When I was fired from Marketplace, I suddenly found myself publicly defending the end of an ideal I’d scarcely wrapped my head around. And I was whiplashed. How had a nuanced post on my personal blog about objectivity lost me my dream job? Many of my coworkers had expressed their displeasure with my firing in private, and it was hardly a secret that many of us questioned “objectivity” and its pitfalls. So why were my colleagues, even the ones who agreed with me, afraid of discussing these questions in public, or even in their newsrooms? The journalists in public radio were some of the most intelligent, flexible, and creative people I’d ever been around. What was the hang-up, especially in an environment that claimed to value diversity of experience and opinion?
I needed to go back and try to understand why this conversation within public media was buried in so much silence. Public broadcasting had started as an idealist, mission-driven effort, intended in part to counter the commercialism of other broadcast news. But I found that from the 1970s through the 1990s, attacks from conservatives had left public media haunted by the ghost of false “balance”—too often, Black and brown and queer people’s stories and perspectives had been “balanced” with racist or homophobic views, or simply censored altogether. As a result, countless people have left public radio and TV, sick of the doublespeak on “diversity” or uncomfortable with the expectation of remaining neutral on our own humanity. In short, public media had a beautiful dream that was never fully realized.
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My first day in public radio was one of my favorite days of my life. On a sunny September day, I rode my bike to WBEZ on Chicago’s Navy Pier from Rogers Park, a Chicago neighborhood, about ten miles. I knew I was going to a Real Office with Adults in it, and I was nervous. I had never had a cubicle before. I rode most of the way along the lakeshore trail in cutoff shorts, admiring the glittering water, and then stopped off and changed my clothes next to the bike trail and smoked half a cigarette. In my opinion, it was bad weather for wearing a button-down shirt and respectable pants (though maybe my true punk-rock belief is that it is never really a good time for respectable pants), but it seemed like the right move.
I got there and I wish it had been the sigh of relief that’s like, “Who cares what I wore?” but instead it was more like, “Good thing I changed out of cutoffs!” People did seem well-dressed, at least by my standards, and like they had curated their body odors before coming to work. I got to see radio hosts at work for the first time, stand in the studio through two live shows and a top-of-the-hour newscast, listen to arguments in editorial meetings. One of the largest teacher strikes in history had just started, and the two education reporters were running around frantically. The controlled chaos of it, the adrenaline rush of daily deadlines and hourly newscasts and live interviews, was all so exciting I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. By the end of the day, I wanted nothing more than to get in that seat in front of one of those fancy microphones with some respectable pants on and be a radio star.
But there was also the stress of any first day, and the usual background transgender stress. It’s never been a secret that I am transgender, but because I have spent most of my life passing as female, people often simply ignore my trans identity and treat me as a woman. As a result, I’m faced with all these choices about what to say to people about my pronouns, whether to say anything, and questions about what they already know. There are issues in my health insurance documentation (Male or female? Insurance companies want to know!). There’s the question of what bathroom to use, and the risk of making someone else—a potential mentor or superior—uncomfortable through that choice. And then, the quiet, lonely investigation into who I can trust with these concerns as they arise. I’d been around long enough to know that your allies aren’t always who you think they’re going to be, and you have to pay careful attention.
In theory, my trans identity was a part of the package. I had come to WBEZ as a Pritzker Journalism Fellow, a program envisioned by This American Life co-creator and then-CEO of WBEZ, Torey Malatia, as a way to bring diverse community voices into the station. Two fellows who had experience in community-based work in Chicago would spend nine months in rigorous paid training in WBEZ’s newsrooms, adopting any skills we found useful. The program would connect WBEZ to new communities and give community organizers media skills to bring back out into the world. I’d been recommended for the gig by my friend and mentor Mariame Kaba, a well-known prison abolition activist. My understanding was that I was at WBEZ to bring the energy and knowledge of my community-organizing work to bear. The other fellow, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, came from a bilingual community paper in Back of the Yards.
