Since President Barack Obama announced last week that he supported same sex marriage, scores of listeners have complained that NPR's coverage cheered the announcement. As Susan Reif of Fairfield, OH, wrote: "I am so curious as to what NPR's push is to have same sex marriage in America?....Please, please, quit pushing this stuff down all of our throats."

Pat Morley of Herriman, UT, was embarrassed by an All Things Considered segment covering the president's announcement. Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent public intellectual and advocate of same sex marriage, was interviewed at length on the show. Morley, an NPR fan, was driving home in his car and said he assured a dismayed passenger, "Just wait a minute, they'll interview someone with an opposing view." It didn't happen. That night, he found an article in NPR.org that more fully covered dissenters, but wrote of radio: "Please don't allow your usual high standard of excellent reporting to decay."

Meanwhile, advocates of gay rights, protested against an interview May 10 by White House correspondent Ari Shapiro with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, classifies the council as a "hate group." "Why did you not ask for the opinions of the Grand Dragon of the KKK when reporting on the Trayvon Martin case?," wrote Greg Korte of Long Beach, CA.

 

Gay rights, and particularly marriage rights, clearly provoke strong passions.

A review of all NPR's shows in the eight days after Vice President Joe Biden started the sudden national debate that led to President Obama's dramatic announcement finds that the coverage did indeed skew in favor of giving air time to the side that favors marriage equality. The review ran Sunday to Sunday, ending May 13, the day after Mitt Romney's own bold speech at Liberty University's graduation ceremony.

On its main news shows over that time, NPR aired 38 reports about the gay marriage debate. Every story included at least an acknowledgement of both sides of the issue, but a tally found 34 interviews with supporters of gay marriage versus 22 opposed and five uncommitted. The supporters, in other words, had a 3-2 edge over the opponents. Fourteen academics endorsed neither side, but provided analysis of polls and political trends. The review did not include the reports on hourly newscasts; no transcripts are kept of these short, usually straightforward bulletins.

NPR's own reporters and hosts were dispassionate and fair in what they said. But what of the balance of interviews? Deputy Managing Editor Stuart Seidel, who also is the standards editor, responded to a query from me:

I don't know that there is a measure of "how far" a news organization should go in reporting one or another "side" on any issue. Our objective is to report on what is happening in society and to give our audience a fair sampling of views without favor or prejudice. Beyond the president's statement about gay marriage, this was a politically and socially important moment and it was important to capture the way it was experienced by those it affected most.

He added:

The issue for journalists is not one of whether there is a bias in favor or against same-sex marriage or gay rights. It's very hard to find anybody in society who does not hold a personal opinion regarding those issues—or many other issues that come up daily in political and social coverage. The challenge regarding coverage of gay rights, as with so many other matters, is whether a journalist is successful in setting aside bias to hear and fairly report divergent views and perspectives. We do that.

It's fashionable in journalism to try to objectify objectivity, to try to determine that fairness is achieved by precisely divvying up the time allotted to one or another view on a subject or the number of words devoted to one view or another, or the number of individuals interviewed. But measuring the time devoted to one view or another—indeed, viewing an issue as having "two" sides—is to miss a core responsibility of journalism. In this sort of story, there is a core responsibility to seek a multiple of perspectives and to present them fairly, with the nuance and complexity that all these stories deserve. We strive to do that in every story we tell and have done that in our recent and past coverage of gay rights, and we will continue to do that in our future coverage.

I agree with Seidel that editors shouldn't be ruled by number counts. But numbers at times are useful as an indicator and a tool: to know what you're doing forces you to think about what you should be doing and whether to adjust. Last week's numbers suggest to me that in the future more opposition voices have to be brought into the coverage of an issue on which Americans are divided. The same would not be true for an issue about which there is no longer much debate: abolishing slavery, for example.

That said, I agree with Seidel that the focus last week should have been on the people most affected by the president's announcement, who are gay Americans. Most of us want to know their reaction first, and indeed, in the first five days last week, the coverage ran more than 2 to 1 in their favor. Opponents may be appalled by what they think gay marriage does to society, but as individuals they are less directly affected by what clearly was an historic announcement by an American president in support of same sex marriage.

In future columns, I hope to return to the subject of just what the balance and tone should be going forward, now that the dust of the president's announcement is settling. Seidel, like almost all editors in the mainstream news media, answered mostly in terms of journalistic process: set aside bias, seek multiple perspectives, present them fairly. Hewing to these standards of process have served American journalism well, but I am becoming ever more convinced that news organizations also have to make clear what their core values are. How gay rights fit into those values is a defining issue. I am struggling with where to draw the lines, however, and would love your input.

Here are two memos for your consideration. One is from my very capable assistant, Lori Grisham, who listened in detail to each of the 38 reports on same-sex marriage and led me through the highlights. Linked here is her summary of what NPR actually did in its coverage.

The second memo, linked here, is the full response from Seidel, an extremely thoughtful, diligent editor who in some ways is the heart of NPR. In his response, he notes that public opinion has shifted in favor of marriage equality. He stops short of saying that the polling numbers should be a guideline for the balance of voices in stories, but implies that they have some role in whether a side gets attention. But he also notes that there can be a problem of "false equivalence" when presenting multiple sides. Some sides, on some issues, in other words, are more valid than others.

Which ones? Seidel doesn't say, but the answer raises my question of values. Among the values I see for NPR and any news organization to address are ones of morality, religion, democracy, science and patriotism. You may see more.

Finally, on Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council: The Southern Poverty Law Center has done valiant work in defense of civil rights over the years, but it is an advocacy group like any other. Many Americans may feel that the center's heart is in the right place, but that doesn't mean that its classifications of "hate crimes" and "hate groups" should be taken as gospel. NPR and almost all the mainstream news media quote the Family Research Council and do not call it a hate group. Indeed, many other Americans feel the council's heart is in the right place.

I agree with Seidel when he wrote:

NPR avoids gratuitously using patently objectionable language for broadcast or publication. Of course, everybody has a different view of what is objectionable. We follow what might be called "broadly accepted social standards," but we also have an obligation to report on views held by many people—and supported by many organizations—that are viewed as objectionable by a large portion of the population. To pretend those views do not exist by not reporting them would deprive people in our audience an opportunity to responsibly draw their own conclusions about the world around them.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

I was a Young Republican when I was in college and briefly worked for Barry Goldwater for president. I worked at the same time in civil rights in South Nashville.

I am reminded of my past as I follow the criticism in recent weeks raised by Breitbart.com, NewsBusters, commentator Michelle Malkin and other Goldwater descendents against NPR reporter Peter Overby for not having sufficiently disclosed that he once worked for an affiliate of Common Cause.

In three stories last month on the American Legislative Exchange Council, Overby reported that Common Cause has been pushing the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax exempt charitable status of ALEC.

ALEC is the organization that brings together state legislators and corporate lobbyists to write and promote model state laws that further various conservative causes. These causes have included the cutting of corporate taxes, restricting unions, expanding voter ID, spreading Stand Your Ground gun laws and imposing Arizona-type illegal immigration restrictions.

 

Malkin, a Fox News contributor, asked her followers in a blog post to contact me and cite the "accountability" section of NPR's Ethics Handbook in reference to Overby's reporting role. Malkin referred to me as a "she," but no matter: she may have been thinking of my predecessor.

In reviewing the complaints, I find that they are partly right in criticizing Overby for labeling Common Cause as only a "good government group" in one of the stories. But the violation was a minor one in otherwise fair and accurate stories that bent over backwards to give ALEC time and space to counter-charge. Spokespeople for ALEC said that Common Cause and its "liberal" and "progressive" allies, as Overby himself called them, were ideologically motivated.

The complaints that I have read make no real argument with the substance or tone of the stories about ALEC. By directing their criticism at Overby's background, the critics appear to be aiming more at the fact that there were stories at all. If you don't like the message, in other words, shoot the messenger.

Some defenders of Overby maintain that the attacks are an attempt to divert attention from ALEC. I do not know the motivation of Malkin and the rest, but the questions they raise of whether Overby should have been allowed to report the story or should have made some special disclosure of his past are good ones. I have put them to a dozen disinterested colleagues and legal experts over the last week. All agree with Overby doing the stories, but they come down all over the place on disclosure.

So let me give you my reasoning for concluding that there was nothing wrong with Overby reporting the story and that no extra disclosure was necessary beyond what already exists as a matter of standard NPR practice.

Overby's byline on the Web versions of the stories, like that of all bylines, links to his bio, which states: "Before coming to NPR in 1994, Overby was senior editor at Common Cause Magazine, where he shared a 1992 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for magazine writing."

Is that enough? It's one click away for Web readers and not immediately accessible at all for radio listeners. NPR's new Ethics Handbook wisely doesn't set many specific rules but rather outlines principles for editors to consider in handling gray areas such as these. The handbook says:

It's not always easy to detect when something we have a personal or professional stake in might conflict — or appear to conflict — with our duty to report to the public the fullest truth we can. Conflicts of interest come in many shapes — financial holdings, romantic relationships, family ties, book deals, speaking engagements, and others. It's important to regularly review how our connections are entangled with the subjects of our reporting, and when necessary, to take action.

In minor cases, we might satisfy an apparent conflict by prominently disclosing it, and perhaps explaining to the public why it doesn't compromise our work. When presented with more significant conflicts that might affect our ongoing work, our best response is to avoid them. But some conflicts are unavoidable, and may require us to recuse ourselves from certain coverage...

When to disclose, and when to recuse.

All NPR journalists, including those of us who work for the arts and music desks, must tell our supervisors in advance about potential conflicts of interest. When first assigned to cover or work on a matter, disclose to your immediate supervisors any business, commercial, financial or personal interests where such interests might reasonably be construed as being in actual, apparent or potential conflict with our duties...

