NPR: NPR Ombudsman

March 26, 2008

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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March 19, 2008

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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March 12, 2008

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

March 5, 2008

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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