I filed my first story for air a couple months later, and after I heard myself on 91.5 FM the next morning, I became a complete fiend for the news, filing news stories nearly every day. I loved being out in the field recording conversations with strangers, recording my own shy voice in the studio, cutting tape rapid-fire before the afternoon newscasts, vying to get a question in at crowded press conferences. I started blowing up the phones of Chicago’s aldermen, city press offices, the EPA, NOAA—anyone with information I needed to get my hands on. Being a reporter felt like a calling, something I needed to do urgently, and do well.
But a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a reporter. The interaction went something like this. My immediate supervisor at the station, Lynette Kalsnes, brought me into a meeting with the managing editor, Sally Eisele, to talk about conflicts of interest. Everyone at WBEZ was smart: Lynnette was a quiet genius and Sally was a loud one. Sally asked me about my activist work, and I told her I’d been working with youth, making stories about Chicago police and incarceration. And I’d been a trainer for years, teaching people about transgender issues and white privilege at workshops and conferences. Sally said that all of that activity had to stop. Okay, fine: I was only there at WBEZ for nine months, trying on journalism for size. But Sally’s interpretation of the conflict-of-interest policy was that I was also not supposed to do stories for the station about any of the issues I’d previously been involved with. Lynette pushed back on this a little. I hadn’t, for example, done any lobbying on LGBT issues—I was a trainer, not a policy advocate. But Sally still thought I should steer clear. It became clear to me that the concern wasn’t about the actual “bias” I might bring, but about how my work would be perceived if people connected the dots.
This was my first glimpse of a Catch-22 related to “diversity” in public media: I had been brought in as a part of the station’s efforts to diversify and connect to community work. And yet I was discouraged from doing stories about those communities or that work. This meant that my extensive network of contacts from underrepresented groups couldn’t come to the radio through me, because it was supposedly all a conflict of interest. I was supposed to steer away from doing stories about the things I knew the most about—prisons and police, queer and trans issues. My connections to marginalized communities were valued in theory, but in practice, I was expected to hide them, lest they compromise my perceived professionalism as a journalist. I didn’t mind the restrictions on posting to Facebook about my political views—but the principle of distancing myself from fundamental parts of my identity didn’t make sense in the context of their stated desire for diversity. I came from a different mind-set, in which media created for, by, and about marginalized communities was the norm. This was opposite day.
It seemed absurd, but I didn’t think it was my place to say so. I agreed to focus on issues outside of my past activism, although I did file a handful of stories about queer and trans people during my time there thanks to Lynette’s advocacy. I made myself into a reporter, focused mostly on science and the environment, and by the time I left WBEZ nine months later, I’d filed one or two stories a day for almost the entire time, and about a dozen features. Over the years, I filed hundreds of stories on controversial topics from postal worker strikes to environmental contamination, tax levies to racial discrimination. No audience member ever expressed concern about my activist past or identity (easily traceable online). And no one ever accused me of political bias in my reporting. (Well, not entirely true: I once made a crack about lawyers on air, having grown up in a family full of lawyers where lawyer jokes were super-normal, but lawyers listening took offense. And I once got a call from a PR rep for the Styrofoam industry after a piece I did about the paper cup industry—they felt that I should have presented a stronger case for the hypothetical possibility of recycling Styrofoam.)
I understood and understand the purpose of conflict-of-interest policies. It’s hard to do a story about your enemies, and even harder to do a story about your friends. The idea that reporters shouldn’t take bribes or report on things that could directly benefit us financially is a no-brainer, and I believe in deep introspection and checking our biases as journalists. Overall, I also sincerely trusted that public radio editors were trying to do right by the truth and move with integrity.
But something about these rules always felt off to me. Maybe they worked in a vacuum, but they didn’t make sense in the context of organizations like WBEZ, WYSO, or Marketplace, all of which purported to be trying to do something fresh and new, trying to represent and reach more diverse audiences. Some identities are more politicized than others—for example, white people are rarely asked to consider the possible conflict of interest in doing stories about white people, and children of lawyers are rarely stopped from doing stories about lawyers (I can attest). But because I’d been an advocate for the trans community, I was considered suspect—more liable to be biased than someone who’d never heard of transgender issues before. Which, of course, is ludicrous.