Overby's previous experience and reporting award were common knowledge among editors. Indeed, they were among the reasons why he was given the reporting position and title, Power, Money and Influence Correspondent. His bio adds lightly: "Some of his lobbyist sources call it the best job title in Washington."

Managing Editor David Sweeney wrote me:

There is no issue here. Peter last worked for Common Cause magazine 18 years ago. That is disclosed on his online bio—on the NPR website—and has been for some time. There was no discussion prior to Peter reporting this story—the latest in a series he has done on ALEC—about whether there were any potential perceived conflicts, let alone any actual ones. Peter has demonstrated in his reporting on ALEC and other political fundraising coverage that he is a straight up, very good correspondent reporting on a central issue of the 2012 election campaign cycle.

Unsaid was that two years after Overby left, the magazine was shut down after simmering tensions with its parent Common Cause, according to an article in the American Journalism Review at the time.

I personally wouldn't have cared if Overby had worked directly for Common Cause itself. One of my complaints about journalism today is that it has become like a caste in which too many journalists have no experience in anything else in life, separating them from ordinary Americans and inculcating attitudes of arrogance. What counts is not a journalist's background, but whether she or he can identify personal biases and be fair in reporting. Each of us has scores of potential biases.

Eighteen years has given Overby a lot of extra time to overcome any bias he might have for or against Common Cause. It never occurs to me to divulge my long ago Goldwater past; I dare anyone to use that and my civil rights work to predict my position on issues today. Most of us can probably make similar claims. I agree with Sweeney that whatever Overby may feel about his long-ago employer, it does not show up in his reporting.

But what of disclosure as a way to maintain audience trust because of a mere appearance of conflict of interest? This is one reason for the posted bios. My feeling is that if Overby were so identified with Common Cause that still more disclosure seemed necessary, then he shouldn't be assigned to the story in the first place.

More important than Overby himself, moreover, is the editing system that surrounds him. Editors and producers are stacked on top of reporters to ensure that stories are scrubbed clean of bias. This faceless team behind the scene holds the ultimate responsibility for what goes on air and online. Even with added disclosures, it is still this system at NPR that listeners at some point have to decide that they trust or not. So far, most of us trust it.

None of this is to say that mistakes don't happen or biases don't seep through. They do. The system is made up of fallible humans. This is why NPR has an ombudsman and listener complaints are posted and investigated separately by me and editors every day.

Labelling Common Cause as merely a "good government group" was one of those mistakes, it seems to me, though I can understand it.

Common Cause was founded in 1970 by a former Republican congressman, John Gardner, in those halcyon days of bipartisan innocence when we all called the organization a "good government group." Its founding cause was transparency in government so that citizens know how decisions are made and can participate.

The organization, however, has since aligned with liberal groups on many issues, in part because conservatives have largely abandoned favorite Common Cause issues such as campaign finance restrictions. The group's current president, Bob Edgar, is a former Democratic congressman with a bit of a halo image on ethics as former general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ.

Overby defends his labeling:

I have an approach to deciding how to identify groups. I try to frame stories like these in the liberal-conservative context, and then use the most specific phrases possible to identify the groups involved. Common Cause is specifically a good government group (using the established term covering ethics, campaign finance and such issues), the same way the Sierra Club is an environmental group or the Tea Party movement is about lower taxes and smaller government.

For a while now, I've been looking to see if Common Cause's changes in leadership have changed its focus, made it more broadly liberal like, say, People for the American Way. Haven't found a good answer yet....One of its big funders last year was conservative businessman Tom Golisano, a founder of the Perot-inspired Independence Party of NY.

All advocacy groups use the same strategy, portraying themselves as aggrieved victims of monolithic attacks. I believe my job is to start with that and then add depth.

His response shows a sense of deliberate care, but the political landscape has so polarized in recent decades, with Common Cause in the thick of the fight, that the "good government" label is too rosy. Many conservative advocacy groups—from the Tea Party to the National Rifle Association—see themselves as promoting "good government." Some elements of transparency, meanwhile, have arguably contributed to the hyper polarization of today by denying legislators the ability to compromise in back-room or face-saving deals, which may not be so good.

A review of other mainstream news media finds that they, too, appear to be struggling with what to call Common Cause. In recent weeks, The Washington Post has used "reform advocacy organization" and "government watchdog." The Wall Street Journal has referred to it as one of many "reform groups." The New York Times said "watchdog group" and Bloomberg came in with the most detailed description: "a Washington-based political ethics watchdog group." I wonder if "liberal" shouldn't have been added to all of them.

But let's be clear here: the subject in Overby's stories is not Common Cause, but ALEC.

His stories have been part of an ongoing focus by all news organizations on ALEC since the killing in Florida of an unarmed 17-year-old boy, Trayvon Martin, by a man whose defense is the Stand Your Ground law. Few of us in the general public had any idea of ALEC's powerful role in propagating this and many other state laws in recent years. This role is certainly worth reporting, whether you agree with the laws or not.

The complaint by Common Cause, filed under the Tax Whistleblower Act, will force the IRS to investigate whether ALEC is a charity or in fact a lobbying organization. The classification is important because charitable donations are tax deductible while contributing to a lobbying organization is not. Overby reported that 99 percent of ALEC's $7 million annual budget is funded by its private members, most of them corporations. The many state legislators who are members pay the tiny balance.

If ALEC is a lobbying group, then we as taxpayers have been helping fund it, while losing the corporate taxes that should be paid alongside our own to help maintain government services.

It is not for me to say how ALEC should be registered, but as a matter of news judgment there is no doubt that the tax status complaint, no matter who brought it, is newsworthy and legitimate. Washington is filled with non-profit organizations that seek to influence legislation for their favorite cause and are registered all or in part as lobbying groups. There is nothing unusual or punitive about this. Common Cause itself is registered as a lobbyist.

Overby reported all this in a straightforward fashion, with no tendentious tone or slant. His third story gave ALEC more time than Common Cause to make its case. Meanwhile, a dozen or more corporations have quit ALEC since the furor over corporate funding erupted. ALEC itself has shut down its task force on public safety and elections.

These are the three Overby reports referred to above:

Boycotts Hitting Group Behind 'Stand Your Ground', April 5, 2012

Conservative Group's Charity Status Draws Questions, April 19, 2012

Charity Status Of Conservative Group Challenged, April 23, 2012

Lori Grisham contributed to this report.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

At my request, NPR has released more information than any mainstream media organization on the diversity of its editorial staff and audience. My analysis two weeks ago turned on the question of which baseline to use in measuring progress. Now I have asked six national leaders and experts of different views what they think of how NPR is doing. They responded with great insight, some frustration and dollops of humor. The goal is for NPR to sound like America.

Summary charts are below. The shame is that commercial newspapers, television and radio don't give out the same detail.

Participants:

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Paul Delaney, The Root Contributor, Former NPR Board Member

Too many Americans cannot acknowledge that the country has serious race problems. Progress in diversity is still not sustainable. Read response.

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U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, Democrat-California

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing ethnic group. Yet too often the portrayal and coverage of them is insufficient. Read response.

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Rhonda Levaldo, President, Native American Journalists Association

When tribal nations are ignored in demographic stories, newsrooms indirectly report native people do not matter. Read response.

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Janet Murguía, President and CEO, National Council of La Raza

Being able to count the number of Hispanic journalists on two hands, instead of one, does not give NPR a whole lot of bragging rights. Read response.

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Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

NPR's staff is part of the new upper class isolated from the mainstream. Here is a staff questionnaire as another way to measure diversity. Read response.

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Michael Schudson, Sociology Professor, Columbia Journalism School

NPR is doing better than the average newsroom, but who knew that a third of NPR's 'elite' audience doesn't have a college degree? Read response.

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This first chart summarizes the staff composition against four baselines: the entire U.S. population, the population over 18, college graduates in the U.S. and NPR's audience. The baselines represent America and target and actual audiences. One of the measures—college graduates—also represents the hiring pool for journalists. The breakdown of the actual audience is a subject for debate and treated in my earlier column. The other charts below show diversity at different employee and management levels. Retention is not addressed.

Editorial Staff Composition vs Demographic Baselines and Audience, by Race and Ethnicity

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The Full Discussion:

Paul Delaney

Correction 5/9/2012 - An original version of this post said "early 20th Century."

Why do we Americans still have serious race problems as we romp through the early 21st Century? My quick answer is, too many Americans cannot acknowledge that the country has serious race problems.

Fortunately, the premier radio media company, National Public Radio, seems to be taking the issue more seriously than most of its counterparts in the rest of the media world, print and television included, but especially new media, which seems to be totally tone deaf. The dearth of interest in internal racial matters and real action by the rest makes NPR's effort look even better, as noted in a report on diversity by the network's ombudsman.

As an NPR board member for eight years, I was always struck by the lack of in-depth consideration of racial issues, when the nomenclature shifted from integration and desegregation to affirmative action and now diversity - the nation cannot even agree on what to call it in attempting to skirt dealing with it. The end of each regular board meeting included a report on diversity, usually a gentle pat on the back for how well the company was doing, or at least what it was hoping to accomplish.

Those meetings tackled the headier matters of pricing structure, content, public service announcements, low-power stations, advent of satellite radio, live streaming and the internet, as new technologies forced themselves on unsuspecting old media. The board was advised by experts to be ready to confront rapidly changing times regarding minorities, youth and international audiences.

