News clip: You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade.

News clip:  It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and the court building.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. All the trial drama is entertaining.

Dahlia Lithwick: Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsy moments. My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, one former NPR editor's grievances continue to reverberate. He implies wokeness is ruining the place.

Alicia Montgomery: 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.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooklyn Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. This has been a historic week in Trumpian jurisprudence. The US 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, as Jon Stewart noted this week, the media that vowed to never again waste precious air time on Trump-related minutiae forgot.

News clip:  Trump leaving Trump Tower on 5th Avenue.

News clip:  They're now making their way across town.

News clip:  He's heading down the FDR.

News clip:  Two of the Manhattan courthouse on Chamber Street.

News clip:  Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance.

Jon Stewart: Arriving at the intersection of American history. The brilliant juxtaposing of the gravitas of the moment with simple traffic terms. [laughter] He arrived at the intersection of American history, where he put a quarter in the parking meter of destiny. [laughter] Leaving the car, looking to avoid stepping in the urine puddle of jurisprudence.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

News clip:  April 17th on Truth Social, Donald Trump quotes Jesse Watters from Fox News. They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge 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. Jury 2 was no longer comfortable to serve on jury.

News clip:  When the juror was walking out, Trump made a remark that was audible enough to be heard in the overflow rumors and Judge Merchan really went apoplectic. Basically making the case that he's not going to tolerate any sort of juror intimidation in his courtroom.

Dahlia Lithwick: 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, different versions of the same question, which is, "Why can't law be better?"

Brooke Gladstone: Some months back, Slate's legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, laid out in her column why "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.

Dahlia Lithwick: 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? Then I think the 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? Those questions are not legal questions. They're political questions that are coming in the garb of legal questions.

Brooke Gladstone: You write that Americans have "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."

Dahlia Lithwick: 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 morality play of, "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. "That is a part of what accountability for Donald Trump must include. I think, principally, the judicial system is something that we use to determine what happened. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Dahlia Lithwick: He loses the first E Jean Carroll trial. The jury finds that he defamed her, and what does he do? He says he won and continues to defame her in real time. He uses law as a tactic, not as a search for truth.

Brooke Gladstone: His goal then isn't to win the case?

Dahlia Lithwick: 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 air time. He is very good at winning for losing.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Dahlia Lithwick: This goes back to the old J Rosen quote, not the horse race, but the stakes. 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 much bigger indictment of how the press is covering elections.

Brooke Gladstone: Competitions.

Dahlia Lithwick: Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsy moments, all that stuff is incredibly interesting. My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

News clip:  The justice's ruling in Donald Trump's favor saying Colorado has no right to keep his name off the ballot this November.

Brooke Gladstone: When we spoke, Dahlia predicted that outcome.

Dahlia Lithwick: I think it's for exactly the reason that we started at, Brooke, which is this is fundamentally a political question that comes to the court dressed as a legal question.

Brooke Gladstone: Is that what the founders were thinking when they wrote the 14th Amendment?

Dahlia Lithwick: 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 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? By the way, if Colorado was allowed to take Donald Trump off the ballot, Texas and Florida will take Joe Biden off the ballot and say he's an insurrectionist. There are very, very real and, I would say, urgent political questions that are undergirding this. I think, in a sense, we're hoping that law is going to solve our politics problem.

Brooke Gladstone: 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? 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.

Justice Jackson: 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?

John Sauer: It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act.

Justice Jackson: 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. Isn't that the nature of the allegations here, that he's not doing these acts in furtherance of an official responsibility?

Brooke Gladstone: 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 strong man. 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.

Dahlia Lithwick: 100%. I think the point is all of these things absolutely should be pursued and absolutely this is not a call to say we should pump the brakes on what Fani 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 relationship with the work of democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you mean a thin relationship to the work of democracy?

Dahlia Lithwick: 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, that there was a loophole in there that has been fixed by a lot of democracy projects working very hard.

