How Not to Cover the Trump Trials. Plus, the Latest Push To Defund NPR
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You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade. It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and the court building. A historic week of Trump trials has inspired more breathless coverage. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.

all the trial drama is entertaining. Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsie moments. My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump. Plus, one former NPR editor's grievances continue to reverberate

He implies wokeness is ruining the place. There is a version of what wokeness is, that marginalized people are storming the barricades and dictating that this story happens and this story gets killed and we're going to use this language and not use that language. That's not what I saw. It's all coming up after this.

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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. This has been a historic week in Trumpian jurisprudence. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments over whether Trump should be immune from prosecution for attempting to reverse his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

His former lawyers and others were indicted in a 2020 election-related scheme in Arizona. A New York judge denied Trump's request for a new trial in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case that cost him $83 million in damages.

And then there's what some call his hush money trial. Others call his election interference trial. And a few others call the Biden trial. Two of those monikers are accurate. The last isn't. Meanwhile, as Jon Stewart noted this week, the media that vowed to never again waste precious airtime on Trump-related minutiae

Forgot. Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. They're now making their way across town. He's heading down the FDR. To the Manhattan courthouse on Chamber Street. Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance. Arriving at the intersection of American history. The brilliant juxtaposing of the gravitas of the moment with simple traffic terms was he arrived at the intersection of American history where he put a quarter in the parking meter of Dastanian.

Leaving the car, looking to avoid stepping in the urine puddle of jurisprudence.

There's also the chance that he could be held in contempt for endlessly defying a gag order that bans him from intimidating and potentially endangering witnesses, jury members and court employees, you know, doing stuff like this. April 17th on Truth Social, Donald Trump quotes Jesse Waters from Fox News. They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge in

in order to get on the Trump jury. The prosecutors are pointing to that and saying, "This is really bad." Jurors are intimidated after this post went up. Juror two was no longer comfortable to serve on that jury. When the juror was walking out, Trump made a remark that was audible enough

to be heard in the overflow room. And Judge Marchand really went apoplectic, basically making the case that he's not going to tolerate any sort of juror intimidation in his courtroom. If a judge says to him, "You cannot use my courtroom to intimidate the court staff. You cannot use my courtroom to threaten the prosecutor,"

He just does it on Truth Social. All of these questions are, in my view, kind of different versions of the same question, which is, why can't law be better? Some months back, Slate's legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, laid out in her column why, quote, the law alone cannot curb Donald Trump's lawlessness.

We spoke back in January about her frustrations with mainstream media's preoccupation with horse race questions in much of the coverage of Trump's various trials. Overwhelmingly, what I was hearing the big brains in the legal academy fighting about was tactical questions. Is it just going to foment the next insurrection to disenfranchise a bunch of Trump supporters?

whether constitutional democracy can withstand the Supreme Court signing off on that. And then I think the sort of sense that the trials are taking too long. The question then becomes, how do we make this happen in time to have meaningful accountability before the election? And those questions are not legal questions, right? They're political questions that are coming in the garb of legal questions. And

And you write that Americans have, quote, been convinced that the justice system alone can somehow be deployed or in the parlance of the insurrectionists, weaponized into becoming the shiny entity that could preserve democracy. The law is not a toolkit that you can pull out to make fascism end.

But I think that there is a uniquely American fascination with the kind of morality play of, you know, we'll all sit back and it's going to be just like law and order. And at the end, the right thing will happen and the guy will go to jail. And that is a part of what accountability for Donald Trump must include.

But I think principally the judicial system is something that we use to determine what happened. And by definition, that is a slow exacting process. It's really built to do something quite different from stop Donald Trump from being the next president.

Because Trump, you observed, has always managed to evade legal accountability because he doesn't allow the legal system to look back at facts. He disputes them even after they've been adjudicated. Look at the case of E. Jean Carroll. He has an entirely different goal for the mechanisms of the legal process, you say.