The feeble solutions (to my mind) were to lure Tavis Smiley to NPR (a failure) and establish a minority stations council (still a work in progress), as well as hire Michel Martin (a success) and bring on a few more nonwhites (wholly inadequate) as minorities came and went in a seemingly revolving-door game. What the decent-looking current statistics do not show is the dearth of deeper involvement, particularly in management. When I joined the board, NPR's president, Delano Lewis, was black (the Obama of his day) but the numbers of nonwhite managers has veered from poor to worse since.

How important is that? I do not believe there is any question that when matters of content and coverage come up in newsroom planning sessions, the presence of people of color makes a tremendous difference. Think Trayvon Martin and border and immigration issues and the Sahel and Iran, Afghanistan, even the elections in France.

From my time on the board, I vividly recall the statement of one manager regarding NPR: "Our future is how brilliantly we do things, not channels of distribution, not how cheaply we do things." Unfortunately, no genius in any newsroom has yet been able to take such findings as those of NPR's ombudsman and make diversity real and sustainable.

Paul Delaney is a contributor to The Root. He was formerly an NPR board member, a reporter and editor for the New York Times and chairman of the journalism department at the University of Alabama.

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Mike Honda

The results from NPR's internal employment diversity study are an encouraging sign for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, who are the nation's fastest-growing minority yet remain underrepresented in most media outlets. For the last four decades, NPR has provided quality, unbiased programming, covering breaking local, national, and international news, music, trivia, the arts, and more. I commend Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos for taking the initiative to examine diversity within NPR reporting and management staff and congratulate him for being NPR's first Latino ombudsman.

Although coverage and portrayals of AAPIs have too often been insufficient and inaccurate, NPR has proven to be a strong leader in staff diversity and representation of AAPIs. AAPI journalists and management offer a unique perspective on the stories NPR covers and shares, further enriching the NPR audience and strongly reflecting the core American values of civil rights and freedom of speech. Journalism is a powerful mechanism for informing public opinion and must be held to the highest standard by including a variety of voices and opinions.

As Chair Emeritus of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, I have worked hard to expand AAPI representation and diversity in the media. One of my proudest accomplishments was working with Comcast and NBC Universal to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the AAPI community to increase investments in AAPI programming as well as diversity in the corporate workforce and on camera. I am hopeful that other local and national media outlets over time will continue to recruit and retain members of the AAPI community to more accurately reflect the communities that they serve.

As the ethnic demographic of the United States continues to change, new staff and coverage should reflect the racial diversity and core values of our country. We must hold true to our prized principles of civil rights and freedom of speech and the press. This includes through equal opportunity employment in journalism. Minorities comprise 28 percent of the total US population and 23 percent of NPR's staff. Needless to say, NPR has had a great record of employing a diverse group of reporters and managers. Therefore, I hope NPR will continue to reflect on this trend and broaden the demographic of their staff.

Mike Honda is the U.S. representative for California's 15^th congressional district.

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Rhonda Levaldo

The baselines for measuring audience diversity is important for many mainstream news outlets because it gives the producers/reporters an idea of what new ideas they can be covering and how they can report on it. A representation of the national census therefore should be used so all minorities are included. With an understanding of who is listening, reading or watching the news, newsrooms can increase content that is reflective of the American public.

For the Native American audience, most of "Native" radio programming is on community-based stations and many of native people listen to what is on National Public Radio (NPR). When the recent survey was posted about who listens to NPR, the Native American statistic was not on the story sent out across newsrooms. When tribal nations are ignored in demographic stories, newsrooms indirectly report native people do not matter, native people do not exist, perpetuate the 19th century racial stereotype of the Vanishing Indian. The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) is always open to assist with stories on Native peoples.

Greater newsroom diversity increases the chance of readers understanding an issue they may not have even thought about before. For example, many in the public do not know that Native people are not all alike, that they don't have the same language or customs. Many do not even know that they are sovereign nations. With increased coverage on just one group like Native Americans, people could instead find not the Vanishing Indian, but citizens consolidating around Native Nations on the Keystone XL pipeline, how Congressional decisions immediately impact Native Nations, and how often Native political leaders talk about which presidential candidate will do less damage to their tribal sovereignty.

The NAJA goal is increasing newsroom inclusion. Reporting on Native Nations beyond a powwow provides the public what is happening in their own backyards. Excluding different races, creeds or sexual orientations turns a blind eye to the general public's interests, opinions, and growth of their ideas.

I encourage NPR to keep building a database of story ideas nationally and locally. With the current census information coming out, stories on diversity issues impact the listening audience by reporting an issue exists or by informing an issue is not as simple as previously thought. NAJA is always willing to help mainstream news outlets in find contacts and reporters. We want these stories to be told, we need the general population to see that Native Americans are still here and what we are doing.

Rhonda Levaldo is the president of the Native American Journalists Association and a faculty member at Haskell Indian Nations University.

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Janet Murguía

A couple of observations about this chart:

First I would note the continued severe underrepresentation of Latinos among NPR journalists and producers. It's true that there has been some improvement. But being able to count the number of correspondents and producers on two hands, instead of one — which was the case when NCLR first looked at these numbers nearly 20 years ago — does not give NPR a whole lot of bragging rights. I would also note with alarm the dearth of Latino representation within NPR's management. It is very troubling that, after raising this issue with NPR for many years and through many efforts such as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists' Parity Project, the numbers are still as bleak as they are.

There are a couple of rays of hope. First, we appreciate that NPR's ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has devoted so much attention to this issue. And we appreciate the courage it takes to have outsiders critique the organization on its own website. Second, it is clear by the longevity of the handful of Latino correspondents at NPR – venerable names in our community such as Mandalit del Barco, Richard Gonzales, Maria Hinojosa, and Claudio Sanchez – that NPR seems to be a supportive environment for good journalism. Perhaps the careers of these revered journalists can serve as role models for potential NPR journalists in the future.

Second, the question of how NPR should measure its responsiveness is an interesting one. Should NPR focus on appealing to its core audience, as most commercial broadcasters do, or does it have a broader mission to serve the public, given its unique role in American media? I would argue that focusing on just serving college graduates underestimates the appeal and value of NPR's programming to the Latino community. NPR is one of the few outlets that consistently and fairly covers the issues Latinos care about most. NPR is producing content that should, and needs to be, heard by our community. I firmly believe that NPR can grow its Latino audience with a concerted outreach effort and with the addition of more people familiar with how to reach and speak to America's fastest growing population. An effort of this kind is much-needed and much too long overdue.

Janet Murguía is the President and CEO, National Council of La Raza.

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Charles Murray

I don't have anything interesting to say about the chart. It's a good thing to have ethnic diversity, ceteris paribus, and NPR has it, mirroring the national population with remarkable fidelity except for underrepresentation of Latinos. But I think the crucial consideration in journalism is that the journalist be fluent in whatever language is being spoken for a given story. If you're doing a story on evangelical Christians, you don't have to be an evangelical Christian—don't even need to be Christian—but you have to be culturally literate about evangelical Christians (which requires more than reading a few clips of other stories about evangelical Christians written by other people who don't speak the language). You have to understand the sense of what the person is saying. I don't just mean be able to empathize, though that's a bonus, but literally to be able to _understand_ what the person is saying. That's much more important (I think) than that the evangelical and you are the same ethnicity. By the same logic, I am not much impressed if a black journalist is assigned to cover a story about, say, black baggage handlers, if the black journalist grew up in Winnetka, went to Dartmouth, and has never held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day.

When I inveigh against a new upper class that is ignorant of, and isolated from, mainstream America, as I do at length in "Coming Apart," NPR's staff was pretty much what I had in mind—or my conception of NPR's staff. So prove me wrong. Poll your staff on the following types of diversity. "Yes" answers are the ones I don't expect from NPR staff.

Religious. Do you attend a worship service regularly—meaning weekly, unless something unusual prevents you?

Political. Do you openly identify yourself as conservative or libertarian?

Lifestyle. Give yourself an overall "yes" if you can answer "yes" to at least three of these four questions.

1. When ordering a drink in a bar, do you routinely order something alcoholic other than wine or a boutique beer? (Campari with soda doesn't count.)

2. Do you relish a big steak?

3. Do you go for weeks at a time without exercising?

4. Can you name at least four series on commercial TV that you watch regularly?

Socioeconomic status. Give yourself an overall "yes" if you can answer "yes" to three of these four questions.

1. Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your fifty nearest neighbors probably did not have college degrees?

2. Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial job or a high-prestige profession (defined as attorney, physician, dentist, architect, engineer, scientist, or college professor)?

3. Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community under 50,000 population that is not part of a metropolitan area and was not where your college was located?

4. Have you ever lived for at least a year in the United States at an income that was close to or below the poverty line? You may answer yes if at any time in your life your family income was below $30,000 in 2010 dollars. Take your best guess. (Being poor in graduate school doesn't count.)

What do I expect from your poll? I guess I'd be surprised if you get "yes" from over 20 percent of the staff on religion, lifestyle or socioeconomic status. For politics, anything greater than zero would surprise me. In any case, I'd love to know the results.

Credit: Charles Murray, WH Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author most recently of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.

Charles Murray is the WH Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author most recently of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010."

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Michael Schudson

Picture yourself walking through a newsroom with 100 journalists at work. They are busy covering the news of the community their organization serves. You notice that 80 are male. You notice that all are white except for four African-Americans and one Hispanic. Question: how well does this newsroom serve minorities in their city?

You can't answer that without seeing what they produce, but you can make some inferences. You know that most of these reporters will feel conspicuous and uncomfortable in many parts of their city. No doubt the staff makes an effort to cover issues of special importance to minorities and women, but you suspect that it is a mission and not a habit, and that it feels like a kind of foreign correspondence. You know it can be done well or poorly but, in either case, it is done with the handicap of a largely monochromatic newsroom. There are few colleagues to enrich the formal and informal cultural mix of the workplace.

