NPR regular freelancer Nathan Lee had signed off on his edited movie review of Outrage Thursday night, May 7. The next morning, he checked for the piece on NPR's movie page.

It wasn't there.

He figured the delay was due to a technical problem. But it still wasn't online at 5 p.m. He called his editor, Trey Graham, on NPR's digital arts desk.

"Trey let me know there was a great deal of internal debate at NPR on whether or not this review could be published," said Lee, a New Yorker who has written 20 movie reviews in the last year for NPR's website.

What ensued was a classic journalism debate between privacy and the public's right to know. NPR came down on the side of privacy; Lee squarely on the other side. Caught in the middle is society's ongoing -- though no longer complete -- unease with discussions of sexual orientation.

NPR commissioned Lee to review Outrage, an 86-minute documentary about closeted gay politicians who vote and campaign against such issues as same-sex marriage and gay adoption, and the mainstream media's complicity by not actively reporting on that. The movie's theme is that politicians who vote against such issues while secretly having gay sex deserve to be exposed.

The film gives politician's names -- even though several targeted continually deny they are gay. Lee's original review included those names.

NPR pulled three politicians' names from the review because running them would have violated a long-held NPR policy, said Ron Elving, Washington editor who was involved in the final decision.

NPR's policy is not to publish or air rumors, allegations or reports about private lives of anyone unless there is a compelling news reason to do so. "We edit material out of what might have been said on NPR to adhere to the policy all the time," said Elving. "So this wasn't unusual."

Lee knew nothing about this policy, and said he wouldn't have accepted the assignment if he had known there were going to be restrictions on his review. Lee is also a film critic for The New York Times and a contributing editor of Film Comment.

By Friday night, Lee had four choices: Run the review as edited, delete his name from NPR's version, kill the piece or rewrite it entirely. Whatever he choose, he would be paid in full, said Joe Matazzoni, a senior arts producer for NPR digital.

When the review was presented sans names, Lee insisted his byline be deleted. So the review ran unsigned and with a brief explanatory note at the end.

Lee was upset that he couldn't discuss what he believed to be an important part of the film's content. "If we ran it without a byline," he said, "I thought that would alert NPR viewers that NPR's position reinforces part of the critique of what this movie was about: which is the squeamishness of mainstream media to cover or investigate closeted politicians or those rumored to be gay."

For the record, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety and the Miami Herald did use names, but The Washington Post did not. Interestingly, some of Outrage's promotional material did not include the names NPR struck from Lee's review nor does the online trailer.

New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott said he gave careful consideration to how to handle the movie's allegations but decided it would be wrong to omit the names.

"None of my editors objected to this, since everything I wrote was strictly and narrowly factual," said Scott. "In my opinion it would have been unduly coy, in the manner of 'blind item' gossip, not to mention the names, though I understand the argument that to mention them is to further the rumors. But it is important for a critic to be able to discuss what a movie is about, and for that reason I'm inclined to be sympathetic to Nathan's view."

As it turned out, NPR did handle its online review in the manner of a blind gossip item. Rather than name a particular prominent politician, the edited version gave enough information for the cognoscenti to easily figure out who the review was talking about.

This is how the final edit handled one politician:

"For now, the various (and suspiciously convenient) girlfriends of one major-swing state governor are but one element of a persuasive case made about a man with aspirations to be the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. Evidence of that governor's homosexuality, Outrage claims, is widespread and well-sourced."

The claims about this governor may be widespread, but they are still not confirmed.

Elving said he was so focused on the decision to omit names that he didn't see the final review. "I don't think we should have written that," he said of the above quote. "Our policy is clear but we shouldn't get cute about playing guessing games."

NPR also was coy in posting a photograph of former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig (R) alongside the review without explaining any connection to it. Craig was arrested in 2007 on a charge of soliciting sex from an undercover male officer. He at first pleaded guilty, but later changed his plea to not guilty. Craig has consistently said he is not gay. If NPR is not going to name names, then his photo should not have accompanied the review.

There's one other "free speech" issue that arose in this flap. After the review was published, Lee posted a comment at 11:46 p.m. explaining why he didn't want his name attached. The comment included the deleted names. I believe he should have had that right to explain -- but not the right to circumvent the editing process.

Matazzoni took Lee's post down around midnight. "When an author and an editor go through a process, that's the end of it," said Matazzoni. "I reminded Lee we had an agreement and it made no sense to try to get the names back in by posting them on the web."

Matazzoni again offered Lee the option of killing the review, but Lee declined.

Lee then went public with his complaints about NPR's handling of his review. One of the first online posts at IndieWire on May 11 made it seem that NPR had stripped Lee's review of names and posted it without telling him. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere lit up with charges of censorship, particularly on gay blogs.

A day later, Lee corrected the misconception by posting a comment on IndieWire, but few bloggers or reporters checked out the accuracy of IndieWire's first post.

"It was interesting to see that the initial reporting was simply passed and pasted on the blogosphere without anyone checking with us," said Matazzoni.