Brooke Gladstone: That was that maneuver that was going to try to get Pence to set things aside, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: 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. Almost more than anything, we have to believe that our vote matters, finding out about the candidates matters, that our state elections matter, that races like State Supreme Court races matter. We have learned this over and over again since Dobbs.

We have the scaffolding for a really cool democracy and we are so unwilling to throw ourselves into the machinery of that democracy, or we want to think about it in October before the election. 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-

Brooke Gladstone: The Muslim ban.

Dahlia Lithwick: -the first one, every lawyer [laughs] that 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." Some of them were real estate lawyers, some of them were family lawyers, and they just realized that this is not a spectator sport, I guess I can teach myself immigration law. Remember all those people who showed up at JFK-

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, yes.

Dahlia Lithwick: -and who weren't lawyers; the taxi drivers and the Uber drivers. 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, Brooke, and we have to use it and we have to use it much sooner than October of 2024.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much, Dahlia.

Dahlia Lithwick: Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts for Slate.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up. What's the matter with NPR?

Brooke Gladstone: Because this is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Now we pay some much-requested attention to the latest controversy at NPR. We'll start with--

Reporter 11: A guy named Uri Berliner who came out, he said, "I've been at NPR for 25 years. Here's how we lost America's trust."

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Uri Berliner: A much narrower niche thinking, a group think that's really clustered around a very selective progressive views.

Micah Loewinger: That's Berliner on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation Show.

Uri Berliner: They don't allow enough air, enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Steve Doocy: What he said is, whatever NPR could do to hurt Donald Trump's presidency, they did.

Micah Loewinger: Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends, part of a now weeks-long conservative media-feeding frenzy.

Steve Doocy: In the name of diversity, they've eliminated diversity of thought.

News clip:  It's gotten so partisan that I no longer trust their facts. I used to understand spin.

News clip:  Donald Trump now calling for the defunding of NPR.

News clip:  Indiana congressman, Jim Banks, among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on "low-grade propaganda".

Micah Loewinger: 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 gives roughly $3 million to NPR directly and over $100 million to stations around the country, including $2.5 million to WNYC, OTMs producing station.

Brooke Gladstone: What has the NPR's response been? If you can sum it up.

Micah Loewinger: Last Wednesday, all things considered, host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with NPR Media correspondent David Folkenflik, who dutifully covered the flare up from within, including NPRs response to Berliner's claim that a focus on building up staff and listenership had skewed its journalism.

David Folkenflik: Edith Chapin, our chief news executive, wrote a memo last week essentially rejecting the argument. She praised the works that our colleagues had done on various continents, the world, various communities around the country, various issues that we focused on. NPR also suspended Berliner and it cited two things.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Rufo, who unearthed old tweets from NPR's new CEO and president Katherine Maher.

Christopher Rufo: In 2018, she declared that Trump's a racist, and she did it again in 2020, and then kept the year off showing how excited she was to vote for Biden.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Jesse Watters: Berliner says, "I cannot work in a newsroom where I'm disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems that NPR has cited in my Free Press essay."

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Kelly McBride: I actually get where he's coming from. I actually thought as an editor, I could have made his argument better for him.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Kelly McBride: I basically have the least desirable job in journalism.

Micah Loewinger: She says the more she dug into the claims in Uri's piece--

Kelly McBride: The more it felt like he had cherry-picked examples to prove a point that I thought was disingenuous.

Uri Berliner: We started covering Trump in a way that we were trying to damage his presidency to find anything we could to harm him.

Micah Loewinger: Uri on Bari Weiss's podcast.

Uri Berliner: I think what we latched onto was Russia collusion.

Micah Loewinger: He wrote, "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.

Kelly McBride: To what extent did Russia have a role in the US 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.

Micah Loewinger: Writing in the Washington Post, Erik 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, "Trump will have you believe that the absence of criminality signifies the absence of wrongdoing, a logical atrocity abetted by Berliner's essay."

Kelly McBride: Even when the Mueller report came out, it was initially just a summary characterized in one specific way, and then when journalists got ahold of the whole report, they were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, this says something completely different."

Micah Loewinger: 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 US president shouldn't be indicted. The report said, "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 seed his requests."