This thought-experiment adopts data from a 1971 national newsroom survey. Newsrooms in a 2002 re-study with similar methods found an improved picture, although not as different as optimists of the 1970s hoped – 33 women, not 20; 8 people from racial minorities, not 5 – with the number of African-Americans still at 4. ASNE data show that for newspapers (as opposed to all news media) the employment of women has held steady at 37% of newsrooms over the past decade; minority employment has been about 12%, growing to close to 14% by 2006, but back to 12% by 2012.

NPR does much better with diversity than the "average" newsroom. In this way, as in many others, it is one of the great success stories in the news media in the past generation.

It does not reach everybody. No surprise, the public radio audience skews affluent and highly educated. Still, more than half of NPR's audience live in households with less than $100K in income and more than a third of listeners do not have a college degree. We're talking about millions of people who do not fit the college-educated, savvy, latte-drinking left-of-center stereotype. I do fit, omitting the latte, and I suspect many NPR staffers do, too, but they serve and must speak to a broader population. How?

By doing what they have often done so well. They can serve their listeners by maintaining first-rate news coverage – by making great use of the evocative capacities of sound — music, language, and voice; by taking listeners past the beaten track of breaking news to the associated stories no one else is getting at; and by acknowledging that many listeners – if my own experience is any guide (it may not be) – are almost never going to go to the Website "for more details" on a story they have heard.

Why do members of both the latte and non-latte species listen to NPR? One person's experience: because I like waking to radio; because I can't stand commercial interruptions; because not infrequently I have interrupted brushing my teeth and moved from bathroom back to bedroom because NPR's on a story just too interesting not to attend to for 60 seconds more; because it catches me up quickly with "top stories" in a way that does not insult my intelligence; because its tone is civil; because Scott Simon is a Cubs fan as is anyone who roots for underdogs.

And if you don't root for underdogs, what's wrong with you?

Michael Schudson is a professor of sociology at the Columbia School of Journalism.

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Stephannie Stokes contributed to this post.

NPR is an increasingly powerful cultural force in books, films and music nationwide—a role that is focusing more attention on the ethics of its coverage, too. The question that pops up among listeners is whether there is a conflict of interest with the online sponsorship ads that are placed in NPR.org by record labels, film distributors and book publishers.

The banners placed by the companies feature their film, book or album—not the company—and run in NPR's cultural Web pages. On rare occasions, the banners even run cheek-to-jowl with a review of the same film, book or album.

What gives? Like some listeners, I, too, have been jarred by seeing such apparent twinning. I recently wrote at length about the ethics of corporate sponsorship in general. I found that the NPR firewall between sponsors and the news to be so firm that it was not necessary for reporters and hosts to make a public disclaimer every time a sponsor was mentioned in a story. I did allow for exceptions, however, if the relationship looked too close.

Among the few exceptions I had in mind were those cheek-by-jowl sponsorships, especially on the music Web pages. In early March, a sponsorship banner for Esperanza Spalding's album "Radio Music Society" appeared on the same page as NPR's "Exclusive First Listen" of the same album. A few weeks later, the same thing happened with the band Of Monsters and Men.

 

This has been happening for some time. Almost exactly two years ago, my predecessor, Alicia Shepard, wrote in response to listener complaints about an advertisement for an album by Jakob Dylan (son of Bob) appearing right next to a website report on Dylan's "Tiny Desk Concert" at NPR.

Upon digging further into the cultural pages and talking with NPR editors, executives and technical managers, I find no actual ethical violations. NPR's cultural critics and reporters maintain strict independence. I am further satisfied, moreover, that ads are not deliberately placed adjacent to reviews on the website. Rather, these adjoining placements are technical faults. They are hard to avoid and so infrequent that, as a practical and financial matter, we just may have to live with them.

There are no measures of how infrequent. But because it seems inevitable that such things will happen, I think that NPR should permanently post an explanation on all the cultural pages. The jarring appearance of a conflict of interest happens often enough to warrant a disclaimer. It is not enough to rely on the availability of NPR's overall ethics guidelines elsewhere in the website, or to depend solely on the trust that most listeners do and should have in NPR's journalists.

Two things further tip the scale in favor of this recommendation. First is the public nature of NPR and the immeasurable value of maintaining its saintly image. Second is the great growth of NPR in digital realms and the evolving nature of online sponsorships.

NPR.org attracts some 10 million unique visitors each month and continues to grow vigorously as the nation moves online and onto mobile platforms. The NPR Music site is particularly popular, drawing 2.4 million unique visitors a month this year, an increase of 30 percent from last year, according to NPR's senior digital analyst, Sondra Russell. NPR's Tiny Desk Concert series is becoming a national cultural touchstone, and NPR Music is riding a wave of popularity at music venues like Austin's SXSW. What distinguishes NPR Music is its ability to find and promote quality and originality in so many genres across the board. NPR's book and film sections are successfully following suit.

Sponsors, meanwhile, are increasingly seeking to appear in specific sections of NPR.org. Ally Bank sponsorship ads, for example, appear on Planet Money. The cultural sections are an obvious sponsorship destination for cultural companies.

That's fine, but this is where geometry and arithmetic come into play. There are fewer ads on a Web page at any given time than in a similar print newspaper business or health section, for example, or on a television show. An online sponsorship is thus more singularly in-your face. Then comes this game of chance as described to me by Anya Grundmann, director and executive producer of NPR Music:

As you might expect, media coverage often coincides with the release date of an album, which is also when it's being promoted by record labels. The same thing happens when movie reviewers cover new films that are being heavily pushed by studios. This is how on occasion a sponsorship placement promoting a new album will appear next to an artist that's featured on the site. Because our content is so wide-ranging and is sourced from more than thirty different programs and stations across public radio, we cannot prevent all instances of overlap.

In other words, sponsorship ads, articles and reviews involving an album, movie or book all naturally land in the online cultural section at the same release-date time. They thus regularly appear on the same Web page, and by chance sometimes run adjacent to each other.

Producers and executives say that they try to limit the chances. On the radio, the executive producers and other top editors receive a list of sponsors for each show so that the editorial side can take scheduling action to avoid the appearance of potential conflicts. The Web is a different beast.

Wrote Grundmann:

The radio is a linear medium: you know when a sponsor is going to appear on ATC [All Things Considered]. It's scheduled into a clock. The show producers know what will appear before and after it. The Web is so different. We can have a dozen sponsors running across the NPR Music site at any time on the tens of thousands of pages that we must have by now. It's not possible at this time for us to control what appears next to what. We send out notes about our most high profile coverage so that [the sponsorship department] can be aware and catch the most egregious potential examples of duplication, on our First Listen series, for example, where our coverage of artists and record label marketing plans have the most potential to collide.

"It's a manual process," explained Steve Moss, CEO of National Public Media, which sells the corporate underwriting and is a partnership among NPR, PBS and WGBH of Boston. "While we are successful in preventing something like this in most cases, it's not a perfect system," he said.

It would seem that in this online roulette of ads and stories one could find a software or code-writing solution, but that apparently is much easier said than done. Bryan Moffett, NPR's Vice President of Digital Strategy and Ad Operations, explained the process in more detail. His description is heavy reading for someone not versed in website logistics, but it does explain how mistakes happen:

Nearly all label-related music sponsors have short "run of music" placements, which means they get rotated through all the content across the music site over a few weeks. My team keeps an eye on the weekly email updates from the music team that detail upcoming First Listens and special events. When they see a First Listen or special feature for a running sponsor that overlaps, we will exclude that specific page from the sponsor's campaign.

We do not pass specific meta-data about content to the ad server; just the overall topic or series. So for a page like that First Listen, the ad server only "knows" it's the First Listen series, not a First Listen of Esperanza. There's no way to automate an exclusion in that system. Each page has a unique ID number, however, which is what we use to exclude a specific page from a sponsor's campaign.

This means it's an after-the-fact process, since the page needs to be built and published before we have the information we need to target away from it. So, there is overlap in the process where the banner can appear on the page. And since orders as well as music events can come up on short notice, it's not perfect. It largely comes to someone on my team browsing through the site every day to look for them as time permits.

It's also worth noting that we only take this step for stand-out pieces like First Listens or major exclusive concerts, like the Shins event a few weeks back. The Music team is always creating new content in the form of news and reviews, and that content is promoted and referenced in multiple places across the Music site. It would be nearly impossible – and unnecessary – to always police to a standard that excludes a sponsor from a page that references the sponsor. The process outlined above is to handle the unique cases.

Any techies in the audience are welcome to propose alternatives. Until there is a practical way to resolve the technical inevitability of adjacent placements of ads and reviews, however, an explanatory note should be put on the pages. The good work of NPR's cultural reporters, reviewers, producers and editors deserves the extra protection to their reputation.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

In a recent segment on Weekend Edition Sunday, national political correspondent Mara Liasson sought to explain presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's lack of strong female support. "He's trailing women by 20 points. His problem is not stay-at-home moms, it's with educated women. He's trailing with college-educated women by almost 30 points," she said.

Her statement rightfully left some listeners irritated.

"Surely she knows many educated women stay at home, even give up careers, because they want to raise their children themselves," wrote Loretta Hess of Normal, IL.

Liasson herself agrees with the listeners and said she misspoke. She and her editors quickly caught the mistake. They corrected the error in subsequent broadcasts that aired in later times that same morning. Weekend Edition Sunday went one step further and aired a formal clarification during the letters segment the following week.

