Consider This from NPR - NPR Turns 50 Amid Reckoning In Journalism Over Who Tells Stories — And How

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Now 50 years old, NPR has grown up alongside American journalism. We take stock of some lessons learned along the way. In this episode: Linda Wertheimer, Robert Siegel, Brooke Gladstone, Ira Glass, Michele Norris, and Andy Carvin. Hear more from NPR's very first broadcast of All Things Considered. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. You may not know this, but this podcast has a kind of parent program, a radio show here at NPR called All Things Considered. See what we did there? And 50 years ago this week in May of 1971, that show, All Things Considered, was born. I hate that job. It was the worst job I ever had. Linda Wertheimer was hired to direct the show, which sounded like this.

I'm Robert Conley with All Things Considered. Yeah, I know. It wasn't the music that made the job hard. It was that NPR back then was a complete startup. We didn't have any chairs. That was one of the things that was disconcerting. We had no chairs. We all had meetings sitting on the floor. I mean, we were so clearly just starting from scratch.

As if that wasn't enough, on May 3rd, 1971, everything Linda and the other producers had rehearsed and planned for to launch their little news show, well, it went out the window. Because that day in Washington, D.C., there was a massive anti-war protest. One of the motorcycle police officers, someone threw a brick at him. I was here at the time. I didn't see anything thrown. Only helicopters coming in low. There was so much tear gas in the air that when I came to work on the bus, I was, you know, I was just gagging the entire time. Up on the rise of this highway section, young people are holding the American flag upside down.

That was the first day of NPR's first show 50 years ago. The demonstrators are fleeing. And in some ways, it doesn't sound so long ago. The police officers are carrying or And in some ways, it doesn't sound so long ago. The police officers are carrying or wearing their tear gas masks. Consider this. For better or worse, NPR has grown up alongside modern journalism. Now 50 years old, we're taking stock of what we've learned along the way.

From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Friday, May 7th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Today, it seems like everybody's got a bone to pick with the news. So what happens when somebody stops talking smack and just decides to wage all-out war? First thing you do in an evasion, you eliminate the communications of the enemy. And what happens if they win? Visit Stockton, California, for a story about a revolt against

the mainstream media that's shaken up a city. From NPR's Invisibilia. It's Consider This from NPR. Not too long before NPR got started, this is what journalism sounded like. I am Edward R. Murrow. For a little while, I would like to review with you the great conflict of our time. Edward R. Murrow. White guy talking right to the camera. Linda Wertheimer grew up admiring him.

But in 1970, she sat down with a man named Bill Seemering, one of the early NPR bosses who created All Things Considered. And he was just kind of lounging him back in his chair, talking about how he wanted it to be different from everything else. And he didn't like the idea of radio voices. And I said, but Edward R. Murrow, not Edward R. Murrow. We're not doing Edward R. Murrow. And I'm thinking, what? What are we doing? Before the late 60s, this was really unusual. Robert Siegel, former host of the show and one-time chief of the newsroom. People were accustomed to the news being proclaimed by the voice of God and in the utmost seriousness and self-importance and authority.

And the late 1960s were full of questioning of authority and of questioning the old ways of doing things. Now, early NPR wanted to get away from super serious news that pretended to have all the answers, which is why on that very first day of All Things Considered, in between all the coverage of anti-war protests, listeners also heard this. A barely edited 12-minute conversation between poet Allen Ginsberg and his dad Lewis, also a poet, about the pros and cons of mind-altering drugs. Home, home, Vajra Guru Padmasiddhi, home. Body, speech, mind, diamond.

The tip is one pat, maybe chicken. Brooke Gladstone, former NPR editor and now host of On the Media, says in the 70s and 80s, while NPR grew modestly, it wasn't thought of as a primary source of news. Even when I started covering NPR for a public broadcasting newsletter called Current in 1982, it was very far-fetched thinking that NPR would ever evolve to actually being a primary source of news for millions of people. But in the decade that followed, that's exactly what happened. And NPR's growth coincided with the rise of opinion journalism, with talk radio from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, with the lightning-fast cable news cycle,

with the growing pressure to compete. And I remember the day of the disaster in Waco, Texas, with the Branch Davidians. Now we have a very large-scale fire breaking out on what must be the south side. When all that CNN had to go on was a shot from a distance of a building on fire. No information about what had happened yet. Let's just stay with this and watch it for a few minutes if we can. Robert Siegel remembers that day in 1993.

It's when NPR's newsroom felt pressured to cover what was happening at the siege of a religious compound in Texas, even though what was happening was completely unclear. We started hearing CNN was on the air with it. Shouldn't we get on the air with it? These are some amazing pictures here. Cable news stations that did that increased the pressure on us. In the mid-90s, NPR grew exponentially, and its focus became more and more on hard news. As that happened, one longtime producer wanted to go the other way. Like I really saw my time at NPR as a time to experiment

and just invent stuff and make stuff. I was encouraged to do that. Ira Glass. He had worked at NPR since 1978, did a lot of work that harkened back to the earlier, more experimental days of the network. One example of that is the story he did as a producer at All Things Considered. of work that harkened back to the earlier, more experimental days of the network. One

example of that is a story he did as a producer at All Things Considered. That whenever people would write about All Things Considered, they would mention this story as like an example of like the quirky kind of thing that they would do on the show. But basically I interviewed people about song lyrics that they thought that they had right, but they had wrong. My friend Susan was convinced for the longest time that Mick Jagger did a song. She was thinking of the song Beast of Burden. She thought the lyrics were, never leave your pizza burning.