He loses the first E. Jean Carroll trial. The jury finds that he defamed her. And what does he do? He says he won. Yeah.

and continues to defame her in real time. He uses law as a tactic, not as a search for truth. His goal then isn't to win the case? If he eventually actually pays fines, that will be a material loss. But right now, none of this matters to him. It's just free airtime. He is very good at winning for losing.

You argue that the narrow focus on Trump's various trials actually plays in his hands because his numbers seem to go up, at least he says, with every indictment. I'm not sure what the alternative is. This goes back to the old Jay Rosen quote, not the horse race, but the stakes.

And I think when we get really, really in the weeds of covering these trials as a series of really dramatic horse races, it gets of a piece with the sort of much bigger indictment of how the press is covering elections. Competitions. Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsie moments. All that stuff is incredibly interesting, but

My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump. Case in point, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump was ineligible to run for president because of his involvement in the January 6th effort to stop the certification of Biden's win last time. The 14th Amendment bars those who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government positions.

The Colorado ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court. The justices ruling in Donald Trump's favor saying Colorado has no right to keep his name off the ballot this November. When we spoke, Dahlia predicted that outcome. I think it's for exactly the reason that we started at Brook, which is this is fundamentally a political question that comes to the court dressed as a legal question.

Is that what the founders were thinking when they wrote the 14th Amendment? No, I think it's fairly clear that removing Donald Trump, an insurrectionist, from the ballot so that he cannot get office again was exactly what the framers were thinking about. And I don't think that's very much in dispute.

The question is whether the Supreme Court, which is at the lowest public approval in your and my lifetimes, right, since they've started Gallup polling, their numbers have never been this low. Does the Supreme Court want to be the entity that yanks Donald Trump off the ballot? And by the way, if Colorado is allowed to take Donald Trump off the ballot—

Texas and Florida will take Joe Biden off the ballot and say he's an insurrectionist. So there are very, very real and I would say urgent political questions that are undergirding this.

And I think in a sense, we're hoping that law is going to solve our politics problem. This week's argument over immunity for the president possesses an even more urgent political problem. Whether our commander in chief is immune from the consequences of any or all actions he takes in office.

Or is it just official acts and not private ones? But how can you tell the difference? Especially when Trump's lawyers argue, not for the first time, that no crime is too criminal to overcome immunity. If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him...

Is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity? It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act. It could, and why? He's not doing it like President Obama is alleged to have done it, to protect the country from a terrorist. He's doing it for personal gain. And isn't that the nature of the allegations here? That he's not doing these acts in furtherance of an official act?

As you said, the law can't be boiled down and reconstituted as a vitamin and then chugged down with a Gatorade to save us from an authoritarian strongman. Back in 2016, the journalist Masha Gessen, who was raised in Russia, warned us that our institutions won't save us. But clearly, it's not a lesson we've learned. 100%. I think the point is all of these things absolutely should be pursued.

And absolutely, this is not a call to say, you know, we should pump the brakes on what Fannie Willis is doing or Jack Smith is doing or Alvin Bragg is doing. No, no, no. I'm not saying that. I'm saying the idea that we can sit around and think that it's going to be in and of itself the basis for him not winning the election just strikes me as deeply dangerous. Americans at this present moment have a very thin line

relationship with the work of democracy. What do you mean, a thin relationship to the work of democracy? For most of us, most of the time, Brooke, I think the notion is that the system works and we're going to go out and vote. And the system doesn't work. The system barely held in the 2020 election. By the skin of our teeth, we got out of a meaningful effort to set aside the election results.

The Electoral Count Act, which is the reason that Donald Trump was almost able, with the help of John Eastman and some of his flying monkeys, to set aside the 2020 election, that's been reformed. There was a loophole in there that has been fixed by a lot of democracy projects working very hard.

That was that maneuver that was going to try to get Pence to set things aside, right? Yes. They were going to capitalize on vague language. And that's been fixed. Things are fixable. Voting rights are fixable. Mail-in voting is fixable. Gerrymandering is fixable.