 

Their reaction was a good example of how to correct an error that was offensive to many listeners. Rather than add to their work, I'll just repeat their clarification, which some listeners might have missed.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Time now for Your Letters. Last Sunday, I spoke with NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson about the week in politics, and part of our conversation focused on a political the war of words. It started when Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, quote, "has never worked a day in her life." Many listeners took issue with Mara's analysis of the gender gap between Mitt Romney and President Obama.

Debora Hoard of Greenwood, Virginia, wrote: As I got ready to go to work this morning - work I do in part so I can have some flexibility to be home during the week - I heard Ms. Liasson say Romney's problem is not with stay-at-home moms, but with educated women. Ouch. She writes: Are these really separate categories?

And Allaire Diamond of Williston, Vermont, adds: These groups are not mutually exclusive. I proudly count myself among the large group of college-educated women who have chosen to dedicate ourselves, full- or part-time, for a year or a lifetime, to the work of raising our children. A woman's life and career, especially when children are involved, is extraordinarily complex and it's insulting to have it reduced to these rough categories, especially by someone that I normally hold in high regard.

We asked Mara about the point she was making and here's her response.

MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Our listeners are right. I misspoke and that's one reason why we corrected the interview for later feeds of the show. What I was trying to say was that while Romney has an overall deficit with women voters, his biggest disadvantage is with college educated women - wherever they work, at home, in an office, a store or a factory.

MARTIN: As Mara said, we re-recorded our interview for later feeds, and that is the interview of record at NPR.org.

A correction was posted on NPR.org that acknowledges the error and the modification. This is standard procedure for any correction. But NPR is at its heart a radio organization, which is why Weekend Edition Sunday was right to also transmit Liasson's clarification over the airwaves.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

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When it comes to raw milk, even a simple story can turn sour on some listeners. There's an ongoing controversy over raw milk's safety. Proponents hail its taste and nutrients. Adversaries worry about deadly food-borne diseases. Government regulators are caught in between, accused of being too lax, too stiff or too in bed with Big Dairy.

Then there is NPR. Its science and health reporters are familiar with the debate; you can find their ongoing coverage primarily on The Salt, NPR's food blog. But concerns didn't reach me until Bonny Wolf, a regular food commentator for NPR, did a short piece for Weekend Edition Sunday in which she described her first sip.

"It didn't taste like a bad idea. It tasted like milk - fresh, rich milk," she said.

That approving statement—and the commentary that followed—left some listeners feeling as though Wolf did the audience a dangerous disservice.

 

"How could this qualify as reporting on NPR?," wrote Jo Ann Lutz from Durham, NC. "The article implied that the government is wrong to require milk to be pasteurized and that the nutrients in raw milk are very important."

"Where were the facts?," Lutz added. "What are the illnesses the government is worried about?"

Orpheus Allison wrote from as far away as Guangzhou, China, to say Wolf's commentary "exacerbates a growing ignorance at where diseases enter the food stream."

Full disclosure: I am no virgin in this controversy. I have drunk raw camel milk in the desert of Mauritania, raw goat milk in dirt-road villages in Colombia and raw cow milk in lots of places. I regularly buy European cheeses made from raw milk of cows, goats and sheep. My mother, who was raised in rural Colombia on raw goat milk that she milked herself, is a healthy 90 years old and still lights up with joy when she describes the pleasures as a girl of squirting the milk into her mouth straight from the teat.

My anecdotal experience is hardly empirical, and you will have to judge for yourself whether you think that I am misguided by bias. Wolf in her report did correctly cite a cautionary study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and a warning from the Food and Drug Administration about the dangers of raw milk. She did not dismiss the reports as somehow wrong.

"My purpose was to call attention to what I've perceived as an increasingly visible controversy over the raw milk issue," she wrote to me, and that is just what she did. As it is, it's legal to sell raw milk in some form in about 30 states. She didn't say one side was right or wrong, but she did try raw milk herself, and, well, it tasted good to her. She left the science to be decided.

In a two-minute format, I thought that she and her editor Geoff Bennett did a good job in being interesting, fair and informative. The light touch was not inappropriate.

Yes, the pasteurization of milk was one of the great public health achievements of humankind. Modern urban societies are hardly structured for the proper care of raw milk, and neither are many farms. China is a perfect example today of poor food regulation and what can happen with adulterated foods. Food poisoning scandals there have even threatened the government's legitimacy. But none of this is to say that raw milk is a priori bad.

Through organic and back-to-the-earth movements, we as a society are feeling our way in trying to find a re-balance with industrial food production. We haven't settled on a balance yet, and may never. But we do have the luxury of a trustworthy government and regulatory protection—at least trustworthy enough so that NPR and the news media can, on occasion, make light of the choices. While passions among advocates on both sides may be high, I suspect that most of us accept that we are not facing Armageddon in this story.

NPR, meanwhile, has done longer, more serious stories on the science itself. When the CDC issued a report in March about how unpasteurized dairy products can cause diseases such as E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria, Nancy Shute wrote about it for The Salt. This followed up on an earlier web story, "Raw Milk Movement Takes Hits from Courts, Health Officials." Less has been done on air, however.

Finally, Wolf is a commentator—and was described as such in the introduction to her piece. By design she can take some liberty in her reports. Her role is different from that of a reporter. We want to hear her expert opinion, though it is supposed to be supported by facts and analysis, and only in her fields of expertise. Wolf, a food journalist and critic for more than 30 years, correctly gave a food opinion: to her, the milk tasted good. But also correctly, she didn't take a stance on the science, which is not her expertise. Other familiar NPR commentators include Frank Deford, Cokie Roberts, David Brooks and EJ Dionne.

But I will say that many members of our audience are literate and insightful. Maybe food issues bring out the best passions in all of us. Below are some of the comments on both sides of the issue. You will enjoy them. Please add your own.

Stephannie Stokes contributed to this report.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

Former foreign editor John Felton conducts quarterly reviews of NPR's Israeli-Palestinian coverage. His 2012 first quarter report is now available online.

Felton reviewed 71 radio segments and 46 Web-only reports for accuracy, variety of voices, fairness, and balance. In general, Felton found that the coverage of the region was consistently accurate, but noted that—as usual—listeners heard more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones. "The scarcity of Palestinian voices reflects the ongoing lack of coverage of the West Bank and Gaza, certainly in relation to Israel," he wrote.

NPR devoted 41 of the radio segments to coverage of Iran's nuclear program. Felton found that NPR presented a broad range of views on the topic, although listeners heard directly from an Iranian official only once. The majority of reports used caution and reflected sensitivity to the subject. Felton praised Talk of the Nation specifically for airing "the most comprehensive coverage" with seven conversations about Iran's nuclear program.

However, Felton did find two instances of imprecision, including a March 7 interview with Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. All Things Considered host Robert Siegel should have more directly challenged Oren's false claim that "the Iranian regime is openly saying it wants these [nuclear] weapons to wipe Israel off the map." He also suggested that NPR should provide a more adequate history of diplomacy over Iran's nuclear ambitions, noting that this conversation has been happening for more than a decade.

I encourage you to read the complete review. Quarterly reviews going back to 2008 are also available online.

John Felton prepares the quarterly evaluations. He has covered international affairs and U.S. foreign policy for more than 30 years. His most recent book, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, was published by CQ Press in 2007. A former foreign affairs reporter for Congressional Quarterly and foreign editor at NPR, he has been a freelance writer and editor since 1995.

Minority hiring is a sensitive issue. Since posting my column last night on race and ethnicity at NPR, I have been able to get more numbers on NPR's staffing that I am posting separately here, while updating the original column so that it is whole. What I find, contrary to criticisms that moved me to look, is that NPR is doing at least OK, and arguably very well.

Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Hawaiian Islanders—or "people of color"—make up 23 percent of NPR's newsroom. This means reporters, editors, producers and managers, according to NPR's Human resources Department. This compares to just 7 percent for radio in general, according to a survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University. The television news industry average approaches that of NPR at a rounded off 20 percent. Daily newspapers fall far behind at 13 percent, according to a survey by the American Society of News Editors.

 

Seen another way, NPR falls short. People of color make up roughly 28 percent of the adult population, compared to their 23 percent representation in the newsroom. But once again, the more important measure is by staffers with college degrees, as almost all journalist and management positions require one.

People of color in 2010 made up roughly 20 percent of Americans with college degrees, according to Kaplan. She pulls her numbers from the demographic source widely used by news media organizations, the GfK MRI Doublebase, which in turn reflects U.S. Census numbers. This 20 percent overall compares to the 23 percent of NPR reporters, editors, producers and managers who are people of color.

NPR does not quantitatively collect staff education levels, but almost all—if not all—of these journalists and managers have college degrees. We thus can feel confident that we are pretty much—and perhaps totally—comparing apples to apples. The newsroom numbers I use, moreover, do not include support staff that does administrative work. In other words, we are just looking at the people who bring you the news, and therefore control it.

Seen this way, NPR shines in its minority hiring.

Let's look more closely at each individual racial and ethnic minority group. Seven percent of U.S. college graduates are African American. Blacks make up 12 percent of the newsroom—much more than their 7 percent weight among college graduates. Hispanics, however, are slightly under-represented. They make up six percent of the Americans with college degrees but five percent of the newsroom. Asians do exactly the reverse. They are five percent of Americans with degrees and six percent of the newsroom. The Native American sample size is too small to draw many conclusions.

There is one person among NPR's journalists and managers who said he or she was Native American, according to Human Resources. This is 0.2 percent of the newsroom, compared to the 0.6 percent of college graduates who are Native American.

Given the large black population in Washington, D.C., where NPR is headquartered, it may make sense that they are the largest minority group in the newsroom. I haven't looked into this. My anecdotal sense, however, is that black males—as opposed to black women—are under-represented, but that is a separate issue.

