“How about the charge that public radio is really leftist public radio?” she asked. On her program, Rehm asked Mohn a question that was, to some degree, about herself. Prior to that March 5 show, NPR execs had met with Rehm to discuss the problem of her advocating for a liberal - and libertarian - cause in her off hours. The other legs are donations of various stripes and the constrained form of advertising known euphemistically as “underwriting.” That wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the fact that taxpayer funding is one leg of the stool that keeps the public radio system upright. Not surprisingly, a 2014 Pew survey found that only 3 percent of Americans with “consistently conservative” views trust NPR. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I think doing so will result in smarter, fairer news coverage that more people - on both ends of the political spectrum - will want to consume and support. It’s time for most, perhaps even all, public media journalists to abandon both the practice and the pretense of conventional impartiality. You could hear the tension in the studio, pent up over decades in which public media people have studiously ignored or denied the elephant in the room: that public media is, broadly speaking, by and for liberals.īut as a longtime public radio journalist myself, I argue that this tension is unnecessary. Mohn was on the defensive because, well, NPR’s CEO is always on the defensive on matters of bias, both real and imagined. Her disclosure in the Post called that arrangement into question. This possibly violated NPR’s ethics handbook, which requires its journalists, though not necessarily talk-show hosts such as Rehm, to remain publicly impartial on controversial issues.Įven though Rehm doesn’t work for NPR - her show is produced by WAMU in Washington - The Diane Rehm Show is distributed to nearly 200 radio stations under NPR’s banner. Rehm had revealed in a Valentine’s Day Washington Post article that she’d been speaking at fundraisers for an organization that advocates for legal assisted suicide. When Diane Rehm and NPR CEO Jarl Mohn met eye-to-eye on The Diane Rehm Show March 5, they were both on the defensive.
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This commentary is adapted from a series of segments on The Pub, Current’s weekly podcast about public media.
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