Kelly McBride: Headline, it's complicated

Micah Loewinger: Now, onto the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the New York Post broke in October of 2020. Uri alleges that NPR didn't cover the story ahead of the election because it would've hurt President Biden. On Bari Weiss's podcast, he refers to a couple of quotes from NPR staff, one he witnessed firsthand.

Uri Berliner: I remember a conversation with a group of us, and one of the great journalists at NPR, someone who is very fair-minded said, "Look, I'm glad we're not covering this because it could help Trump."

Micah Loewinger: Kelly McBride says she doesn't know who said this or whether it's an accurate quote, but she did recognize the second one.

Uri Berliner: One of our top news manager, 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."

Kelly McBride: The quote that he attributes to 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?" I reached out to a senior editor and he gave me that quote along with a lot of other context.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Kelly McBride: Exactly. Once the provenance of the laptop was actually confirmed, journalists began to cover the contents of it.

Micah Loewinger: That said, you believe NPR could have covered later iterations of the laptop story sooner than it did?

Kelly McBride: Yes, I think they were a little slow to get back to it.

Micah Loewinger: 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 "as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory."

Kelly McBride: The stories that I've read and heard on NPR recently implied 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. It was a mistake, but it wasn't unique to NPR.

Micah Loewinger: He was alleging that because it could be construed as lending credence to a "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.

Kelly McBride: 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? There were thousands of storylines to pursue that seemed more accessible.

Micah Loewinger: 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 "Israel is doing something bad," and then largely categorizes NPR's coverage as "oppressor versus oppressed" where Israelis are the oppressors.

Kelly McBride: I get a lot of similar critiques in the public editor inbox and those critiques are more precise. 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 want to report it.

Micah Loewinger: She says, "NPR should explain on-air why it makes these decisions."

Kelly McBride: 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 to try and tell that story because there's just more story to tell there.

Micah Loewinger: She does agree with Uri's criticism of NPR's coverage or lack of coverage of antisemitism.

Kelly McBride: 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 antisemitism, and I also would've 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've made him figure it out.

Micah Loewinger: In an effort to quantify NPR's liberal bias, Uri looked up the voter registration of DC NPR journalists

Uri Berliner: What I found was 87 registered Democrats on our editorial staff, zero Republicans. I presented this at all hands or a large news meeting. I said, "Hey, look, something's gone wrong here. If we're really thinking about diversity and our coverage, something is really off."

Micah Loewinger: Steve Inskeep, 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, Steve Inskeep, 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 are your thoughts on UJri's count and the larger point he's trying to make with it?

Kelly McBride: 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 DC. 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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 offers a defense against bias, which we all have.

Kelly McBride: 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Kelly McBride: 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

Micah Loewinger: 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%.

Kelly McBride: Did NPR change or did the American populace change? Because it's pretty clear that the Republican Party has become much more conservative. When you ask people outside of studies like this how do they identify, those numbers have moved.

Micah Loewinger: 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 NPRs woes on wokeness.

Uri Berliner: I think that NPR is still an incredibly valuable public institution. I think it needs serious fixing.

Micah Loewinger: Uri Berliner.

Uri Berliner: I think there are member stations in small towns and remote areas that rely on this money to provide a local news coverage. I think it's pretty critical, so I wouldn't support defunding NPR.

Kelly McBride: I believe him,-

Micah Loewinger: Kelly McBride.

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.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, NPR has problems, but maybe not what you think they are.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 "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.

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

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Alicia Montgomery: 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 spring of 2020. From my seat and the meetings that I attended, there was a lot of effort to cover Trump as fairly as possible.

Brooke Gladstone: Which was usual. It was the bend over backwards stance of a liberal news organization.

Alicia Montgomery: It's the bend over backwards 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about some direction that you might have been given at an editorial meeting.

Alicia Montgomery: During the run-up to Trump's election, there were all sorts of meetings for team leaders whose desks 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Because Code Switch was? For people who don't know.