The bottom line here is that in terms of the nation's largest racial and ethnic minority groups—blacks, Latinos and Asians—NPR staffing may have arrived. Why do I hedge by saying "may"? You need college graduates to produce the level of NPR's journalism. Many staffers actually have graduate degrees. But to "sound like America," does NPR need a staff that more closely mirrors the total demographic weight of each ethnic and minority group?

I don't think so, but I recognize the legitimacy of the tension among reflecting the American population, reflecting NPR's target audience and reflecting journalism's talent pool. There is no one good answer. But I think it is safe to say that in resolving this tension, NPR is not doing badly, and possibly very well. By my way of thinking, it is truly doing well.

Related charts are in the original post.

When NPR announced the hiring of Gary Knell as CEO in October, Joel Dreyfuss of The Root, an African-American oriented website, published an open letter challenging Knell and NPR to work harder to diversify its staff and programming. Dreyfuss said he wanted NPR to be "a reflection of the America I live in," which, of course, is part of public radio's mission.

Dreyfuss's demand has been a running one for decades among some racial and ethnic minority advocates and listeners. Discrimination lawsuits, messy firings and various diversity attempts helped fuel the attention. So, over recent months, I have been building my own notes in an attempt to measure just how good a job NPR is doing now. What I find so far is that, racially and ethnically, NPR is not doing badly, and is getting better.

 

To see if Latino, black and Asian listeners find programming that appeals to them, I broke down NPR audience figures by higher education and income. I discovered that within these categories, the levels of representation of the minority groups and whites are not far apart. Minority staffing in the newsroom and on air, meanwhile, continues to improve. NPR does significantly better than the industry averages in radio, television and newspapers. But then, we expect NPR to do better.

Knell has publicly committed himself to further improve diversity, not just of race and ethnicity, but also of age, geography and what he calls "thought." He is aided by the vice president for diversity, Keith Woods, whose role has taken on greater internal importance in the wake of the fiasco over the firing of Juan Williams.

Additionally, Ellen McDonnell, the executive director who oversees the news shows, is in the midst of creating and implementing a strategy to push the shows, as she puts it, "to bring in more diverse voices to reflect the rich diversity of this country." Her effort follows on similar earlier projects, but brings a methodological strategy that she is developing with Columbia University's schools of business and journalism.

With national elections approaching in November, the political coverage in particular is too Washington-focused and filled with white voices, she said. She doesn't want to eliminate those voices, she said, but explained: "That lens is too narrow."

In my own study, I don't actually quantify a breakdown of the news coverage by race, and to my knowledge no one else has either. I tried, but found that it is impossible to classify stories as black, Latino or Asian. Most stories cross over and are of interest to many groups—even stories that might focus primarily on one racial group. There were so many caveats that any numbers I tried to come up with were useless.

But I do have a separate caveat. To look at race and ethnicity does not mean that I believe NPR should write any goals into stone. Race and ethnicity still matter in America, but less as time goes by. I used to teach immigration policy at Harvard, and that background tells me that the United States is the single most successful example in world history of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society. Sociologists and market researchers today have identified what some call "a new mainstream" in which the educated and the young identify with each other more than with their ethnic and racial roots, though the roots don't disappear.

Indeed, I am also trying to follow how NPR is doing in covering the white working and middle class. My sense is that the national news media, of which NPR is part, has done a poor job in recent decades of covering this segment of Americans. The recent coverage of the Tea Party, which to some degree represents this group, has been mostly political, not social in character. I am a critic of some of Charles Murray's earlier books, but feel that he is on to something in his latest, Coming Apart. His study uncovers a huge cultural chasm that has opened between poor and working class whites, on the one hand, and upper income and highly educated whites on the other. This latter group includes most national journalists.

Looking at NPR, the overwhelming majority of its radio audience is in fact white –roughly 87 percent, according to research pulled together for me by Lori Kaplan of NPR's Audience, Insight and Research Department. This is substantially higher than the 77 percent of adult Americans (18 and older) who are white. Asian-Americans make up nearly 4 percent of the audience, but roughly 3 percent of the adult population. African-Americans and Latinos, however, are under-represented among NPR's listeners. Blacks make up nearly 12 percent of the adult population but just a little more than 5 percent of NPR listeners. For Hispanics, the numbers are 14 percent versus 6 percent.

Fine. But irrelevant.

Using the total adult population is the wrong baseline. NPR appeals overwhelmingly to college-educated Americans. As you can see in the accompanying chart, more than two-thirds of NPR listeners have a college degree, compared to less than one-third of all Americans. Because college graduates earn more than people with just a high school degree or less, the NPR audience trends to higher-than-average income, too. Forty-five percent of listeners have a household income of more than $100,000 a year. A quarter of all American households earn that much.

The sophistication of its audience—combined with its sheer size of more than 25 million people listening to an NPR program each week—reflects the trust in NPR news, as well as the appeal of its storytelling. Whether these listeners have a college degree or not, they are smart, informed, interested in the world around them and they tend to be opinion leaders. It is an audience that has few or no other alternatives for independent and fair news on radio. It is also the audience that NPR wisely goes after.

So, it seems to me that the important question in looking at minority listenership is what percent of the audience is NPR attracting among college graduates within each racial and ethnic category. I went back to Lori Kaplan. The gaps now narrow significantly.

This chart shows adult listeners with a college degree in the four principle racial and ethnic categories. The first bar records what percent within each group listens to NPR at least once a week, regardless of income. The second bar measures listenership in households that earn more than $100,000 a year.

What you see is that the groups aren't so far apart in how they index. Among all income levels, more than 11 percent of whites with a college degree listen to NPR. This compares to 9 percent of Asians with a college degree, nearly 7 percent of Hispanics and 6 percent of blacks.

The gap is even narrower among those with household incomes of more than $100,000. Asians in this category actually out-index whites. Nine percent of these wealthier college educated Asians listen to NPR, compared to less than 8 percent of whites. The percentage among Latinos is close behind at slightly more than 6 percent, followed by African-Americans at 5 percent.

In an ideal world, the same percentage of all groups would listen to NPR. This would imply that the programming and news coverage speaks to them equally. Many factors might explain the current differences, among them marketing. But the size of the gaps suggest that while NPR should work to close them, the differences are not major.

A qualifier: Some audience members list belonging to more than one race or ethnic group. The number of people who do this is small and doesn't substantially change the above results.

This then brings us to staffing. Diversity in staffing is important for two reasons. One, it assures that there are voices in the newsroom raising the concerns and points of view of different segments of our society. Two, it assures that all listeners hear voices with which they can identify on air, making NPR their radio. Your radio.

Woods said it best in a speech at the University of Colorado Boulder this past week:

Let me speak first in terms of ideals. Journalism is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. That's how attached it is historically to democracy. Freedom of the press carries with it an incumbent responsibility that tends to get lost in the noise that sometimes envelops conversations about the First Amendment...

My profession does not always act responsibly. But the ideal that underlies our actions, honorable or otherwise, is simple, evergreen, and at its core, democratic. That ideal is expressed in the three ethical pillars upon which responsible journalism stands:

Tell the truth as fully as possible;

Remain independent of undue influence;

Minimize harm to vulnerable people;

So if you ask, "Why does it matter that journalism 'sounds like America,' " I would say this: Because that is how ethical journalism sounds. Tell the truth as fully as possible means you have to seek out that truth wherever it will be found.

Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Hawaiian Islanders, or "people of color," make up 23 percent of NPR's newsroom, meaning reporters, editors, producers and managers, according to NPR's Human resources Department. This compares to just 7 percent for radio in general, according to a survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University. The television news industry average approaches that of NPR at a rounded off 20 percent. Daily newspapers fall far behind at 13 percent, according to a survey by the American Society of News Editors.

Seen another way, NPR falls short. People of color make up roughly 28 percent of the adult population, compared to their 23 percent representation in the newsroom. But once again, the more important measure is by staffers with college degrees, as almost all journalist and management positions require one.

People of color in 2010 made up roughly 20 percent of Americans with college degrees, according to Kaplan. She pulls her numbers from the demographic source widely used by news media organizations, the GfK MRI Doublebase, which in turn reflects U.S. Census numbers. This 20 percent overall compares to the 23 percent of NPR reporters, editors, producers and managers who are people of color.

NPR does not quantify the education levels of its staff, but almost all—if not all—of these journalists and managers have college degrees. We thus can feel confident that we are pretty much—and perhaps totally—comparing apples to apples. The newsroom numbers I use, moreover, do not include support staff that does administrative work. In other words, we are just looking at the people who bring you the news, and therefore control it.

Seen this way, NPR shines in its minority hiring.

Let's look more closely at each individual racial and ethnic minority group. Seven percent of U.S. college graduates are African American. Blacks make up 12 percent of the newsroom—much more than their 7 percent weight among college graduates. Hispanics, however, are slightly under-represented. They make up six percent of the Americans with college degrees but five percent of the newsroom. Asians do exactly the reverse. They are five percent of Americans with degrees and six percent of the newsroom. The Native American sample size is too small to draw many conclusions. There is one person among NPR's journalists and managers who said he or she was Native American, according to Human Resources. This is 0.2 percent of the newsroom, compared to the 0.6 percent of college graduates who are Native American.

Given the large black population in Washington, D.C., where NPR is headquartered, it may make sense that they are the largest minority group in the newsroom. I haven't looked into this. My anecdotal sense, however, is that black males—as opposed to black women—are under-represented, but that is a separate issue.