The reason people are losing confidence in voting is because we are not performing what it is to be confident about voting. And so almost more than anything, we have to believe that our vote matters. Finding out about the candidates matters. Our state elections matter. That races like state Supreme Court races matter. We have learned this over and over again since Dobbs, right? Yeah.

We have the scaffolding for really kind of cool democracy. And we are so unwilling to kind of throw ourselves into the machinery of that democracy or we want to think about it in October before the election. So I think the pragmatic answer I'm giving you, which is so boring, is structural democracy reform. That's the answer.

Remember, in the hours and days after Donald Trump enacted the travel ban, after the 2016 election. The Muslim ban. The first one. Every lawyer I knew showed up at an airport and went to baggage claim and held up a sign that said, dude, I'll be your lawyer. And they were just, some of them were real estate lawyers. Some of them were, you know, family lawyers. And they just...

realize that this is not a spectator sport, I guess I can teach myself immigration law. And remember all those people who showed up at JFK, right? Oh, yeah. And who weren't lawyers. The taxi drivers and the Uber drivers. So I think we...

can very quickly tilt into what I'm describing as a very thick relationship with democracy preservation, but it's a muscle brook and we have to use it and we have to use it much sooner than October of 2024. Thank you so much, Dahlia. Thank you for having me. Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts for Slate. Coming up, what's the matter with NPR? Because this is On The Media. On The Media.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, how Kamala Harris became a contender. People, I gather, were asking her, do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions. And her answer was, I'm happy to join a process like that, but I'm not going to wait around. I'm not going to wait around.

Evan Osnos on the rise of Kamala Harris. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. Now we pay some much-requested attention to the latest controversy at NPR.

We'll start with... A guy named Uri Berliner came out. He said, I've been at NPR for 25 years. Here's how we lost America's trust. On April 9th, the Free Press, a substack run by former New York Times writer Barry Weiss, published an essay by Berliner, then a senior business editor for NPR, claiming that NPR's reflexive liberal takes had lost conservative listeners. Much narrower kind of niche thinking, a groupthink that's really clustered around a

That's Berliner on Chris Cuomo's News Nation show. He declined to speak with us, but he argues that at the network's Washington headquarters, the focus was on ethnic and racial diversity on the staff while ignoring political diversity.

He accused his colleagues of left-wing advocacy that distorted coverage of the Mueller report, the origins of COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, and more. Concerns he said he tried to raise internally since 2021. What he said is whatever...

NPR could do to hurt Donald Trump's presidency. They did. Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends, part of a now weeks-long conservative media feeding frenzy. In the name of diversity, they've eliminated diversity of thought. It's gotten so partisan that I no longer trust their facts. I used to understand spin. Donald Trump now calling for the defunding of NPR. Indiana Congressman Jim Banks among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR.

NPR, with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization, accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on, quote, low-grade propaganda. A quick note, NPR has never produced on the media, although it did distribute the show until 2015. A defund NPR bill would squeeze the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which

which gives roughly $3 million to NPR directly and over $100 million to stations around the country, including $2.5 million to WNYC, OTM's producing station. What has the NPR response been, if you can sum it up? Last Wednesday, All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with NPR media correspondent David Fokenflik, who dutifully covered the flare-up from within.

including NPR's response to Berliner's claim that a focus on building up staff and listenership had skewed its journalism. Well, Edith Chapin, our chief news executive, wrote a memo last week essentially rejecting the argument. She praised the work that our colleagues have done on various continents of the world, various communities around the country, various issues that we focused on. NPR also suspended Berliner, and it cited two things first.