Okay. A small, goofy story. And the other one is from Bad Moon on the Rise, which, of course, like everyone else in the country, I thought was, there's a bathroom on the Rise, which, of course, like everyone else in the country, I thought was, there's a bathroom on the right. There's a bad moon on the right. But a story that gets at the question a lot of people in journalism were asking,

and still are. Should the news be intimate, human, and personal? Or should the news be hard-nosed and fast-paced and cover the world's biggest stories? It's almost like NPR had a right brain and a left brain. And I feel like you were, you picked one side of the brain. I guess, like I loved covering the news. So I got to play both sides, actually. I got to play both sides.

Glass, of course, left NPR after the network rejected his idea for a show that would become This American Life. And plenty has been written and said about that show's influence on audio journalism and podcasting. But more recently, the program has been subject to some new influence of its own. Yeah, like, like, and I can say, like, in the early years of our show for a long time, like This American Life was just way too white and way too narrow in the group that was on the air. And now. But is that something you actually felt or was that something sort of brought to your attention at a certain point? No, it's something I always knew.

Like, but, you know, honestly, like, we were making a show with a tiny staff and there were very few people at that point who were trained to do this particular kind of journalism. And then, you know, and then in honesty, like, I think it just wasn't a priority, you know, just in, like, the worst way that a person can say that. Was it hard making it a priority in the end? I mean, certain things about it were not. Like, hiring good people and bringing people in

and training people was not. You know, we're a staff where we have a whole set of race equity filters that we put stories through during the editorial process, trying to deal frankly with each other and talk these things through. And so it also slows things down. You know, that's one of the things about organizations that don't do a good job with race equity, is that everything has to be fast, fast, fast. And fortunately, because we're a weekly show, we can afford to slow things down. All kinds of news organizations are in the middle of this reckoning right now. A reckoning about who tells stories and how, who's considered objective, what does that mean anyway, and what kind of work is necessary to

change. That has been challenging for legacy media, for old school media, you know, to figure that out. Former All Things Considered host Michelle Norris is now a columnist at the Washington Post. She points out in the last 15 years, there have been new questions about who tells stories, especially when those stories are about race. You know, can you express yourself fully and cover Black Lives Matter? Or can you do that and cover politics and do that in a way that is fair and impartial. I will be honest that I faced some of that. And, you know, as many other Black reporters did, covering an ascendant Black candidate. And yet, white reporters cover white politicians all the time, and they're not questions about

objectivity. There was a time where I feel like as a young journalist of color, as you were coming up, you were sort of led to believe that you shouldn't be quote unquote pigeonholed in stories about race, and that you had to do this kind of dance around the things you might be interested in or not because of how it would be perceived. How do you think that changed as you were coming up? So my, I will admit that for a time as a journalist, I did not want to cover the race beat. As a person of color, we are expected to step up every February and serve up stories about our people and our culture. There was an expectation that I would bring both contacts and context to those kinds of stories. But if I look back at, you know, on the time that I was there, and this is not unique to NPR,

but I think mirrors what happened in American journalism as a whole, to the extent that we were covering race, we were often actually covering racism. This is Morning Edition. I'm Bob Atwood. So there was a riot. A white police officer charged in the fatal shooting of a black teenager. So there was a riot. There was someone who was a first person to occupy a position. There was someone who died and we were remembering them because they stood chest to the wind.

And now we want to take a moment to remember the legendary civil rights leader Dorothy Haidt. It was usually some event that caused us to stand at attention and focus on an issue, as opposed to covering race as a factor of everyday life. And I think that's one of the big changes that I'm starting to see in American journalism now, that we're actually looking at race as not just the hurricane that bears down upon us, but rather this kind of wind that's blowing, you know, over our shoulders all the time. Remembering old values and cultivating new ones. To Brooke Gladstone, that's the key to the next 50 years of American journalism, and not just at NPR. You know, some stories are more important than others. Nothing has taught us that more than the Trump administration, which was brilliant in filling the air with shiny objects and having us all running around like

dogs and squirrels. We had to wise up to the fact that we did not need to follow up every single lie. We had to pick those ones that mattered, which means we have to admit to ourselves that we have values and principles. Do you know what I mean? How do you then think about going forward? Well, it was Walter Lippmann who said, the world is far too complicated for us to understand in its entirety. We have to simplify it in order to live in it. We have to understand that that, to an extent, is our job. Make the world comprehensible. Present an accurate picture of what matters most.

Brooke Gladstone. And I want to say thanks to everyone who spoke to us for this episode. You can find out more about each of them in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Audie Cornish.