The bottom line here is that in terms of the nation's largest racial and ethnic minority groups—blacks, Latinos and Asians—NPR staffing may have arrived. Why do I hedge by saying "may"? You need college graduates to produce the level of NPR's journalism. Many staffers actually have graduate degrees.

But to "sound like America," does NPR need a staff that more closely mirrors the total demographic weight of each ethnic and minority group?

I don't think so, but I recognize the legitimacy of the tension among the three goals of reflecting the American population, reflecting NPR's target audience and reflecting journalism's talent pool. There is no one good answer. But I think it is safe to say that in resolving this tension, NPR is not doing badly, and possibly very well. By my way of thinking, it is truly doing well.

The following chart with information prepared for me by the Human Resources Department further breaks down NPR's newsroom by racial and ethnic categories, and by managers, journalists and support staff.

What follows are two charts that give more detail on NPR staffing, according to NPR's Human Resources Department. The first chart separates journalists, senior editors or managers, and support staff. The second chart includes all of NPR's staff. As you can see, people of color are distributed throughout the hierarchy and are strongly represented among senior management.

I am a news ombudsman, not a corporate one, and so I consider NPR's non-news staffing and corporate management to be outside my purview. But as all the numbers were given to me by Human Resources, I pass them on to you. In general, the numbers update NPR data released in 2009 for all departments and represent a small but respectable improvement in two years. This is especially so in upper management, production and editorial positions.

I can also say with certainty that NPR has a Latino ombudsman, its first.

In the coming weeks, I will be doing a quantitative regional bias study and a qualitative look at who gets interviewed on air. I welcome suggestions on other ways to analyze diversity.

Methodology

2010 and 2011 Doublebase GfK MRI: MRI data generally has a 5% margin of error. The sample size is 52,000 persons across the US and the data source is used extensively across US Media organizations.

From MRI on how respondents select their race:

It is up to the respondent to decide. We show the respondent a card and ask: please tell me the number next to the race or races you consider yourself to be. There are 5 options: White, Black/African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian or Other.

Learn more about the 2010 Doublebase GfK MRI online.

Arbitron Nationwide:

(ACT 1 based on Arbitron Nationwide, Persons 12+, Fall 2011, Monday‐Sunday Midnight‐Midnight)

The Arbitron numbers are based on two different methodologies — a 7 day paper diary which relies on recall and a passive meter carrying device. The total surveyed between the two Arbitron methodologies, is approximately 350,000 persons across the U.S.

Lori Grisham contributed to this report.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

You're invited to use this space to discuss media, policy and NPR's journalism. We'll follow the conversation and share it with the newsroom.

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• If you can't be polite, don't say it: ...please try to disagree without being disagreeable. Focus your remarks on positions, not personalities.

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Last week we explored whether the word Christian has come to be synonymous with conservative. It seems to be in the entertainment and news industries. But Christians, who make up more than 78 percent of Americans, have a wide spectrum of political views and ideologies, and many responded thoughtfully. In the interest of both accuracy and fostering national comity, what follows are some of those comments. There is no consensus yet on labeling, but please continue the discussion with me and NPR.

Religion News Service's Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief, wrote:

One of the problems with reporting on religion that it is often done by journalists who don't know the terrain. There are obviously different kinds of football players, and different kinds of businesses and different kinds of doctors. No one would confuse Tim Tebow with a guy who plays for a neighborhood pick-up league, or mistake Citibank for Joe's Pawn Shop.

The problem with religion reporting, though, is that journalists unfamiliar with the field sometimes confuse and conflate different kinds of Christians, whether writing about politics, films, beliefs, leaders, etc. Religion is a beat where details and nuance matter a great deal, and often they get lost in the shuffle.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, shared his thoughts. Acton Institute, a think tank located in Grand Rapids, MI, supports smaller government and free market economics informed by "religious faith and moral absolutes." An excerpt from Sirico's response:

Asking "Who are the Christians?" is less an existential query than a question about partisan branding: What political group gets to claim the word for themselves—and exclude others from its rightful use? The irony is that many mainstream groups wish to recover the franchise at a time when several historically Christian organizations (such as the YMCA) are attempting to distance themselves from the Christian brand. Mr. [Schumacher-Matos] claims that "politically and socially conservative Christians have in fact co-opted the title." But perhaps they never really abandoned it while the politically and socially liberal Christians discarded it, embracing instead, the sort of Christianity that Niebuhr (H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Kingdom of God in America") so memorably described as, "A God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

 

Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly published two blog posts on the subject—Stealing Christianity and Stealing Christianity Redux. Kilgore, a mainline Protestant, belongs to a denomination called the Christian Church. He said the name reflects the founders' desire to be inclusive and "resist inter-denominational conflict." He wrote:

Now it's an unfortunate but inescapable fact that many (though hardly all) conservative evangelicals use the term in an exclusive as opposed to an inclusive sense, rejecting in particular the idea that mainline Protestants are authentically "Christian" because we do not typically embrace biblical inerrancy or treat involvement in conservative cultural and political causes as matters of doctrinal orthodoxy. While conservatives are free to make that aggressive and divisive claim, but it is historically inaccurate and morally dubious.

...

Mainline Protestants (and Catholics, and Orthodox) are generally happy to share the term "Christian" with evangelicals, who hardly "had it first." If they must distinguish themselves, an adjective or two is not too much to ask, and the same is true of journalists talking to or about them.

For yet another perspective, Andrew Maddocks from my office spoke with Sam Fulwood, a veteran journalist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.

"There's no question in my mind that 'Christian' has been appropriated by the political right, to the point that Christians don't recognize it's been done," he said. While the Republican right appealed to family values and tried to engrain morality and spirituality in the public sphere, the left became perceived as secularists, or even "anti-religious at worst." The media, Fulwood said, bought into that, largely because in the days of paramount objectivity—particularly the 40s, 50s and 60s—religious topics made the media so uncomfortable they refused to engage in conversations. When they finally did, he said, they got it wrong.

That shift is "all very unfortunate, because in some ways it is a gross misunderstanding of history," he said. Fulwood is an African American, and is high on what he called a "Christian religion index." He thinks most other African Americans would be too. The church was an important part of the civil rights movement, liberation theology and state intervention to help the poor—ideas that in a contemporary context are considered on the "left."

Now, "If you say you're Christian, you're a Republican—before, if you were Christian you were liberal," Fulwood said. Fulwood thought that in this segment NPR should have said "conservative Christian" or "right-leaning Christian" to describe the film. Fulwood wanted the Christianity described in the film interview differentiated from the church he attends—a progressive church. He understood that David Greene was describing a genre, but Fulwood asked whether the average listener would know that genre exists. He thought she or he would not.

So, in conveying a too-narrow definition of "Christian," Fulwood thought the report did not describe the Christianity reflected in "October Baby" as accurately and fairly as possible.

Blog readers also contributed valuable feedback both here and on Facebook. I appreciated reading the scope of responses. A selection:

Alex Miller (3_1415926) wrote:
...It really comes down to the fact that our language encourages us to stereotype and lump people together. The mechanism by which someone comes to the conclusion "black kids wearing hoodies are dangerous" is the exact same mechanism that allows others to say "Christians are conservative bigots". This "mechanism" is, of course, mere laziness. So I simply encourage everyone to use their language more carefully, and not be lazy when it comes to describing subtleties and complexities.

Thomas O'Reilly (Toreilly) wrote:
Thank you NPR for starting this discussion. In my own Evangelical community, we are having this debate of whether true Evangelicals can be liberals. Liberal Evangelicals are fighting against an echo chamber of Fox News, WND, and talk radio that says that people who do not hold to a politically conservative persuasion are trying to directly attack God and Christianity. In as much as Evangelicals' primary identity tends to be rooted in their faith, I don't think it was wrong to call the film a Christian film. If you called a Sunni or a Sufi film a Muslim film, it would still be accurate. However, there are some of us Christians who are sensitive to the perceived inference that only the Religious Right are true Christians.

Angela Nelson (AngelaJoyNelson) wrote:
"Christian" as it is used in media and marketing, is simply that: media marketing. Take something you want to sell and apply the label of 'Christian' if you want to reach a particular audience and it will sell, regardless of its quality, because labels sell...

Patricia Tush Bass wrote:
Thank you for this piece. As a "progressive" Christian minister, I am increasingly concerned that the use of the word "Christian" is being used in exclusive ways, implying that everyone who is "Christian" thinks identically politically and socially.

We tried to pick not just responses, but representative ones. There were many, many more that were worth highlighting. If you are interesting in reading more, you can find many of them on the Ombudsman Facebook page and in the comments of the original column. I look forward to your additional thoughts, including on what might be an agreed way to label Christians with different political and social views.

Who are "the Christians"?

This beguilingly simple question was provoked by a Morning Edition report in which host David Greene referred to an anti-abortion movie, "October Baby", as a "Christian film." Many Christians objected. They didn't identify with the movie or its message.

"I've been troubled for years that conservative, evangelical Christians have appropriated the name 'Christian' as if Christians holding progressive views don't exist," wrote Theodore Johnson of Basye, VA. "In today's story, the reporter seemed to go along with that fiction by using the word 'Christian' without adding 'conservative' or 'evangelical' or some other words to indicate that these are Christians with one point of view that isn't held by everyone who consider themselves Christians."

Johnson's point is more than valid. But Greene's response was also valid.

"'Christian' is a well-established modifier when describing a genre in filmmaking, as well as a genre in music," he wrote me. "There's an award for Christian music at the Grammys, for example. Amazon and other retailers classify Christian movies as a category for sales."

 

"We absolutely accept the point that 'October Baby', with its message on abortion, could have been classified in other ways – perhaps as a socially conservative film, for example," he added. "But this was a piece about a very broad genre."