In spite of this initial shock, for most of my time in public radio, I believed in what we were doing. I believed that, even if we didn’t fully articulate them, the values that drove our work were more or less the right ones: support for human rights and free speech, dislike for racial and economic inequity, distrust of authority, and love of truth, however complex and multifaceted. I also found the environment, overall, to be remarkably friendly and open-minded about my trans experience. I figured our efforts to present ourselves as unbiased were just about avoiding unnecessary controversy, and even though I didn’t love that dance, I accepted it. So I was surprised when I realized how important it was to these institutions—and in some cases, to individuals I knew personally—to insist on our detachment and “neutrality.” This version of “objectivity” was as laughable to me the day I got fired as it was the day I started.
And I found it ironic. The people I worked with were liberals, mostly. I find it comical that public radio pretends not to be liberal. For the most part, it is liberal, or at least the people who work there are. From my perspective, that creates a few problems. One is that everyone in public radio is in the business of trying to hide the politics of the people in public radio, to avoid accusations of liberal bias. Another is that it is guilty of the very thing it strives to defend itself from: representing a relatively homogeneous worldview, in more ways than one. Working journalists are mostly college graduates, many with master’s degrees. Lots of them, like me, grew up in cities or college towns, liberal bubbles of some kind. A majority are people for whom poverty coverage is a cause and “diversity” is a cause. And seeming not to have any liberal slant is also a cause in many public radio newsrooms. That’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.
The further irony for me was that I had never seen myself as a liberal. I’m viciously anti-partisan as a journalist, unattached to a political party in my private life, and hypercritical of partisan platforms and approaches. My views on many individual issues were so far to the left, lots of my Hillary-loving colleagues could never have guessed what they were. I held it all close to my chest—I didn’t need people knowing I didn’t even believe in capitalism or monogamy or prisons or the nuclear family. I actually thought I was good at political reporting in part because I cared so little for party politicians in general. I wasn’t neutral, but I was skeptical as hell.
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Why were people in public radio holding on to the idea of objectivity so tightly? The first thing I learned through research was that public radio and television in the United States are unlike anything else in the world. In most other countries, public media outlets are majority public-funded, and many are under direct state control. In the US, “public media” is a public-private partnership. After a flurry of lobbying in the last century to figure out how to regulate the airwaves, the final language of the Communications Act of 1934 signified a loss for those who supported truly public airwaves: it was basically a laissez-faire piece of legislation that said channels could be licensed to anyone, although federal regulators made some effort to require commercial stations to broadcast in the public interest. It was the rising popularity of television decades later that activated people to really push for public-access stations with consistent taxpayer support.
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was the beginning of dedicated taxpayer funding for television and radio programming. One of the last acts of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society legislation, it created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it stated that the CPB should pursue programming with “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Johnson waxed poetic when he announced the act’s passage, bragging that the new service “will be free, and it will be independent—and it will belong to all of our people.” But in reality, the CPB never had a dedicated federal funding source, which meant it depended on Congress to appropriate money for it in each federal budget. The money never came at the levels suggested by the original law. As a result, public broadcasting has never been fully “public”—and even the slim public funding has always been politicized. Public media quickly became a toy for partisans to bat around at budget time.
One of the CPB’s first big moves was to create the public television network, PBS. In almost no time, the language of “objectivity” was used to challenge PBS programming. In 1971 a conservative media watchdog called Accuracy in Media (AIM) went after PBS for two documentary programs it claimed lacked “objectivity.” One was about youth incarceration, another about sex education. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) declined to intervene, AIM sued. A federal appeals court in 1975 found that the “objectivity and balance” admonition in the Public Broadcasting Act was not something the FCC could enforce the way AIM wanted; it was a goal to aspire to, not a standard subject to regulation. The drafters of the Public Broadcasting Act had never defined objectivity, and it would persist throughout public media’s history as a nebulous concept, meaningless as a legal “standard” but useful as a mode of attack against programming one didn’t like.
Public radio began almost as an afterthought. When National Public Radio was incorporated on March 3, 1970, nobody reported on it except for CPB’s own publication. Perhaps due to how overlooked radio was as a medium, it was at NPR that some of the more idealistic aspects of public broadcasting in the US were put into practice, beginning with its original mission statement written by Bill Siemering. The founding document of NPR envisioned a pluralistic public resource focused on curiosity and social change.