This fiasco highlights how information ricochets around the Internet without people verifying the veracity.

It's also points out that NPR's policy isn't consistently applied. NPR acknowledged this in a letter which Dick Meyer, NPR's executive editor, sent to those who complained.

"Though we have a policy, we do not have a perfect history of enforcing it or meeting all our aspirations," wrote Meyer. "And there are judgment calls, subjective decisions. Some blogs for example, have cited a conversation that aired on the show 'News & Notes' in November 2008 about efforts to 'out' a prominent singer and actress. That conversation, while not malicious, nevertheless did not conform to our standards."

This issue is not going away. It is important for NPR to have standards but they also need to be reviewed from time to time. And freelancers need to know NPR's standards.

Count me as guilty of believing that someone's sex life should remain private until he or she wants it public or there's a compelling news reason to invade that privacy. A movie, even one that makes strong allegations, is not a compelling news reason.

That said, did NPR handle this well? No. But in the end, the real issue, one I would venture is the reason for much of the vitriol, lies not so much with NPR's policy but with the premise of the Outrage documentary: politicians living lies.

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Please also see Andrea Seabrook's piece for All Things Considered on Congress' reaction to Outrage.

Joseph Monagle of Manchester, N.H. heard this story on Monday's Morning Edition about President Obama's speech at University of Notre Dame. What bothered him was when NPR's Scott Horsley referred to the people who interrupted the speech as anti-abortion hecklers.

"Although his speech was interrupted several times by anti-abortion hecklers, they were quickly shouted down," said Horsley. "Even those who disagreed with the president on abortion, like Michelle Coble, were generally respectful. The architecture student wore a model of the Supreme Court building on her mortarboard, along with a sign saying "Fight for Unborn Human Rights."

Monagle had done his research. He pointed to how NPR has identified Code Pink, a group of female anti-war activists.

"Look for Code Pink on NPR's site and you'll see that NPR refers to Code Pink as protestors, but the people who interrupted Obama are hecklers," said Monagle. "This is pretty cut and dry. You treat one group one way and one another. It's pretty biased."

Monagle's right that NPR is not always consistent on this matter. When Code Pink interrupted John McCain's acceptance speech last fall at the Republican Convention, they were called protestors -- not hecklers.

By definition, someone who interrupts a person giving a speech by yelling rudely is a heckler. Those who yelled out at Obama when he was speaking at Notre Dame were hecklers, but then by the same token, so were the Code Pink ladies at the Republican Convention.

It would be reasonable for a listener to conclude that NPR likes and supports the new movie, The Soloist, about the relationship between a newspaper columnist and a gifted, homeless musician.

Two days before the movie opened on April 24, Morning Edition did an 8-minute story about Los Angeles' skid row and Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist, whose book is the basis for the movie.

The night before the movie debuted, All Things Considered host Robert Siegel did an 8-minute interview with the movie's director. At the interview's end, Siegel invited listeners to go to npr.org to read an excerpt from Lopez's book.

And then the morning the movie opened, Morning Edition's film critic, Kenneth Turan, who works for the Los Angeles Times, gave a 3-minute personal review. After that, listeners were invited to watch clips of The Soloist and get more movie reviews at npr.org.

One astute listener, Elliott Mitchell, who volunteers for WPLN in Nashville, noticed the rather large amount of attention to one movie and sent me links to five NPR segments that either mentioned the movie or directly reported on it. That includes the three above and two brief mentions.

Why 19 minutes on one movie?

"I can't speak for the other shows but certainly in our case it seemed apt to look at the real life story that inspired The Soloist if we were spending several days examining LA's skid row," said Madhulika Sikka, ME's executive producer. She said Turan's reviews are selected weeks before and usually are coordinated with whatever he is writing for the Times.

But what was more troubling to Mitchell is that Dreamworks Pictures, which is behind The Soloist, also bought funding credits to promote the movie.

The credits ran from April 13 to April 26 on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday and the music show From the Top.

"I will not and do not want to believe there is collusion of that nature at NPR with The Soloist," Mitchell wrote. "But may I submit that -- from my perspective -- it's possible to make that connection. My reaction is that some listeners might believe that NPR is selling out."

What it clearly looks like is old-fashion pay for play: Dreamworks pays to 'advertise' on NPR, and NPR, hoping to please and encourage Dreamworks to spend more, devotes 19 minutes to the movie.

It's not the case. NPR is not selling out. But it is worth explaining what happened with the funding credit and why it shouldn't.

About one week in advance, NPR's corporate sponsorship division sends a schedule of funding credits to all NPR shows so they have an opportunity to identify conflicts before they air, said John King, operations manager. He says the schedules are emailed and hand-delivered to Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

A firewall really does exist between the editorial and marketing sides of NPR to prevent NPR sponsors from influencing programming.

"To that extent, the firewall has worked," said King. "We are also interested in avoiding situations when a sponsorship announcement runs near a story or review that mentions the sponsor, so that listeners do not think there is a connection between the sponsor and the content. These unfortunate juxtapositions don't happen all the time. But they do happen occasionally."