What we have, then, is a question that goes beyond NPR to what should be a national debate over how to use the word "Christian." A truly useful debate would extend even further, to what it means to be Christian, given that nearly 80 percent of Americans claim to be one.

I have not done an empirical content analysis of the entertainment and news media to know whether politically and socially conservative Christians have in fact co-opted the title. But I suspect that most of us agree that they have.

Note, for example, Greene's interview with the director of "October Baby", Jon Erwin:

GREENE: Given that there are a lot of people in this country who have been, you know, drawn to movies like this in the last few years, given, you say, that a lot of them don't feel welcome in Hollywood - I mean is there a sort of culture war developing in movie-making right now?

ERWIN: That's a great question. You know, I think there can be. Certainly a lot of the values that are portrayed in entertainment are not values that I was raised in. Certainly I was raised in the South in a Christian home and family. And I can't speak to the whole Hollywood community. I mean, certainly there's a lot of different companies. I do think that as a rule, kind of the aggregate product coming out of Hollywood is something that can be deeply offensive to people like myself. And I think Christians have kind of sat back and we've complained a bit. And I think now we're realizing that instead we need to engage and we need to make, you know, quality work.

Erwin takes it as a given that Christians are people who think like he does, and Greene doesn't challenge him. Later in the segment, Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond gets even more specific about what are Christian versus leftist beliefs:

If you dissect the political messages in most Hollywood films where there is a political message, it's a left-leaning political message. Look at all the children's films, for example, where the rich guy is always the bad guy, where the environment is always being despoiled by, you know, the American military or the American rich guy.

But contrast this to a memorable 2005 essay in Harper's Magazine written by Bill McKibben, a self-proclaimed leftist, environmental activist:

A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to "preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history"—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be "making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."

The essay was titled "The Christian Paradox: How A Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong." It was resurrected this week by Timothy Noah in The New Republic in criticism of the Morning Edition segment. Noah adds:

McKibben is a political liberal, but in times past not even conservatives necessarily thought that Christianity was principally about sexual abstinence, smaller government, and preparing for the End Times. Frank Capra, whose films express Christian themes of solidarity with working people and contempt for the pampered, indifferent rich, was a lifelong Republican. The small-c word "christian" meant "charitable" or "compassionate." It has now fallen into such disuse that one Web site defines it, disapprovingly, as "someone who leads an outwardly Christian life, but does not acknowledge Christ as savior"—in other words, a lousy hypocrite.

Beginning in the 1990s, politically active Christians who once called themselves the "religious right," "Christian right" or "conservative Christians" came to find those terms as pejoratives. This was much like people on the left came to think of the label "liberal." The liberals became "progressives." The politically conservative Christians called themselves just Christians.

Everyone, of course, has a right to name themselves what they want. It is up to us, however, in the broader public and the news media to decide whether to go along. To portray yourself as the only or true Christians is, as Noah puts it, "terribly presumptuous." Noah goes further:

To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It's a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that's too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.

I don't know that the Christian right consciously "sold it" or that the news media is overly sensitive to charges of anti-religious bias. But the latter at least rings true, however subconscious it might be among journalists. Certainly it's a good reminder that reporters and editors at NPR and elsewhere should re-think their terminology, including in reporting on the so-called Christian genres of movies and music. The Associated Press Stylebook used by NPR, like The New York Times' style book, offers no guidance. I am hoping that readers of all Christian persuasions might by responding here.

Underlining the need for accuracy are polls showing the divisions among Christians about what they—or all of you who are Christian—really do believe.

Just about 78 percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to a series of recent surveys by the authoritative and non-advocate Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The two largest groups of Christians are the 26 percent that self-identify as white Evangelicals and the 24 percent as Catholic. This is followed by 18 percent mainline Protestants, seven percent black Protestants, two percent Mormons and a smattering of others.

None of these groups are politically homogenous, however. Catholics are the most equally divided in party terms. Forty-eight percent said they leaned Democrat, versus 43 percent Republican in a Pew survey. But even a quarter of Evangelicals, the base of the Christian right, said they lean Democrat. And while mainline Protestants are widely seen as liberal, 51 percent lean Republican, according to Pew.

The division on specific issues is especially unpredictable. Abortion rights is a good example. A third of white evangelicals say abortion should be legal, Pew reported. Slightly more than half of Catholics do. A sizeable percentage of mainline Protestants—some 37 percent—say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

The Pew surveys were conducted in 2007, 2011 and 2012. The margin of error for each of the statistics ranges between +/-1.5 percent and +/-7.5 percent— the Mormon statistics had the highest margins of error due to their smaller sample size.

Stephannie Stokes contributed to this report.

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

My recent post about acknowledgment of sponsors in news reports provoked hundreds of responses and a lively debate on the blog and on Facebook. Some made me squirm and go back to read what I wrote. Almost all the responses were sharp and smart, as one would expect from NPR readers and listeners. So, I thought I might summarize some of the main objections and try to answer them here.

 

1. "You either trust NPR's reporters and editors to be impartial, or you don't" is equivalent to saying "take it or leave it" to NPR's listeners. This statement is dismissive of listeners' concerns.

Response: Taken by itself, the tone of that statement is indeed dismissive. I was worried when I read those complaints that in taking a clear stance, I had communicated something I had not intended. After re-reading the column, I don't think I did so. I know that I had no intention to be dismissive. I genuinely take to heart all your comments. I am fully aware that I can be wrong. But here is the full statement of what I said. You decide if this sounds dismissive:

There is no way to totally eliminate the appearance of all conflicts of interest, and sometimes the conflict itself. Any system comes down at some point to trust. You either trust NPR's reporters and editors to be impartial, or you don't.

This is not to say that when a reporter or editor has a personal or professional stake in a story that it should be allowed. It shouldn't. This is also not to say that if for some reason a conflict is unavoidable, it should not be disclosed. It should. The new handbook is admirably clear on this.....

And then further down in the post:

And even if disclosure were done, you still have to trust that the NPR staffers involved didn't shade the story one way or the other because of the sponsor. This is what I mean by how it always comes down to trust in the end.

Audience trust is what any news operation must maintain above all. This is why NPR has an ombudsman, so that you know that someone independent is actually listening to criticisms you have of any shortcomings in NPR news reports and investigates them. I don't always agree with the criticisms, however, and you wouldn't expect that of me. What some listeners and readers don't like, moreover, others do. I hope that you see that whichever side I come down on, however right or wrong I might be, that I take great pains to investigate your criticisms and parse the nuances of what I find. I often am uncertain, say so and ask you for your guidance. I do all this out of respect for the sophistication of NPR's audience.

In this particular case, I wasn't suggesting that listeners either be satisfied with NPR's standards and programming or stop listening. Rather, I intended to convey that even if NPR reporters and hosts made every possible on-air disclosure, the public must ultimately put some trust in the organization that is delivering the news.

Journalists, meanwhile, must continually work to retain the trust of their listeners by adhering to the highest journalistic standards of fairness, accuracy and impartiality. The firewall between the money and editorial sides of NPR must remain impregnable. We must all be alert for the slightest breach.

2. Of course, NPR should disclose its sponsors. This post proves NPR is selling out.

Response: NPR already discloses each and every corporate sponsor publicly. You know who they are because you hear the sponsor announcements on the air or see their sponsorship banners and boxes on the web. They also are listed publicly in one convenient place in the annual report on NPR's website. None are secret.

3. Acknowledgment is not as complicated or difficult as the post suggests. If a simple acknowledgment would put NPR's audience at ease, NPR should do so. That would build trust. It's too hard isn't an excuse.

Response: As stated above, there already is disclosure. To add more acknowledgment in news stories takes away valuable time and space from reporting the news itself. Which would you prefer? I come down on the side of not cluttering news items and shows with rote announcements that become meaningless with time and that to me are unnecessary for transparency. I think most listeners agree.

But there are times when the connection between a news item and a company's sponsorship is so direct that additional acknowledgement may be required to defuse what could be a strong appearance of a conflict of interest. This is the case, for example, when a company—or a foundation—sponsors a section of the news and that company or foundation is in a news item. This very concern has come up with bank sponsorship of Planet Money reports. Few rules can cover all cases. NPR's new Ethics Handbook is being revised to come up with principles to help guide editors in deciding what sorts of sponsor connections appear to be so direct as to require this additional disclosure. I look forward to seeing the language of the revisions.

4. The insipidness of the 5-Hour Energy segment proves a corporate bias that goes hand-in-hand with my protecting sponsors.

Response: I will let my conclusion on the 5-Hour Energy segment speak for itself:

But to not even mention that the health risks for adults and, especially, students are so front and center in today's public debate seems to me to be such an obvious omission. It turns the segment into such a puff piece that it is no wonder listeners questioned a conflict of interest. This was, at best, unfortunate.

In fairness, the piece was a business one that tried to profile the curious and little known Indian-born founder of the company that makes the energy drink. It did so by interviewing a magazine reporter who had written about the founder. The segment didn't work well. But not all of them do. As they say, things happen.

If anything, the piece stood out because so much of what NPR does is of such high standards. That, at least, is my humble opinion. What's yours?

Please continue the discussion on Twitter @SchumacherMatos or at my Facebook page.

You're invited to use this space to discuss media, policy and NPR's journalism. We'll follow the conversation and share it with the newsroom.

Please stay within the community discussion rules, among them:

• If you can't be polite, don't say it: ...please try to disagree without being disagreeable. Focus your remarks on positions, not personalities.

• ...This is not a place for advertising, promotion, recruiting, campaigning, lobbying, soliciting or proselytizing. We understand that there can be a fine line between discussing and campaigning; please use your best judgment — and we will use ours.