“I saw radio as an agent for change,” Siemering said when I called him on the phone at his house in Pennsylvania, and listened carefully to his gentle, shaky voice, his appreciative memory of NPR’s idealism. Many still point to the lovely language in Siemering’s “NPR Purposes” document, which opens: “National Public Radio will serve the individual: it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.”
When NPR’s first news show, All Things Considered, went on the air in 1971, the afternoon news show reflected Siemering’s vision: it was a quirky blend of news, documentary, commentary, and shoe-leather reporting. The very first broadcast included many minutes of tape from an antiwar protest in DC earlier that day. It encapsulated a new vision for radio in the US—a type of radio that felt like a public square, commercial-free, diverse, and equal parts sober and strange.
But there was a problem with the idea of forming public media into a kind of broadcast public square. Public space in the United States was (and is) contested from all sides. From the start, there was conservative opposition and accusations that it wasn’t “objective” enough. Soon after, the country elected President Richard Nixon, who didn’t support NPR’s mission and also didn’t want public funding for anything critical of him. In 1972 he vetoed CPB funding entirely and set up a new funding structure that would permanently limit how much CPB could bring in directly from the federal government.
As a result, fear of defunding hovers over every public media controversy. Public radio and TV face a constant tension between providing an “alternative” to corporate news media versus producing programs that are popular and uncontroversial enough to garner sponsorship from private entities. Public media has to grapple with the question of who the “public” is, but that debate has always been tainted by partisan politics, which means NPR’s (nonpartisan) founding values would only ever get so far. Within a decade, public media went from presenting itself as an alternative to striving for mainstream recognition and an “objective” voice.
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The mainstream “objective” voice at the time was also a white male East Coast voice. So, early challenges to public broadcasting also came from another angle: broadcasters of color who wanted a seat at the table after decades of exclusion from commercial radio and TV stations. In 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, listed media among the culprits in the overall environment of racism and marginalization that led to the urban uprisings of 1967. “Most newspaper articles and most television programming ignore the fact that an appreciable part of their audience is black,” the Kerner Report read. “The world that television and newspapers offer to their black audience is almost totally white, in both appearance and attitude. . . . [O]ur evidence shows that the so-called ‘white press’ is at best mistrusted and at worst held in contempt by many black Americans.” Black Americans, as well as Latinos and other people of color, saw in public media an opportunity to get a foot in the door.
A Latina TV producer named Cecilia Garcia was among several people I contacted to learn about this early history—we connected by phone after I found her name on a list of participants in a minority task force for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1970s. She’d been a media activist and producer for decades, mostly in her hometown of Detroit.
Back then Detroit was hot, crowded—a site of protests and riots and union organizing, with a still-robust auto industry about to begin its long collapse. Garcia was born in Detroit and went to high school on the southwest side, where there’s a large Mexican American community. But she read the Detroit Free Press and saw the way white editors and reporters talked about people in Black and brown communities as criminals and outsiders; she flipped through TV stations and didn’t see her community represented at all. But, she explained, “I knew instinctively that the airwaves belong to all of us.” In the early ’70s, just out of college, she decided to do something about it.
She and a group of about fifteen friends started sending letters to their local public television station, WTVS, demanding a Latino program of their own. They walked into the station and asked for a meeting. At the time, organizations around the country were taking advantage of the Civil Rights Act to file lawsuits accusing broadcasters of racial discrimination in employment and programming. Partly to avoid unwanted controversy, WTVS eventually took Garcia and her friends under its wing. With the station’s technical support, they started a bilingual TV program called Para Mi Pueblo, which aired weekly starting in 1973.
For the six years that Garcia produced Para Mi Pueblo, she made no bones about her work being for and by the community, often advocating for issues relevant to Detroit’s southwest side. “I knew in southwest Detroit, we needed a health clinic. We presented that; we talked about that; we really dug into that issue. At the end of my time on the air, a health clinic had opened, which I saw as a big success,” Garcia said. “Was that bias? Yes. It was bias in favor of health care for my community.”