Morning Edition, which ran two stories about The Soloist, anticipated the conflict and moved the funding credit twice to avoid the awkward appearance of a credit following a story.

But that didn't happen with ATC.

ATC's executive producer, Christopher Turpin, said he never saw the list of funders in this case, which is why he didn't move the credit.

"Had I seen it, I would have moved it, as I've done in the past, and as ME apparently did," said Turpin. "The bottom line is we usually move credit conflicts, this time we missed one. And it's a wake-up call to develop a better process."

Sikka added that ME may have moved the credit this time but it is an inexact science.

"Sometimes we miss them pure and simple and that's just the way it is," she said. "If someone sees a credit close to a piece about the same thing we'd ask to move it to avoid the 'appearance' of a conflict. Sometimes we don't because we don't see it or forget to notice."

Turpin said that movie studios like to advertise on NPR shows because NPR listeners tend to like segments about movies.

"Generally, the reason we are talking to people about their movies is because the person or the movie is interesting," said Turpin. "I am interested in avoiding misconceptions on the audience's part (as in this case). But we make our own value judgments about whether a movie is worth covering. The funder has nothing to do with it." Sikka agrees.

This situation brings out an inherent dilemma at NPR and other public radio stations. How do you have a firewall if you pay attention to the placement of funding credits? But if you don't pay attention to the credits, then the perception of "pay for play" can arise.

This happened before with the TV show '24'. And with the movie No Country for Old Men and possibly other times I have missed.

It shouldn't happen and it's easy to fix. But the shows do need an established process, and not to do it on a haphazard basis. A top editor from each NPR-show should make sure to check the funding credits each day against that day's show's schedule of stories and rearrange any conflicting funding credits. This would reduce the appearance that NPR is doing stories only to satisfy a funder.

From time to time, I think it's instructive to share audience emails and an NPR staffer's response. James Webb of Langhorne, PA, questioned why a guest on Tell Me More was asked her race.

"As a satellite radio customer I listen to Tell Me More quite a bit," wrote James Webb of Langhorne, PA. "During an interview on today's program, I heard the show's host ask a guest who was speaking about South Africa what her race was. Let us pretend that this happened on any other show and see what the reaction would be. I find the show has interesting guests but the bias the host displays is quite at odds with an otherwise good product."

Michel Martin, host of Tell Me More responds:

"I am sorry if the question offended the listener's sensibilities but the fact is it was a highly relevant question, one which was necessitated by the fact that race matters. Or more specifically ethnicity matters, which is, in fact, the question I asked. The issue here is that South Africa, like the US, has a history of voting along ethnic lines, and ethnic lines are INTRA- racial as well as INTER-racial.

"Having asked the black guest about her ethnic ( some say tribal) affiliation, I could do no less than ask the white guest, which would have been obvious if we had been in a visual medium. Which raises the further point that listeners seem not to find it strange when one asks a black African whether his or her tribal or ethnic affiliation factored into his or her vote--they seem to grasp the obvious since violence has attended a number of recent elections due to ethnic difference---and the answer may be yes or not, but they grasp why we ask.

"People only seem to find it strange when the person being asked is white, as if whiteness is so universal and expected it does not need to be highlighted. But the fact is that few white South Africans ever vote for the ANC as this guest had done in the past. Most vote for the Democratic Alliance, all the more reason it was important to ask, and for the listeners to know the ethnic identities of both guests."

Later, Webb replied:

"I have spent some time in South Africa and understood by the accent that one of your guests was white so I suppose I was surprised when that question popped out. I do not equate tribal membership and ethnicity but your response explains your position well and I am grateful for the reply."

Continue reading "When is it Appropriate to Ask Someone's Race? " >

Will you please stop refering to the novel Influenza A virus circulating throughout Mexico, the US and the world as "swine flu" instead of the correct name, "H1N1 virus."
Thank you,
Cyndie Bashore

Dear Ms. Bashore:
I asked Joe Neel who is the lead editor on NPR's flu coverage about why NPR uses both terms and this is his response:

"NPR will continue to use the terms "swine flu" and "H1N1" interchangeably in its national broadcasts. You will likely hear us use "new swine flu" or "new H1N1" on first reference.

Here's why:
--The virus is a new swine virus, so it is accurate to call it "swine flu" or "new swine flu."
--The virus is a new H1N1 virus, so it is also accurate to call it "H1N1" or "the new H1N1 virus."
--We view "swine flu" as somewhat more precise scientifically than "H1N1."

There are at least 11,000 strains of animal flu viruses called H1N1, some of them swine, some human, some bird, etc. The top virologists in the world agree that this is a swine H1N1.

--The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling it "swine-origin influenza virus" as well as "H1N1" in its publications.

As the government drops the use of "swine flu" and uses "H1N1" more extensively in press conferences and taped interviews, I think you'll hear "H1N1" more frequently in our coverage."

NPR has also set up a Flu Shots blog.