One, he had written the free press op-ed without permission from the company. And two, in that essay, he had shared proprietary numbers about listener demographics. The suspension gave the conservative media outrage cycle a second wind and ignited activist Christopher Ruffo, who unearthed old tweets from NPR's new CEO and president, Catherine Marr. In 2018, she declared that Trump's a racist, and she did it again in 2020.

and then capped the year off showing how excited she was to vote for Biden. After about 50 NPR employees signed a letter urging Maher to rebut the, quote, factual inaccuracies in Uri's op-ed, she wrote an internal response. He didn't like it.

But lost in much of the coverage was a close look at Berliner's proof, the NPR coverage he cited as evidence of left-wing bias.

I actually get where he's coming from. I actually thought as an editor, I could have made his argument better for him. Kelly McBride is senior vice president of the Poynter Institute and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. She's also NPR's public editor, meaning she's paid by NPR to critique NPR to investigate and respond to listener complaints about its coverage.

I basically have the least desirable job in journalism. She says the more she dug into the claims in Uri's piece... The more it felt like he had cherry-picked examples to prove a point that I thought was disingenuous.

We started covering Trump in a way that we were trying to damage his presidency, to find anything we could to harm him. Uri on Barry Weiss's podcast. And I think what we latched on to was Russia collusion. He wrote, quote, when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

But Kelly McBride says NPR was right to keep the spotlight on two of the main questions of the Mueller investigation. To what extent did Russia have a role in the U.S. election and try and disrupt it? And to what extent was Trump in his campaign a part of that?

It is ridiculous to think that any national news agency wouldn't cover the hell out of that story. Writing in the Washington Post, Eric Wemple pointed out a technical problem with Uri's focus on collusion.

Robert Mueller did not apply the concept of collusion to his investigation. As Wemple put it, quote, Trump will have you believe that the absence of criminality signifies the absence of wrongdoing, a logical atrocity abetted by Berliner's essay. Even when the Mueller report came out, it was initially just a summary characterized in one specific way. And then when journalists got a hold of the whole report, they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this says something completely

completely different. Trump had basically attempted to spin the report as exonerating him. Robert Mueller declined to recommend charges against Trump, at least in part, due to a Justice Department legal opinion that said a current U.S. president shouldn't be indicted. And the report said, quote, the president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or cede his requests.

Headline, it's complicated. Now onto the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the New York Post broke in October of 2020. Ury alleges that NPR didn't cover the story ahead of the election because it would have hurt President Biden. On Barry Weiss's podcast, he refers to a couple of quotes from NPR staff, one he witnessed firsthand. All right.

I remember a conversation with a group of us, and one of the great journalists at NPR, someone who was very fair-minded, said, look, I'm glad we're not covering this because it could help Trump. Kelly McBride says she doesn't know who said this or whether it's an accurate quote, but she did recognize the second one. One of our top news managers, when The Post published this explosive story, said, we're not going to cover stories that aren't stories, and we're not going to let our audience be distracted by this. The quote that he attributes to Trump

The managing editor was actually a quote from my newsletter. The week that the New York Post came out with its stories, I was responding to questions from the audience who were asking, is NPR going to cover this story? And I reached out to a senior editor and he gave me that quote along with a lot of other context. The Post was the only outlet that accepted data, allegedly from the laptop, from Rudy Giuliani.

McBride says NPR editors passed on the story because they didn't have access to the laptop. No outlet did. As media professor Dan Kennedy pointed out in a recent essay, even Fox News waited until after the election because it couldn't verify basic facts about the laptop. Exactly. Wow.

Once the provenance of the laptop was actually confirmed, journalists began to cover the contents of it. That said, you believe NPR could have covered later iterations of the laptop story sooner than it did. Yeah, I think they were a little slow to get back to it.

Let's move on to the theory that COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Uri claims that this story was not reported at NPR for political reasons, that it was dismissed, quote, as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. The stories that I've read, Lee, and heard on NPR recently imply that the origin of the beginnings of COVID are still unknown, and the lab leak is a viable theory. If you look at the last...

30 stories that NPR did. Now, did NPR and most of American journalism repeat the government line that it couldn't have possibly been a lab leak without a lot of independent investigation? Yes. So it was a mistake, but it wasn't unique to NPR.