Alicia Montgomery: 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, we became the team that dealt with race and often politics. 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. The question, well, what if one candidate just lies more than the other? Just hung out there as the hard questions on want to do sometimes.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes. [laughter] This is ludicrous.

Brooke Gladstone: When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of that racism,-

Alicia Montgomery: Crickets.

Brooke Gladstone: -crickets.

Alicia Montgomery: 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 loudly shut down.

Brooke Gladstone: I recall that NPR was a big holdout on applying the word liar to Trump.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes. Oh, there were so many blowups about that.

Brooke Gladstone: We don't know what's going on in his mind. Maybe he thinks it's the truth.

Alicia Montgomery: There is a valid journalistic point there. As frustrating as it was, that lying is about somebody's motivation. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: NPR also didn't want to call waterboarding torture.

Alicia Montgomery: Wow. Yes, that's a deep cut and also true.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm just saying you talk about the ugly truth is that NPR's good journalism isn't always about the journalism.

Alicia Montgomery: 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. If you are calling waterboarding torture, maybe George W Bush's, people don't want to come on your show if you are saying Obama's policy during the Syrian civil war didn't work out very well.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean the red line?

Alicia Montgomery: 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 was president.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that it took a kind of courage for him to publicly criticize the organization, but it took the wrong kind of nerve.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: That his argument was, and this is strong language, a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst. What did you mean?

Alicia Montgomery: 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. What Uri did was, to call it cherry-picking is generous.

Brooke Gladstone: That's what he says NPR does because it has coalesced comfortably around the progressive worldview.

Alicia Montgomery: 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 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. This is something that really got me because for several years while I was at NPR, I worked on a program called Tell Me More with Michel Martin. 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.

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 different communities about whether that was a good idea. A lot of the police force in Washington, DC and Philadelphia and New York and 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Race seems to be the point where you argue his version of a comfortable coalescence at National Public Radio broke down or wokeness.

Alicia Montgomery: 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. It's not what I saw.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Alicia Montgomery: [laughs] 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: When it faded away, what was reasserted?

Alicia Montgomery: 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 DC doing a few terrible things to a few marginalized people and that's all we needed to cover.

Brooke Gladstone: NPR's core editorial problem is, and frankly has long been, you said, an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice.

Alicia Montgomery: Donald Trump made MS-13 a talking point and 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 the poster child for that. I remember a lot of resistance to actually diving into that. MS-13 was killing people in the neighboring county to Washington DC, taking advantage of Central American immigrant communities, and really terrorizing those places. It blew my mind that we didn't follow up.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me another example.

Alicia Montgomery: If you think about why were the white voters so angry about whatever was happening in the world, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: There are statistics that suggest that it does suppress wages.

Alicia Montgomery: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You agree with Berliner when he says an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR?

Alicia Montgomery: Did it ever? [laughter] 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You guys were both there for-

Alicia Montgomery: At the same time.

Brooke Gladstone: -roughly the same length, right?

Alicia Montgomery: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. 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

Alicia Montgomery: 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 wouldn't have been heard and examined before are now getting a microphone

Brooke Gladstone: Again, I'm saying that all of this is long overdue. 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 boohoo on my tiny violin. Very rich people got canceled for a few minutes or even for longer.

Alicia Montgomery: When a woman said something or a person of color or another marginalized person said something that made life hard for their bosses, he just got fired. Nobody called it cancellation. They just called it life and tough breaks and too bad. A lot of people are going to call what happened to Uri cancellation

Brooke Gladstone: In this particular case, he didn't like what they called him and he quit, so he canceled himself.

Alicia Montgomery: 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. That's not a tragedy that society needs to spend a lot of time trying to remedy.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you write this article now?

Alicia Montgomery: 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 thoughtful, dedicated, and yes, I'm going to use the word patriotic public radio journalists got trashed.

Brooke Gladstone: You ended by contesting Berliner's premise that NPR doesn't reflect America. You argue that it does.

Alicia Montgomery: It does. 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. Rather than listen to the criticism 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Alicia, thank you very much.

Alicia Montgomery: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callendar, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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