Gingrich & Co. lost the
> battle to choke off public funds to NPR, but they probably emerged
> victorious in a larger quest: to anchor NPR in the political center. In
> a 1995 conversation with University of Maine professor Michael 
> McCauley,
> who has written an authoritative new book, NPR: The Trials and Triumphs
> of National Public Radio, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media admitted 
> that
> he felt NPR aired less objectionable material in the 1990s than it did
> in the 1980s, when AIM first began to assail the network on ideological
> grounds. These days, Newt Gingrich himself is full of praise for NPR:
> "Either it is a lot less on the left," he remarked in 2003, "or I have
> mellowed." (NPR itself trumpets the Gingrich turnaround in its
> press packet as "an amusing fact.")
>
> The second camp of critics consists of people who object to the way in
> which NPR has ceded political space to the likes of Barnes, Irvine,
> Gingrich and Pat Buchanan (who once dubbed NPR "an upholstered little
> playpen of our Chablis-and-brie set"). These critics see NPR as too
> mainstream, too spineless and timid, too deferential to power. They
> point to a revolving door between the US government and NPR (president
> Kevin Klose, for example, was formerly the head of the International
> Broadcasting Bureau, which oversees Voice of America, Radio 
> Martí
> and TV Martí); they lament the narrow range of political opinion
> on NPR (no current NPR commentator, they note, has the progressive
> credentials of the late Michael Harrington, who had a regular slot on
> NPR in the 1980s); and they point to NPR's campaign against low-power
> radio stations [see Rick Karr].
>
> One does sense a creeping caution and conservatism at NPR over the past
> decade. In 1994 it engaged death-row inmate (and former WHYY radio
> reporter) Mumia Abu-Jamal to do a series of brief commentaries on 
> prison
> life and the death penalty but soon reversed itself in the wake of a
> vigorous campaign from Senator Bob Dole and Philadelphia's Fraternal
> Order of Police ("A sterling parable for the new, mature NPR" was James
> Ledbetter's ironic description of the Abu-Jamal fiasco in his book Made
> Possible By...). In 1995 Andrei Codrescu, one of the few really pungent
> voices left on NPR, produced a commentary about Armageddon that drew
> 40,000 complaints from the Christian Coalition. To Codrescu's apparent
> dismay, NPR rushed to apologize for his segment, after which NPR
> executives informed Current, a trade newspaper, that they would step up
> their policing of the daily commentaries. In 2000 TV Guide and Current
> reported that NPR had allowed three officers from a specialized
> propaganda unit of the US Army based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to
> intern at its news programs over a nine-month period. At the time an 
> NPR
> executive called the decision "a real goof."
>
> Since 9/11 NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has devoted a number of 
> his
> columns at npr.org to the network's coverage of the Bush Administration
> and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's perhaps too early for a
> definitive assessment of NPR's reporting on these subjects, but what's
> clear is that quite a few listeners are dissatisfied with the coverage
> of George W. Bush and his foreign policy. Consider a recent missive 
> from
> Richard Steinman, a research scientist at Columbia University. On the
> weekend of March 19, 2005, Steinman turned on his radio, looking for
> coverage of the demonstrations that marked the second anniversary of 
> the
> Iraq War. In a subsequent letter to Dvorkin, Steinman recounted NPR's
> programming choices that weekend: "a 'patriotic,' feel-good West Point
> piece; sports fans' feelings toward a baseball player (yes, steroids);
> more feel-good filler about an Iraqi-American painter and her use of
> color; Bantu Refugees Adjust to New Lives in America. Quote from the
> story: 'we give the government of America the high five'; Army Chefs
> Battle for Best-Dish Honors; a singing physics professor."
>
> NPR executives bristle at the implication that the programming is
> frivolous. "It is easy," says vice president of news and information
> Bruce Drake, "to carve out one small period or point of coverage and 
> use
> it as a foundation for this kind of criticism--but it wholly ignores 
> the
> large body of work that NPR has done over the last two years." Drake 
> has
> a point: Much of NPR's Iraq reportage has indeed been of high quality,
> and he has the awards (including a Peabody) to prove it.
>
> Yet listeners like Steinman are correct to ask searching questions 
> about
> NPR and Iraq, especially since some of the network's luminaries have 
> not
> been shy about expressing their own views on that subject. In October
> 2002 political correspondent Mara Liasson, in an appearance on Fox News
> Sunday, assailed two Democratic Congressmen for traveling to Iraq.
> "These guys are a disgrace," she said. "Look, everybody knows
> it's...Politics 101 that you don't go to an adversary country, an enemy
> country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the President
> of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don't know,
> resign." In the same vein, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott
> Simon--who was an antiwar activist at the University of Chicago in the
> Vietnam era--wrote a swaggering essay for the Wall Street Journal
> editorial page on October 11, 2001, titled "Even Pacifists Must Support
> This War," and, in a March 2003 speech in Seattle, he reportedly
> expressed support for the US invasion of Iraq.