He was alleging that because it could be construed as lending credence to a quote unquote racist or right wing conspiracy theory, journalists at NPR were not sufficiently curious about the scientists who early on did argue that there might be something to the lab leak theory.

Were they not curious because of all of the narratives around race and ethnicity and geographic origin? Or were they not curious because we were in the middle of what's arguably the story of a century and there were

thousands of storylines to pursue that seemed more accessible. Let's talk about NPR's coverage of recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. In his column, Uri portrays the editorial process as a frictionless conveyor belt of stories about how, quote, Israel is doing something bad and then largely categorizes NPR's coverage as, quote, oppressor versus oppressed, where Israelis are the oppressors.

I get a lot of similar critiques in the public editor inbox. And those critiques are more precise, right? They critique NPR for not labeling Hamas as a terrorist organization, for not acknowledging that the health authority that reports the number of dead, which is now around 37,000, not labeling that as Hamas and casting doubt on that figure, for disproportionately covering the suffering of Palestinians,

and minimizing the suffering of Israelis, for not saying often enough that the reason that so many people have died in Gaza is because Hamas hides among civilians, and for accusing either implicitly or explicitly Israel of war crimes.

but not giving Israel a chance to respond. Those critiques are much more precise than Uri's suggestion that every time Israel does something bad,

NPR is wont to report it. She says NPR should explain on air why it makes these decisions. Many critics do see bias, and it's not bias. It's a deliberate set of journalistic choices to focus on where there are more people dead and

and to try and tell that story because there's just more story to tell there. But she does agree with Uri's criticism of NPR's coverage or lack of coverage of anti-Semitism. It is smart to argue that this is a piece of journalism that is currently missing from NPR's body of work.

I would have pointed to the statistics that show a rise in anti-Semitism. And I also would have looked at statistics of other forms of harassment, like anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, racial crimes against Black people, against Latinos, and then looked for NPR's work on those areas.

I don't know if it's disproportionate to other forms of hate crimes, but if I was his editor, I would have made him figure it out. In an effort to quantify NPR's liberal bias, Ury looked up the voter registration of D.C. NPR journalists. And what I found was 87 registered Democrats on our editorial staff. Zero Republicans. I presented this at an all-hands or large news meeting, and I said, hey, look,

Something's gone wrong here. If we're really thinking about diversity and our coverage, like something is really off. Steven Skeap, host of NPR's Morning Edition, took issue with these numbers and with Uri's methodology in a column for his own substack, pointing out that he himself, Steven Skeap, is not registered to a political party, that he's worked with people who are probably conservative at NPR, and that hundreds of people work in content at NPR around the world. What's the problem?

What are your thoughts on Uri's count and the larger point he's trying to make with it? I wish that he had not used that figure because I think it's so easily torn apart. I'm assuming that that reflects the heavily democratic demographics of D.C.,

He didn't report how many people are no party affiliated. I bet that that number was bigger. But we know that journalism likely tilts more liberal or democratic. She says that for journalists at NPR, the methodology of rigorous journalism, the professional practice of scrutinizing a theory by speaking to a range of sources and reporting out the facts is

offers a defense against bias, which we all have. Uri actually did what he is accusing NPR of doing. He had an assumption of bias, and he set out to prove that bias, and he reported out one figure that supported the proof of that bias, but he didn't seek out other data that was knowable that might have contradicted that. That said...

Kelly McBride says NPR is too focused on news affecting people on the coasts, in big cities and university hubs, that it could do more to highlight rural and small town life. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and I don't hear my experience of being in a declining small industrial town on NPR much at all.

