CURRENTS
Public Radio: Firewalls and Funding
The session on “Business and Journalism Values” at the annual Public Radio Conference in Washington last spring promised to be serious. Ponderous, even. Then Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR ombudsman, sashayed into the room in a judge’s robe and white wig, waving a gavel.
“Why not have some fun?” asked Dvorkin, one of three judges for an in-house version of the NPR game show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! The idea was to use the game-show format as a way to navigate the tangle of ethical dilemmas that have cropped up in recent years.
So three teams — program and news directors, general managers, and development directors — grappled with questions based on actual situations. What should a station do if a philanthropist offers a large grant to produce a news series on his favorite issue? Can reporters be assigned to “publicize” a bill that would be of great benefit to a station? What if reporters and editors at a station think they are offering fair coverage of a war, but a major donor threatens to boycott if the station doesn’t “balance” its coverage and tilt in the funder’s direction?
As government funding for public radio has dwindled in the last decade, stations have been forced to replace it with private money. This, in turn, has led to new partnerships, sometimes with businesses and foundations that have an interest in what gets broadcast. At the same time, NPR and much of public radio has moved from being an alternative news source to a mainstream one, ratcheting up the stakes for advertisers and sponsors (“underwriters” and “funders”) who now expect more bang for their bucks — more listeners for their messages.
“In some corners, the firewall feels a little more porous,” explains Peter Iglinski, president of Public Radio News Directors Inc. What is needed, he says, is an understanding by all parties — management and development as well as the news — so that everyone is clear about where the line is before a crisis develops. “With the game-show format,” he says, “no one was put on the defensive.”
Contestants were given three potentially contradictory “guiding principles” to consider as they made their decisions: maximize benefit to listeners, maximize journalistic integrity, and maximize station revenue.
It wasn’t always the journalists who came up with the most journalistically sound answers. John Watson, a journalism ethics professor at American University and one of the game-show judges, ruled in favor of the development folks, who said they would run an unsavory-sounding bit of tape in a story involving phone sex “if it advances the story.” The news directors were ready to pull the sound if listeners objected.
Development directors and the GMs both waffled, however, when faced with whether to accept money from an arts council in exchange for a five-minute weekly program. The news directors said the idea was “tainted from the start,” and when Bill Buzenberg, head of news at Minnesota Public Radio and one of the judges, declared, “Nobody buys programming on public radio,” the audience broke into applause.
National Public Radio’s worries are different from those confronting local member stations. NPR’s firewall is solid; a funder can’t underwrite a series, for instance, because money goes into NPR’s general fund and is not tied to any one story. Programming and content decisions are made independently of the development office, and NPR has rules against accepting funds for covering specific issues.
But there is some concern that success might spoil NPR. As the stakes rise, says NPR’s Dvorkin, programming tends to become risk averse. “No one comes down to the news department and says, ‘Do more stories that are more accessible to a larger audience,’ but I think that we’ve become addicted to money. And that becomes a kind of self-censorship; we know at a sub-conscious level what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.”
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