RACIST COVERAGE?

Last week, I was at a two-day workshop on how to better cover race and ethnicity. There won't be a column this week, but I am including an email that a listener sent me about race and the Sean Bell story. Bell was a young, unarmed African-American who New York City police killed hours before his wedding. On April 25, the three officers were acquitted. One officer was white; the other two black. Should NPR have mentioned the race of the officers?

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Tags: Sean Bell | listener letters | race

7:06 PM ET | 05- 5-2008 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

NPR, NEW YORK TIMES AND SOURCING MILITARY EXPERTS

UPDATE:
Media correspondent David Folkenflik reports on the issue of Pentagon consultants and the New York Times in his story which aired May 1 on All Things Considered.

What are your thoughts?

--Chantal de la Rionda, Office of the Ombudsman

The New York Times revealed last week that the Pentagon has long covertly pressured and pampered more than a dozen retired military officers hired by broadcast networks as analysts to ensure positive spin on the Iraq war.

Among those cited was a military consultant for NPR.

After a two-year investigation, Times' reporter David Barstow described how the Pentagon cultivated military analysts for TV and radio by providing special access hoping in exchange for positive spin on the war, particularly after it started going badly. In some cases, analysts used that access to promote their post-military careers with defense contractors.

Deep into the 7,600-word piece on April 20 Barstow mentioned an NPR military analyst, Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr. (Ret.) in an email he sent to the Pentagon that could be construed as Scales trying to gain favor in order to be sent to Iraq for high-level briefings. Scales denies this.

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Tags: David Barstow | FOX News | General Robert H. Scales Jr. | Lt. General Thomas G. Rhame | New York Times | Robert Scales | Tom Bowman | Tom Gjelten

2:52 PM ET | 04-28-2008 | permalink | comments (15) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

HATING THE MEDIA WHEN YOU SHOULDN'T

BLACKSBURG, Va. --- The sign in the downtown store that sells Virginia Tech paraphernalia was quite clear: "No Media, Please."

It's a fair response to the media onslaught that was expected for the one-year anniversary of the most deadly campus shooting in history. On April 16, 2007, a sociopath gunned down 32 students and then took his own life. Within hours, hordes of news media were sticking microphones, cameras and notebooks into the faces of shell-shocked students.

But that sign in the store is also not fair.

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Tags: Virginia Tech

9:46 PM ET | 04-20-2008 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

SHOULD NPR LINK TO VIOLENT ANTI-MUSLIM VIDEO?

Without YouTube or LiveLeak, the world might only hear or read about the disturbing new anti-Muslim, Dutch video, "Fitna."

Now just about anyone can see the 17-minute movie that some consider more inflammatory in Muslim-majority countries than the Danish cartoons that sparked riots in 2006.

In the pre-Internet world, the so-called mainstream media played the role of gatekeeper: determining with authority what the public did and did not need to know. Much more editorial censorship existed. But now the public can get any information it wants through the Web -- with or without the news media's guidance. Everything -- in good taste or bad -- gets out in cyberspace.

One issue that arises for NPR is whether the network should provide direct links to potentially offensive material it reports on.

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Tags: Fitna | cartoons | the Netherlands

2:58 PM ET | 04-11-2008 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

IS OBAMA'S PASTOR ANTI-GAY?

Jason Carlson was driving home listening to All Things Considered (ATC) on March 24 when he heard a gay man say he would not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because the senator's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was anti-gay.

That didn't gibe with what Carlson, an Evanston, Ill. high school science teacher, knew about Wright. Later, Carlson did a quick Internet search using "Wright" and "anti-gay," and discovered that what he had heard on NPR was, in fact, wrong. In a piece edited before broadcast, ATC had put something on air without checking to make sure it was correct.

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Tags: Corrections | Joel Rose | Poynter Institute | Rev. Wright | Sen. Obama

12:15 PM ET | 04- 2-2008 | permalink | comments (5) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

NPR'S IRAQ COVERAGE

In an eerie chain of coincidences, insurgents' mortar attacks were launched at the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad at exactly the same time that NPR's Dina Temple-Raston had gone there recently on reporting assignments.

"It's happened four or five times," said Temple-Raston, who is on a voluntary, five-week temporary assignment in Iraq. "I've been in crazy war zones before but I've never had mortar shot at me before. They are incredibly scary because if you have a war soundtrack in your head, what you hear is mortars."

Temple-Raston is working in NPR's Baghdad bureau located outside the Green Zone. She's joined by NPR correspondents Anne Garrels and Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, producer Jack Zahora, six translators and four drivers. Covering the war costs the non-profit, largely listener supported public radio network at least $1 million a year.

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Tags: Anne Garrels | Dina Temple-Raston | Loren Jenkins | Lourdes Garcia-Navarro | Project for Excellence in Journalism

7:51 PM ET | 03-26-2008 | permalink | comments (9) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK

--Alicia C. Shepard

Words matter, but tone and how the words are said often matter even more.

A good example of this is a recent feature that ran on Weekend Edition Saturday (WESAT) about a Baghdad press conference where American and Iraqi journalists got a chance to quiz U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Mukasey had flown there to observe Iraq's new legal system, and NPR Justice correspondent Ari Shapiro went along and later filed two news stories, including an interview with the new attorney general.

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Tags: Ari Shapiro | Attorney General Mukasey | Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

8:03 PM ET | 03-19-2008 | permalink | comments (13) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

HOW WELL HAS NPR COVERED THE ELIOT SPITZER STORY?

I am out of town this week at a journalism seminar and visiting WUSF in Tampa, Fla. My column will return next week.

Interested in thoughts on how well NPR and other mediums have covered the Eliot Spitzer story.

--Alicia Shepard

Tags: Eliot Spitzer

5:55 PM ET | 03-12-2008 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

INVITE MORE CONSERVATIVES TO NPR?

By Alicia C. Shepard

When Sen. John McCain won the Virginia Republican presidential primary on Feb. 12, some conservatives thought he was sending a subliminal message. It wasn't his victory speech. It was the people McCain brought on stage.

Instead of young conservatives, or even doctrinaire conservative George Allen, a former Virginia governor who was in the audience, McCain surrounded himself with moderate, liberal or aging Virginia Republicans, according to David Keene of the American Conservative Union.

"If you were a conservative Republican activist and saw that picture, a shiver went up your spine," said Keene, whose group rates members of Congress on how they vote on key conservative issues. (McCain has a rating of 65; a "true" conservative is 80 or higher, the group says.)

NPR listeners might have missed this conservative critique of McCain had they not heard Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep interview Keene during NPR's recent Conversations with Conservatives series that ran in late February.

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Tags: Glenn Beck | Gov. Romney | Grover Norquist | Sen. McCain | Steve Inskeep

3:56 PM ET | 03- 5-2008 | permalink | comments (43) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)

 

SHOULD NPR HAVE APOLOGIZED FOR "DARK CONTINENT?"

Nine times out of 10, it is the adjectives that get journalists in trouble.

Most recently, an adjective got veteran NPR newscaster Jean Cochran into difficulty when she said on Valentine's Day that President Bush was heading to Africa to visit the "dark continent."

Almost immediately, a flurry of angry emails and phone calls came into NPR.

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Tags: Africa | Jean Cochran | On-Air Apology | the Economist

4:09 PM ET | 02-27-2008 | permalink | comments (41) | e-mail post | trackbacks (0)