That's real, that geographic bias. And it probably has some overlap with conservative liberal, but I don't think it's as one-to-one as people think it is. One of Uri's strongest pieces of evidence showing that right-wing audiences got fed up with NPR is internal data comparing 2011 to 2023, showing that the

percentage of listeners identifying as Democrat rose from 23% to 67%, while the percentage of conservative listeners dropped from 26% to 11%. Did NPR change or did the American populace change? Because it's pretty clear that the Republican Party has become much more conservative and

And so when you ask people outside of studies like this, how do they identify, those numbers have moved. Instead, Uri Berliner says conservative listeners got turned off by biased coverage coinciding with former NPR CEO John Lansing's North Star, his explicit effort beginning in 2021 to diversify its staff and audience to better reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the country.

Since 2020, according to a New York Times story this week, NPR's listenership has shrunk by 20%. But during that same period, the pandemic scrambled work commutes and listening habits as NPR's podcast competition continued to multiply.

From 2020 to 2023, the share of adults who get news on TikTok quadrupled. From 2018 to 2022, Pew found that the percentage of Americans who closely followed the news dropped from 51% to 38%. Conservative listeners may be tuning out NPR, but they're tuning out conservative media too at a remarkable clip.

Data from the writing found that between February 2020 and February 2024, traffic to Fox.com dropped by 24%, by 60% to The Blaze, and by 87% to Breitbart, whereas CNN and The New York Times saw 20% and 22% drops, respectively.

In other words, it's far too simplistic to blame NPR's woes on wokeness. I think that NPR is still an incredibly valuable public institution. I think it needs serious fixing. Uri Berliner. But I think there are member stations in small towns and remote areas that rely on this money to provide local news coverage. I think it's pretty critical. So I...

I wouldn't support defunding NPR. I believe him. Kelly McBride. But he did the thing that's probably going to support that cause more than any other thing. NPR gets a drop in the bucket directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's the smaller markets that are mostly going to suffer if that money goes away.

Coming up, NPR has problems, but maybe not what you think they are. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one.

I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson, the first ever Black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, just because many of Uri Berliner's specific complaints weren't entirely supported by the evidence, it doesn't mean NPR is problem free. Ask Alicia Montgomery, an NPR veteran of nearly 20 years. Now it's late. She described in a recent column how when she first saw his essay, it coincided

It, quote, felt like hearing a loud, ugly family argument break out in the room next door. I wanted to pretend it wasn't happening. I wanted people to shut up. But if they were going to shout, I at least wanted them to tell the whole story. You know? Actually, as a 23-year NPR veteran myself, I get it.

Brooke, you and I know that a lot of public radio feels like a family in the best ways and the worst ones. There is a problem with receiving even well-intended criticism with an open mind, at least as far back as I can remember. What Rory had to say was,

You know how it is when you have a family argument and somebody opens the door with a truth and then it starts getting less and less true as the yelling continues. That's what it felt like.

He described it as straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president that veered towards efforts to damage or topple his presidency. Now, you were there. Was there none of that? There was none of that. I'm just going to say that straightforward. I can't account for what people said in the cafeteria, but I was on morning edition from fall of 2017 until...

until spring of 2020. And from my seat and the meetings that I attended, there was a lot of effort to cover Trump as fairly as possible. Which was usual. You know, it was the bend over backwards stance of a liberal news organization. It's

The bend over backward stance of an organization that has to stay in good standing with a broad swath of people from different constituencies in order to guarantee its survival. Talk about some direction that you might have been given at an editorial meeting.

During the run up to Trump's election, there were all sorts of meetings for team leaders whose desk or teams might be dealing with the election. And because I was in leadership at Code Switch, I was included on a lot of these meetings. Because Code Switch was, for people who don't know...

Code Switch was the editorial vertical set up to talk about the intersection of race and culture, but because of shifts in newsroom priorities and resources, it's

We became the team that dealt with race and often politics. And I was in one such meeting where the suggestion was made that if we were covering a story about Donald Trump lying, we should match it with a story about Hillary Clinton lying. And the question, well, what if one candidate just lied?

lies more than the other, just hung out there as hard questions are wont to do sometimes. You recalled an editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump's strong poll numbers wouldn't survive his being exposed as a racist. Yes.

