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As a former staff reporter/producer at NPR, I am rather amazed at the way all of the controversy on the secret taping of the fund raiser is turning. First, who says it is all right for anyone to record video of what were supposed to be private conversations? If you get something good, that makes it okay? The person making the statements was not directly or indirectly involved in news and editorial decisions. So, he said the Tea Party groups are motivated by racism. This bulletin just in. What I mean is these are his private views, revealed in moments of candor at a business lunch about other matters in which the people posing as potential donors pretended to be someone they weren't. Why is so little attention paid to their deception and invasion of his right to privacy?
The furor over this episode does point out, however, a fundamental problem with non-commerical media: public broadcasting in America is compromised, as a news enterprise, by its constant need to beg for money. This applies to television and radio. News, by definition, consists of facts that many people don't want widely known and information which upsets, irritates and disturbs. How many people, here, there and everywhere, can public broadcasting make angry before its loses a critical amount of financial support? How many days in a row could any public broadcasting outlet take on corporate America in a strong, uncompromised way? Can NPR bite the hand that feeds it and the stations, Congress? Yeah, but for how long?
With commercial broadcasting, it is possible to keep greater distance between money and news decisions. Commercial broadcasters don't beg for money, they get it as part of a business transaction. Once that transaction is complete, the advertiser has no reasonable expectation of any editorial input. In contrast, public broadcasting is viewed by corporate America as weak and a target for influence. PBS and NPR stations are always rattling the tin cup for money and corporate America comes along to give it to them, at a price. It is impossible to determine what that price is, but rest assured it is being paid.
It might surprise some people to realize that public broadcasting is compromised, when, in the minds of many, it is some sort of paragon of virtue because it doesn’t run commercials. One well known on-air person at NPR once said, "I don't think we can be bought, but I think we can be rented". By that, he meant that a substantial donation would be reflected in news coverage. This does NOT mean that reporters and producers are then sent out with a line to follow, but donations can influence where news is focused and, in the back on the mind, the fact that a donor is sponsoring certain coverage can't help but influence the tone, and perhaps the substance.
One funny thing to me is how everyone at NPR acted guilty as soon as the finger was pointed at them. It shows just how weak the thread is holding public radio together, even nearly forty years after the creation of NPRs programming. If I broke into a store to get milk for my family after a massive hurricane destroyed everything else in sight, I wouldn't plead guilty to a felony just because a police officer happened to walk by.
This week, everyone at NPR seemed more than ready to throw up their hands as to say, “You caught me”, pushing their president out the door in a few nanoseconds after the "scandal" broke. They couldn’t even wait few days to show that they took the misdeeds of the video taper seriously? It is unseemly and shows overall weakness, which I think this is what most people at NPR are probably feeling with the far right Republicans on the prowl.
Instead of covering themselves in sackcloth and ash over a few dumb statements by a fund raiser, the people at NPR should be proud of the work they accomplish under the pressures they face. If you act guilty, people will assume you just might be. This was a time to stand and be counted, instead they bowed their heads sheepishly and embraced more management turmoil
It has been written in more than one book that NPR helps people hang on through loneliness and information drought in some areas of the country where only one small newspaper serves the community. Ian Frazier, in his book The Great Plains, said that public radio makes life bearable in far flung, isolated areas of the country (this was certainly even more true in pre-Internet, pre-satellite days). That is no mean accomplishment, but they also push along the national dialog and make a contribution to our understanding of ourselves.
The implication of this "sting" was that NPR should not even be talking to something calling itself a part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah? Commercial broadcasters took cigarette money for decades and sports programming is still bloated with ads for beer, obviously influencing generations to party down with alcohol, which often results in death. Only right wing America would buy into the idea that NPR shouldn’t even have talked to those guys and a lot of right wing America didn’t care for or hated NPR before anyway.
As a general rule, when people come around offering money, businesses (and NPR is a business) warm to the idea very quickly and ask questions later, if at all. The sting video does lead to the implication that NPR makes at least muted promises to those who give it large sums of money. Well, what are we to make of that? I say, judge them by the quality of their programming and reporting, but keep a careful watch for outside influence.
NPR, in my view, is much more than many people ever expected it could be, but still not good enough given its resources and available air time. It could be better, it could be more fearless in taking on hard subjects and unpopular views. We have the good with, in my view, the clear knowledge that its success is tied to its compromised nature. Would you rather not have it all? Not for a second.
I would sincerely like for NPR to find a way out of the dilemma of being partially funded by tax money, provided it wasn’t then immediately replaced by another, worse problem. They’ve had more than 40 years to work on it. During that time, they have become a rich and successful operation. (NPR can be seen as the top of the smaller news organizations, or the smallest of the big, either way, they’ve made it.) Part of the problem is that no one ever turns down money. They have enough, on an annual basis, to be a good, strong news organization, but they want to be more than that, so they keep raising money and risking a fatal compromise of their “mission” and journalistic intentions.
Do they want that success more than they want to pursue absolute integrity? The answer so far as been not to answer that question and instead try to make the individual integrity of reporters the touchstone for the organization. It has worked well so far, but the events of this week show the dire limits of that strategy. They also bring into sharper relief the compromises inherent in public broadcasting generally and at NPR.
Doug Terry 3.12.11
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