>
> A third group of critics takes issue not so much with NPR's political
> orientation but with its monotonal sound quality; its often bland and
> homogeneous programming; its lack of aural experimentation; and its
> diminished cultural coverage--which, they note, was an integral part of
> NPR's founding mission. These critics, many of whom work in the world 
> of
> public radio, lament that on the road to becoming a "primary news
> provider" NPR has neglected its original mission to provide a wide 
> array
> of top-notch, eclectic cultural programming. (They note, as evidence of
> NPR's bias against innovative, artistic fare, that the network turned
> down two of public radio's most popular programs--Garrison Keillor's
> Prairie Home Companion and Ira Glass's This American Life, both of 
> which
> found a home at rival distributors.)
>
> "The notion that we are turning away from culture is not correct," says
> Klose, who cites programs like Performance Today, Jazz Profiles and a
> recent eight-part series on the state of regional theater as evidence 
> of
> NPR's cultural vitality. Klose is right: Valuable cultural fare
> continues to flow from NPR. But the numbers show that news is clearly
> seen as more important: In 2002 NPR spent $41 million on news and
> information, and only $7 million on cultural and entertainment
> programming.
>
> "The NPR drone" is how some staffers describe the network's overall
> sound, and many NPR watchers concur with that description. "If you
> listen to a lot of NPR," Brian Montopoli averred in The Washington
> Monthly in 2003, "you realize how similar it all sounds: no matter who
> is talking, or what they are talking about." Writing in the New York
> Times in 1998, Greil Marcus took blistering aim at NPR's leading hosts
> and newscasters, and wondered why, year after year, their work imparts 
> a
> sense of "boredom with the world."
>
> Klose takes issue with the notion that NPR is bland, detached and
> formulaic: "I think it's an urban myth," he says. "It's an armchair
> cavil that has no basis in fact." But at least one distinguished former
> NPR employee has a view closer to that of the critics. Two years ago
> Robert Krulwich, who many consider to be the network's finest
> correspondent from the late 1970s and early '80s, issued a blunt
> critique of NPR's programming--and, by implication, its audience--at a
> staff retreat. According to the notes of a staff member who was present
> at the talk, Krulwich made the following points:
>
> Politesse. NPR desires to be polite, to maintain dignity. It doesn't
> challenge its sources or interviewees. There is room for reporters to
> stiffen when they hear a lie and poke back.
>
> Scared of audience. The habits of your audience shouldn't be your 
> habit.
> NPR writes too much for our expected listeners. We should disturb the
> audience occasionally. Tell them what they don't already know and what
> they don't want to hear.
>
> No joy. A mature organization grows accustomed to itself. NPR has lost
> the willingness to play. You don't hear much that makes you laugh or as
> many tears. Too much in the mind. NPR needs more people who scream,
> suffer; people who are playing.
>
> Might the Kroc money, by providing NPR with a solid financial cushion,
> pave the way for more quirky, spontaneous and risky programming? Says
> Susan Stamberg: "The Kroc money, actually, will probably reduce the
> quirk level even more, because with it we can pay for more and more
> sober reporters out in the field."
>
> One subject on which the critics agree is that NPR can do much more to
> reach nonwhite listeners. In the 1980s audience research data urged
> public radio stations to concentrate on a specific type of
> well-educated, self-motivated individual. According to Jack Mitchell's
> Listener Supported, that data boiled down to the following: "success 
> for
> public radio meant having great appeal to a subset of the population 
> and
> none at all to the vast majority of the population." This helps to
> explain why nine out of ten NPR listeners are white. And these facts
> form the backdrop to Tavis Smiley's dispute with NPR. (It has to be 
> said
> that the reasons behind Smiley's divorce from NPR remain murky: On one
> side is his assertion that NPR wasn't doing enough to promote the show.
> But NPR, which rushed to create a new black-oriented show hosted by Ed
> Gordon, claims that Smiley insisted on a $3 million promotional budget
> for his show, when its entire advertising budget is less than 
> $200,000.)
>
> In any case, some station managers saw Smiley's show as a vital bridge
> to nonwhite audiences, and they regret its disappearance from NPR's
> airwaves. One station manager in a major metropolitan market recalls a
> series of focus groups composed of African-American and Hispanic adults
> who had never before listened to public radio. He notes that they
> reacted indifferently to nearly all of the programming on his
> station--except for Smiley's show, whose energy and verve fully 
> captured
> their attention.
>
> "There is a belief out there that NPR has no interest in reaching
> African-Americans and Hispanics," says Maxie Jackson, program director
> of WETA in Washington, DC. "I don't believe that. I firmly believe that
> they would love to increase the audience of people of color for public
> radio programming. That is also true of Public Radio International and
> the other program suppliers. The problem lies in the fact that none of
> them have the research, the research budget, the marketing expertise 
> and
> the communication strategy expertise to do that.... The biggest and
> fundamental issue at hand here is that none of these organizations have
> reached out to people of color in the past. None of them know how to do
> it."
>
> Critics who wish to see NPR move in a more progressive direction are
> likely to be disappointed. At the moment, NPR's center of gravity is in
> the middle of the spectrum. Twenty-eight percent of NPR listeners,
> according to an internal document, consider themselves either "very
> conservative" or "somewhat conservative." Thirty-two percent defined
> themselves as "somewhat liberal" or "very liberal." But 29 percent 
> chose
> the category "middle of the road." Given this data, NPR executives will
> no doubt play it safe in the years to come.
>
> Indeed, the economic structure of public radio more or less guarantees 
> a
> centrist editorial formula. Less than 2 percent of NPR's budget 
> consists
> of funds from the taxpayer-funded CPB. (In the 1970s NPR received 90
> percent of its budget from the CPB.) But the member stations, which in
> some sense "own" NPR, and on which NPR relies for much of its 
> additional
> revenue, receive a hefty 12.7 percent of their budget from the CPB. To
> compensate for diminishing federal support, NPR has been forced to rely
> on corporations and foundations. In 2002, the last year for which data
> are easily accessible, NPR accepted $250,000 or more from each of the
> following corporate "underwriters": Procter & Gamble, Sodexho,
> Microsoft, Saab, Citibank and the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.
> Wal-Mart became an underwriter in 2004. Both NPR and Wal-Mart refuse to
> disclose the dollar amount. A public radio system that is substantially
> dependent on corporations will not, in all likelihood, produce a new
> generation of I.F. Stones, Jessica Mitfords and Sy Hershes to
> investigate chicanery in corporate America.
>
> If it is relatively easy to discern NPR's (and public radio's) aversion
> to political risk-taking, it's somewhat more difficult to explain its
> resistance to freshening up its programming along the lines suggested 
> by
> critics who crave innovative, sound-rich fare. NPR staffers interviewed
> for this article point a finger at NPR management in general and two
> sober executives in particular: Bruce Drake, the vice president of news
> and information, and Barbara Rehm, managing editor. Before coming to
> NPR, Drake worked at the New York Daily News for twenty-one years. Rehm
> is a ten-year veteran of the Daily News, after which she spent four
> years in the early 1990s at Voice of America. Staffers describe them as
> bureaucrats who possess a narrow political and cultural imagination. 
> For
> years Drake has opposed the creation of an investigative unit, and NPR
> is currently without one.
>
> Last May NPR hired, as a second managing editor, the highly regarded
> editor of the Baltimore Sun, Bill Marimow, who was fired from the
> newspaper after he raised one too many complaints about the Tribune
> Company's inexorable quest for high quarterly profits at its Baltimore
> property. Marimow, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for stories about police
> brutality, has overseen the creation of a number of new beats and staff
> positions, and he is pushing his reporters to do more investigative
> reporting and hard-hitting journalism. His main accomplishment so far 
> is
> an award-winning series by Daniel Zwerdling that documented brutality
> against immigrants at New Jersey detention facilities. But NPR sources
> anticipate future discord between Drake and Marimow.
>
> Regardless of what Marimow does, NPR's political reporting will
> undoubtedly remain relatively bland and cautious. But in a rapidly
> changing media landscape, it's not at all obvious that a play-it-safe
> editorial formula will enable NPR to prosper. The average listener is 
> 50
> years old and white. Down the road, will younger listeners embrace the
> polite reporting model that NPR currently adheres to? Possibly. But 
> it's
> also possible that they will opt for tastier, more opinionated fare on
> the Internet or satellite radio, especially now that "podcasting," a 
> way
> of posting audio content online, allows listeners to create their own
> radio menus.
>
> One way, perhaps, for NPR to confront the challenge is by re-examining
> the values of its original mission statement, which called for
> interpretation (in contrast to strict adherence to "hard news"
> reporting), artistic innovation and gutsy investigative reporting. That
> approach points toward a journalism that pokes back at lies with 
> outrage
> and indignation, and programming that is pungent, offbeat and
> passionate--qualities that NPR's competitors, Public Radio 
> International
> and American Public Media, have brought to bear with outfits like the
> American RadioWorks documentary unit, and shows like Marketplace, This
> American Life, To the Point and The World (and as independent producers
> David Isay and Joe Richman have done on NPR itself).
>
> What might fresher programming sound like? Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin,
> who is one of NPR's more incisive critics, points to an All Things
> Considered documentary by Noah Adams on the origins of the civil rights
> song "We Shall Overcome." "As he traced the roots of the song," Dvorkin
> explains, "and how it so powerfully affected people, the documentary
> went live to Spelman College in Atlanta, where the school choir
> performed it straight into All Things Considered on Martin Luther 
> King's
> birthday.... It showed the true power of radio and NPR at its best."
>
> But change won't be easy, according to Bill Buzenberg, who was vice
> president of news and information at NPR from 1990 to 1997 and is now
> senior vice president of news at American Public Media. "NPR has a fear
> of doing kick-ass journalism at the highest level," he says. "They're
> not hungry enough."
>
>
>
> This article can be found on the web at:
>
> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050523&s=sherman
>
>
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