It's just kind of ludicrous. And when a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of that racism. Crickets. Crickets. Silence. Again, even the suggestion that the facts might be more complicated. Silence was often the response. And that was an improvement over what it could have been, which is being wildly shut down. I recall that NPR was a big holdout on applying the word liar to Trump.

Yes. Oh, there were so many blowups about that. We don't know what's going on in his mind. Maybe he thinks it's the truth. There is a valid journalistic point there, as frustrating as it was, that lying is about somebody's motivation. And if you can't tell whether the person knows the difference between the truth and the lie, are they a liar? I don't necessarily think it was always decided the right way. NPR also didn't want to call waterboarding torture.

Wow. Yes, that's a deep cut and also true. I'm just saying, you talk about the ugly truth is that NPR's good journalism isn't always about the journalism. NPR's good journalism a lot of the time is about maintaining a good relationship with the people in charge and maintaining access to powerful people. And if you are calling waterboarding torture...

Maybe George W. Bush's people don't want to come on your show. If you're saying Obama's policy during the Syrian civil war didn't work out very well. You mean the red line? What was that line in the sand? Did we ever find it? Trying to stay on good terms with people in power and cover them rigorously, always attention, no matter who is president.

You said that it took a kind of courage for him to publicly criticize the organization, but it took...

the wrong kind of nerve. Yes. And that his argument was, and this is strong language, a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst. Yes. What did you mean? There is a kind of journalism where what you do is find the stories that are going to support the worldview of your audience and ignore or downplay the facts that your audience would find challenging.

And what Ruri did was to call it cherry picking is generous.

And that's what he says NPR does because it has coalesced comfortably around the progressive worldview. You know what? For the time that I was there, there was nothing comfortable about the discussions around Trump or around race or policing. It was really, really tense. The idea that

these decisions are being made because of pressure from people in marginalized groups who don't want to hear X, Y, and Z, that's not real. And this is something that really got me because, you know, for several years while I was at NPR, I worked on a program called Tell Me More with Michelle Martin. And even though the program's explicit mission wasn't

race. We did cover race a lot more than the other shows. We also covered gender issues. We covered faith issues in a way that the other shows didn't. And if you listen to media that is people of color or people in marginalized groups, the stuff that we produce for each other, it doesn't sound anything like what the NPR leadership thinks people in those groups want to hear.

The idea that all cops are bad or that policing needs to be shut down. There was a lot of diversity within policing.

different communities about whether that was a good idea. A lot of the police force in Washington, D.C., in Philadelphia, in New York, in Chicago, Los Angeles, there's a lot of people of color in those police forces. And they've got families and they've got neighbors and they've got people who think that they're doing good work in the community. Race seems to be the point where you argue his version of a comfortable coalescence between

at National Public Radio broke down or wokeness? There is a version of what wokeness is when conservative critics talk about it, that marginalized people storm the barricades at a news outlet and dictate that this story happens and this story gets killed and we're going to use this language and not use that language.

And that's not what I saw. During the period that Uri was talking about, there was an exodus of on-air women of color to other places. Could have been a coincidence. I don't know. I mean, it wasn't just women. The network also lost Sam Sanders, who rose from, I think, an internship to being the host of It's Been a Minute.

Maybe John Lansing changed everything after George Floyd's death. But in the time that I was at NPR, there were always these spasms where some terrible thing would happen around race. And we would have a moment that would last somewhere between three and six months of higher level of attention to issues of diversity in reporting and staffing. And then it would just all fade away. So when it faded away, what was reasserted?

The comfortable space, comfortable for the leadership anyway, where problems of race were all about a small minority of really bad white people somewhere in the country that wasn't close to Washington, D.C., doing a few terrible things to a few marginalized people. And that's all we needed to cover.

NPR's core editorial problem is, and frankly has long been, you said, an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. Donald Trump made MS-13 sort of a talking point in his anti-immigration rhetoric.