Around the country, producers of color were also seizing the moment to push for better distribution of shows about communities of color and facing varying levels of resistance. Garcia joined with a national group called the Latino Consortium, which distributed programming by and for Latinos; similar consortia were founded for Black, Asian American, and Native American producers. It was hard to get programs about people of color picked up for national distribution, and it was prohibitively expensive to copy tapes. Garcia describes the various consortia “bicycling” their tapes across the country, which meant sending a single video recording by mail. She’d send a film from Detroit to a consortium member or friend at WGBH in Boston; they’d air it and mail it to someone in Wisconsin or Nebraska or California; and so on. It was time-consuming, but oftentimes it was the only way to get their programs on the air.
“We came together because we felt we could not rely on PBS to distribute our programs,” she said. “Breaking into distribution at the national level seemed impossible for producers of color.” She explained that programmers were torn between the pressure to be representative and the desire to be popular, and too often the conflict was settled in rooms with entirely white station managers, programmers, or board members who could not imagine a Latino show as a popular show. “If it’s a group of white men primarily making programming decisions, it becomes almost impossible for our voices, voices of producers of color, to be heard.”
Her work revealed, again, the bias inherent in news judgment; like Ida B. Wells before her, and Black Lives Matter after, she knew that sometimes the only solution was to make the news yourself.
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Public radio had a different structure than TV, because it produced its own national programs from the start (PBS was a distributor, not a producer). In NPR’s newsroom during the first few years, the biggest debates were not outwardly about diversity. One divide surrounded the line between cultural production and hard news reporting: some in the newsroom thought the organization should focus All Things Considered on hard news and attempt to compete with other daily news organizations, while others felt a major part of the show’s calling was to cover culture, music, and arts, as well as human-interest stories. The debates could become quite contentious; at one point, the now-famous correspondent Nina Totenberg was nearly fired for leaking the internal battles of the 1970s to the press.
This debate was about diversity in a way, because most of the trained news reporters came from a more traditional background, and most of them were white. One of the news directors brought in to sharpen NPR’s political focus, Robert Zelnick, would later write a book arguing against affirmative action. Bill Siemering recalled only that the two Black reporters on NPR’s original staff “didn’t last long.”
Jack Mitchell, the first NPR staff member and longtime producer of All Things Considered, said most of the newsroom at the beginning were people who came from the left, many from the world of educational and community radio (public radio’s precursors). “With the possible exception of a few engineers, NPR’s staff, to a person, disliked Nixon and hated the war he failed to end,” he wrote in his 2005 book Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio. “While not consciously skewed, the program content undoubtedly reflected this antipathy.” At the time, public radio was so small-scale that Nixon hadn’t even noticed, in spite of his open hatred for public TV.
NPR’s experimental days were relatively short-lived. The culture wars started early and came up often, and by the end of the ’70s, the organization had burned through a couple of presidents and many of its original staff, including Siemering and Mitchell. Siemering’s vision of working closely with local stations in order to better represent all parts of the country was never fully realized. “NPR started as an alternative, and switched,” Mitchell told me when I called him. When a new president named Frank Mankiewicz took over in 1977, Siemering’s vision of an alternative to commercial broadcasting largely gave way to an effort to take the programming mainstream. As that mainstreaming took place, diverse voices faded into the background.
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By the end of the 1970s, more than a few people were fed up with the struggle to diversify services that were intended to be representative of the public from the get-go. The vision of public media as a smart, balanced alternative to commercial media seemed half-baked if the voices were still mostly white, so public media did what it does well: it commissioned a study. Cecilia Garcia was among twenty-eight people invited to sit on a Task Force on Minorities for the CPB. In 1978 the final report of the task force opened with this line: “The task force must conclude that the public broadcast system is asleep at the transmitter.” The executive summary calls PBS’s and NPR’s minority programming numbers “appalling,” noting that in 1977 less than 5 percent of the 1,500 hours of programming NPR distributed was produced by or focused on racial or ethnic minorities. More than half of public radio licensees and 16 percent of public TV stations had zero people of color on the staff. At the national level, among fifteen executives running the CPB, PBS, and NPR, there was only one person of color.
The Task Force on Minorities made dozens of specific recommendations, including new funding for training programs for reporters and producers of color, improved tools for evaluating audiences that went beyond just counting and tracking demographics, and, of course, more people of color in leadership. Many of the recommendations were never implemented. Forty years later, a discussion is still underway in public radio about why “public radio voice” is so homogeneously white and East Coast sounding. The percentage of Black people in NPR’s newsroom peaked at 12 percent in 2012, and in 2017 was down to 8.8 percent. The percentage of Latinos crawled up from 5 percent in 2012 to 6 percent in 2017, when Latinos were around 18 percent of the US population. PBS stations have lots of diversity trainings and diversity policies, but still not a lot of diversity.
In some ways, Garcia thinks this lack of representation is baked into the way public broadcasting is funded; the combination of unprotected public funding and unrestricted private funding means it faces both pressure to be uncontroversial and pressure to be popular with the mainstream. It reduces risk-taking and creates a paradox for the stated goals of diversity. “There are winners and losers when we fund things the way we do here, and, inevitably, people of color have been on the losing end of that equation,” Garcia said.
Her critiques echo countless stories I’ve now heard from people of color who do or did work in public radio; after I was fired, several people expressly told me that they had left public media due to racism or tokenism in newsrooms. Others have shared stories about being the only person of color in a newsroom in a major urban area, and how their white colleagues didn’t see that as a problem. Still others have talked about the gatekeeping they’ve experienced from white editors and editorial boards, who—like most of us—take an interest in the stories they can identify with or connect to, undervaluing or ignoring the ideas brought to them by journalists of color. Public radio puts out its mediocre diversity numbers every year, and people respond with ideas for how to improve through recruitment. But the problem is more systemic.
Jack Mitchell, NPR’s first employee, said it’s clear to him that diversity is and always has been political. He recalled that the original rationale for diversifying newsrooms in the 1970s was affirmative action, not representation in and of itself. Early on, the idea of affirmative action had to do with acknowledging the existence of discrimination, and accounting for it through policies designed to counterbalance past wrongs. But gradually, diversity efforts shifted from an attempt to redress harm, to an effort to create workplaces in which everyone would benefit from multiculturalism, often while denying or ignoring systemic oppression. Mitchell noted that in public radio, diversity gradually ceased being about social justice and shifted to being about representation. And as he pointed out, you can’t bring people in for the purpose of “diversifying” and expect the institution to operate exactly the same way it always has. It defeats even the stated purpose.
And this is the paradox of “objectivity” and diversity. Real diversity means fighting against institutional oppression and discrimination, which is a political act. From almost the very beginning, public broadcasting found itself entrenched in a complex, often frustrating attempt to appear apolitical—for fear of being defunded or of outright attacks by the right wing. You can’t depoliticize diversity, but public media has tried.
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The right wing started using “objectivity” to try to destroy public media almost immediately. James Ledbetter’s 1997 history of public media, Made Possible By . . . , explains that it was often queer and Black voices who were the target of these attacks. There was plenty of rancor in the ’70s, but in the ’80s conservatives began to really push the culture wars. Ronald Reagan installed a chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Sonia Landau, who openly challenged programming the administration didn’t like on the basis of a lack of “balance,” while simultaneously pushing for PBS to air propaganda in support of Reagan’s policies.
Landau was also part of a push for an ongoing “scientific” analysis of whether the content on PBS was balanced and objective, an effort with strong support from conservative members of Congress. These studies would count the number of conservative versus liberal voices on air (which Ledbetter called a “quixotic pursuit,” particularly given the Reagan administration’s push to get rid of the Fairness Doctrine requiring balance for private broadcasters). Pretty quickly, quantitative analysis of whether or not programming is “balanced” became a threat dangled over PBS leaders’ heads, who responded by making more space for right-wing guests regardless of their relationship to truth or facts. These efforts at balance are especially notable given PBS’s dicey record of pursuing programming that is representative of the country’s diversity—one kind of balance was openly sacrificed for another.
Members of the Reagan administration also went after individual programs on PBS, including documentaries on Cuba, Guatemala, and a nine-part series focused on the politics of the African continent from an African viewpoint—virtually any anti-US or anti-Western sentiment was met with the demand that it be more “balanced.” Outside conservative groups joined the chorus. In 1983 PBS aired a series about Vietnam, and Accuracy in Media produced an hour-long rebuttal, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, narrated by Charlton Heston, and aired on PBS. AIM used what would become a classic tactic: it critiqued the creators and their motives as unobjective, rather than critiquing the accuracy of the series itself.
But instead of defending itself against partisan attacks, PBS often responded by simply agreeing to carry more conservative content. It already had shows that pitted liberal and conservative views against each other; why not programs that pitted conservative and even more conservative views against each other? General Electric, the same company that became a primary underwriter for the new radio show Marketplace in the late 1980s, underwrote and helped promote the hit TV show The McLaughlin Group, a conservative-dominated yell-fest. It premiered on PBS in 1981 and became an early platform for Pat Buchanan, who during the 1980s advocated the idea that AIDS was God’s retribution against sinful homosexuals. A conservative TV production company called the Blackwell Corporation used funding from conservative foundations to produce PBS documentaries throughout the 1980s, pushing neocon views on Central American politics, telecommunications, and South African apartheid. And Ledbetter writes that PBS itself began to support conservative counterprogramming, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants for the production of right-wing shows by the early ’90s.
At NPR the battles were quieter but concerned many of the same issues. Inside the newsroom, Mitchell recalled battles over covering gay rights, with some dismissing such coverage as a form of advocacy even as covering conservative issues was being pushed as a form of balance. In 1986, after a New Republic article by Fred Barnes criticized NPR for its sympathetic coverage of Latin American uprisings, news director Robert Siegel warned the staff against being biased or doing advocacy journalism; Mitchell wrote that an independent reporter named Paul McIsaac was blackballed by Siegel for his Latin American coverage.
Fear of bad press from conservatives led PBS and NPR down a path of caution and self-censorship from which they have yet to return. While happy to air programs that were sponsored by General Electric or even the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, Ledbetter writes that PBS refused to air a series of Academy Award–winning documentaries: a 1991 exposé about General Electric and nuclear weapons, a 1992 film about the US invasion of Panama, and a 1993 documentary about domestic violence survivors. The rationale for not airing the latter documentary, Defending Our Lives, was that its coproducers included an anti–domestic violence organization; the rationale for not airing the documentary about General Electric was that a consumer advocacy group pushing for a boycott of GE had been part of the production. The question was not whether the documentaries were factual, or even whether the journalism was slanted in some way; it was whether the documentaries might be fodder for conservative activists to attack. This fear of angering major sponsors or politicians set up a dangerous precedent: cautions against not checking one’s facts gave way to cautions against doing anything that might be accused of “bias.”
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Bias is in the eye of the beholder, and right-wing activists saw bias in any programming they didn’t like, especially programming that concerned Black people and gay people. There was nothing conservatives hated more than filmmaker Marlon Riggs, who produced unapologetic, raw imagery about Black gay life and sexuality. Riggs’s 1989 documentary about queer Black men, Tongues Untied, became a cause for right-wing censors—by the time it went to broadcast on PBS in 1991, almost two-thirds of stations refused to air it, and years later Republican congressmen were still complaining that it had been aired at all, calling it a violation of decency and community standards. PBS also canceled a POV documentary called Stop the Church, about an ACT UP action in New York City in 1989 trying to draw attention to the AIDS crisis. The stated reason for the censorship was that stations simply couldn’t handle the attention that would be generated by distributing the film.
Riggs responded personally to the vitriol. Writing for Current, a public media rag, in 1991, he criticized the idea of “community standards” that was used to attack his film: “The question such broadcasters never asked, because the answers are too revealing, is: Whose community and whose standards are they upholding?” He called for a “public” television that was actually for all of us—not just a boxing ring for white conservatives and white liberals. But public media as public square, with all of the chaos that entails, was by then a far cry from public media in practice. PBS’s The McLaughlin Group and NewsHour and NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered all took pains to balance Democrats with Republicans but rarely balanced white voices with people of color, or male voices with women’s.
“Paradoxically,” Riggs wrote, “the Tongues Untied censorship hysteria has helped rekindle an essential public debate: who is to have access to so-called ‘public’ media, and on what terms? Who should represent and define ‘minority’ perspectives and experience? Above all, who has the authority to draw the thin line between innocuous ‘diversity’ and unacceptable ‘deviance’?”
During the AIDS crisis, “Silence=Death” became a refrain of the queer movement. The idea of telling our stories and exposing our truths was central to queer activism, and the risk of death was real: the biggest queer story of the 1980s was the story of AIDS. There were frequent murders of gay and gender-nonconforming people. Queer communities have also long been plagued with the crisis of suicide, which feeds off silence and isolation. Making media about our sexualities was considered a way to save lives, and that meant filmmakers like Marlon Riggs and the creator of the censored ACT UP documentary, Robert Hilferty, were inclined to value voice over political party. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to talk to Riggs or Hilferty about their films, the PBS censorship, the attacks from Congress? After learning about them in James Ledbetter’s book about public media, I Googled the two censored artists. Marlon Riggs had died in 1994 of complications related to AIDS. Robert Hilferty died in 2009, of suicide.
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During my years of working in public radio, I never once heard a newsroom leader talk about “balance” in terms of anything other than left versus right, accuser versus accused, or critic versus criticized. This reflects a problem not just with public media, but with the news media’s understanding of the concept of “balance” more generally. In 2017 I published an article that asked, “What if balance was about process, rather than outcome?” I proposed that to do truly “balanced” work, journalists should stop focusing on the appearance of balance, and focus more on the process of reporting itself. Rather than trying to just seem fair by pitting opposing positions or left and right against one another, I argued that our efforts at balance should be about making journalism more representative, more accessible, and more collaborative, some of the values I understood to be at the heart of public radio when it was founded.
Focusing on the balance of left and right tends to keep us within Daniel C. Hallin’s sphere of legitimate controversy—whatever we assume “the public” sees as a legitimate debate is fair game. But it tends not to acknowledge that our ideas about who makes up “the public” are easily skewed in homogeneous newsrooms, and there are powerful forces already tipping the scales toward overrepresentation of white cisgender men. Queer people and people of color have often been excluded from legitimacy, not just by media but by our political parties, too. A truly “balanced” public media has the potential to be representative in ways that many public institutions currently are not. What if people in prison, undocumented immigrants, youth, transgender people, Black people, rural and elderly people had disproportionate or even proportional presences in our newsrooms? I think the dream of a quirky, idealistic public media depends on the pursuit of this kind of balance.
And yet public media’s history provides ample examples of how marginalized voices were “balanced” not with people who had differing experiences, but with conservative ideology. Conservatives set the terms of the debate around media bias to focus on left versus right, and the liberals in charge of public broadcasting programs went along with it.
This choice matters, because the partisan framing obscures the fact that concrete, material power struggles in the US aren’t really between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have elite power structures and Washington lobbyists and fancy fund-raisers. Real power struggles have more often been between rich and poor, white and Black, native-born and immigrant. Conservative activists painted the issue of balance as a battle between Republicans and Democrats, when in fact they were engaged in a battle between people with institutional power and people without.
I’m concerned not so much with the consequences of that trend for political partisans and parties as the consequences for the rest of us. I don’t care if Democrats or Republicans win the debate; I care that marginalized people become pawns in a debate that’s not really about us. This framing continues to constrain oppressed identities under a yoke of “partisanship” as a means to censor our voices. And too often, public media’s defense against these blatant attacks on the truth hasn’t been more truth-telling. It has been less. Meanwhile, too many people have left journalism and public radio, or never started in the first place, fed up with its hypocrisy on “diversity.” Programs such as the one that brought me into public radio continue to pop up, but actual representative newsrooms have yet to arrive—when people talk about “public radio voice,” they still mean a white East Coast or midwestern person with a smooth tone. People who speak up about racism, transphobia, or class issues in newsrooms can still be fired for doing so.
Perhaps all this caution about giving conservatives the impression of “balance” has paid off financially, but what about morally, ethically, in terms of the service mission of public media? Has depoliticizing diversity led to increased trust? The threat to defund public media returns every budget season, still a useful whipping post. But instead of everyone trusting NPR and PBS as neutral arbiters of the public good, that trust continues to decline. In a 2017 survey conducted by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, more people surveyed cited Fox News as an unbiased news source than NPR.