He was always conflating this idea of immigrants and specifically undocumented immigrants with a rise in violent crime. And MS-13 was sort of the poster child for that.

I remember a lot of resistance to actually diving into that. And MS-13 was killing people in the neighboring county to Washington, D.C., taking advantage of Central American immigrant communities and really terrorizing those places. It blew my mind that we didn't follow up. Give me another example.

If you think about why were the white voters so angry about whatever was happening in the world, you know, one of the things that led to a lot of them supporting Donald Trump in defiance of what the conventional wisdom was, especially in elite media, this assumption that immigration doesn't threaten the livelihoods of most Americans. Immigrants are doing jobs that most Americans don't want.

Immigrants may not be competing with NPR listeners for jobs, but that's a legitimate question worth asking. There are statistics that suggest that it does suppress wages. There are. And I felt at the time that there's a way to have that conversation without giving in to a bunch of

anti-Latino, anti-immigrant rhetoric. Just ask the question. See if there is something happening there that might be undergirding some of this anti-immigrant feeling that's not just about racism. So you agree with Berliner when he says an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR? Did it ever. I mean,

I mean, I guess that's where I disagree with Uri. I don't remember a long stretch of time at NPR where you could really accurately say that the editorial spirit was to be open-minded. It was to be smart, but...

It wasn't necessarily open to being challenged. And you guys were both there for roughly the same length, right? Yeah. Yes. So I've often felt that the need for diversity in representation in journalism is long overdue. I'd also like to see more diversity in areas of class and region and religion. Yes.

I also, though, see a kind of orthodoxy and a chill rising from the side that has been silenced for too long. Backlash comes, then the lash again, forces of reaction and overreaction. It doesn't mean death to journalism by any means, but I think it's worth acknowledging, you know,

I have a lot of problems with that argument because a lot of the lash and backlash and talk about wokeness taking over is something that is happening in social media. And the consequences for the people who are lashed at now, what people call cancellation, is that people whose criticisms of them are

wouldn't have been heard and examined before are now getting a microphone. Again, I'm saying that all of this is long overdue. And I'm not claiming a kind of equivalency either socially or morally or any other way.

Just as in the Me Too movement, I had a lot of boo-hoo on my tiny violin. Very rich people got canceled for a few minutes. Yeah. Or even for longer. You know, when a woman said something or a person of color or another marginalized person said something that made life hard for their bosses...

You just got fired. Nobody called it cancellation. They just called it life and tough breaks and too bad. And a lot of people are going to call what happened to Uri cancellation. In this particular case.

He didn't like what they called him and he quit. So, you know, he canceled himself. He did. He broke the rules of the place where he worked and there were consequences that he didn't like. And so he left. And that's not a tragedy that society needs to spend a lot of time trying to remedy. And why did you write this article now?

You know, I was prepared to forever hold my peace because I love NPR. And because I know on some level, any kind of criticism of this organization makes it harder for the good people in the organization to do their work. But I wasn't going to sit silently by while this false narrative demeaning the good work of hundreds of

of thoughtful, dedicated, and yeah, I'm going to use the word patriotic public radio journalists got trashed. You ended by contesting Berliner's premise that NPR doesn't reflect America. You argue that it does. It does.

I mean, and this was part of why I left. You can fall in love with the story about who you are and your role in the world, that you were blameless. For me, anyway, this is the part that's personal. Blameless in whatever went wrong and entirely responsible for what went right. And rather than listen to the criticism of...

of people who are looking to you, people who are looking up to you. You just put up a wall, say I was always right, I'm on the right side of history, and everybody needs to shut up. That is something that I saw at NPR, and that's something that I've seen in our country, and that's something that I am fighting within myself. Alicia, thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Thank you.

Alicia Montgomery is the vice president of audio at Slate, and she's the author of the recent article, The Real Story Behind NPR's Current Problems. The Real Story Behind NPR's Current Problems

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger.