randomWalks

Do you have the text of what the NPR ombudsman said? I'm wondering what he means by "tough to take," and is he talking about himself or some category of listeners out there? I heard that piece and didn't think it sounded different from anything else on NPR.

I've often thought that NPR was at its finest when covering music, consistently highlighting lesser-known artists of high quality and discussing their work with intelligence and flair.

I've added a link to the ombudsman piece (thanks!) -- he was talking about himself!

I'm struggling with the extreme cognitive dissonance that is reflected in his conclusion:

"That's why Ulaby's reports seem to me to be a good example of journalistic inclusiveness. They do not alienate mainstream NPR listeners."

How does this follow? Well, if your aim is to broaden your listenership without changing a thing about your programming then I suppose that not alienating white listeners is an appropriate principle to work by, but of course you'll never succeed.

Hm, that was interesting, though all over the place. I see what you mean about how his idea of journalistic inclusiveness seems impossible, but regardless of what the piece is on, whether it's hip-hop or politics or gardening, I think listeners would prefer that the presentation be accessible to most, rather than geared towards those in the know. If it's too intellectual, it would probably end up alienating both mainstream listeners and the potential listeners NPR is trying to bring in. For instance my 16-year-old sister would appreciate hearing a story about Timbaland, but she doesn't read intellectual music criticism in her spare time. She probably needs the story to be as "accessible" as I do.

Where does he talk about wanting a more "diverse" audience? I see him talking about attracting a younger audience, but younger does not necessarily mean more racially diverse.

It seems that NPR's most successful effort in attracting non-white listeners may be Tavis Smiley. Notably, the show does not sound like other NPR shows--because Tavis does not sound like other NPR hosts.

I imagine NPR is resistant to putting stories within the news shows that sound markedly different from the others. They probably fear that that will drive people to tune away. This is the same thinking that drives public radio station to streamline their sound and focus on one format, rather than a patchwork quilt of different formats.

As far as a racially 'diverse' audience, I was extrapolating broadly (read: pulling out of my ass) from the juxtaposition of a piece on Timbaland, an artist understood to be outside of the cultural sphere of NPR listeners, and the word 'inclusiveness', throwing a bit of what I think I know about NPR's audience in there, and mixing it all up and pouring it over this dying horse.

I really don't think the music reviews are inaccessible at all. They're generally better and certainly no worse than typical print criticism, and the fact that you can actually listen to the music in question makes deciphering the frequently convoluted metaphors far easier.

Really nedlog haven't you sort of restated my point that though NPR may make a show of being concerned about serving an audience that reflects the Public from time to time, operationally they answer to a higher credo which, in practice, demands a white 'feel' to the programming? It's disgraceful.

adam, are you assuming, or do you know for a fact that Timbaland is outside of the cultural sphere of NPR listeners? Your comments are showing a notable presupposition about NPR listenership, and I'm wondering whether that's factually informed in any way.

"Like some who wrote in, I initially confused Timbaland with a well known pop singer called Justin Timberlake."

When I said 'understood' I meant that Dvorkin and NPR understand this to be the case. Which is not to say that I don't understand it to be the case myself, but that's what I meant. I think NPR listenership is overwhelmingly white, and I think it's in large part uninformed about hip-hop among other things. I do not have any numbers for you however.

Really nedlog haven't you sort of restated my point that though NPR may make a show of being concerned about serving an audience that reflects the Public from time to time, operationally they answer to a higher credo which, in practice, demands a white 'feel' to the programming? It's disgraceful.

The "white feel" you identify is, I think, de facto and somewhat subconscious. It's a pernicious status quo, not a diabolical mandate from the upper echelons of NPR management. And it afflicts all of public radio.

It would be difficult for NPR (and public radio stations) to tweak its sound in such a way as to attract people of color without doing a major overhaul that could also turn away many of its white listeners. That's the crux of the issue. As others have said, public radio is in many ways a victim of its own success.

For your consideration: David Giovannoni, possibly the most influential audience researcher in public radio, has argued that public radio ought to just keep doing what it's doing and, eventually, more people of color will start listening. He argues that public radio's appeal hinges not on race, but on education level -- and since statistics show that people of color are attending college in ever-growing numbers, eventually these college-educated people of color will start finding their way to public radio in greater numbers.

I don't know what I make of that.

The potential that digital radio affords to broadcast more than one audio channel simultaneously may allow public radio to start serving people of color in a more concerted fashion -- presuming that someone creates the programming to fill those channels. For Latinos, Radio Bilingue is a possibility. At this point, it would be hard to scrape together a 24/7 stream of black-oriented programming.

(Because of the jobby-job (that old excuse) I have to pull back from jumping into this with my opinions in tow.)

The "white feel" you identify is, I think, de facto and somewhat subconscious.

Not knowing one iota about how NPR's decision-making works, I'll go out on a limb and say that I doubt it's subconscious in the slightest.

I'll draw what may be a faulty analogy here. In dealing with United for Peace & Justice (which is largely a white, middle-class, liberal formation), debates about the political content of debates about the political content of the Feb. 15 demonstration last year that had everything to do with race and class were veiled in language about the "mainstream." In a city with a massive community of people of color, a room of organizers kept saying it would be "divisive" and it would "scare" the mainstream to take up the questions of Palestine or police brutality or to take a strong stance against the nascent occupation.

The assumption was that mainstream=white & middle class. The only way to win the argument was to challenge what "mainstream" meant and to do outreach to organizations of color to convince members of those groups to come to the meeting and argue with us. These groups had largely shunned the main anti-war groups in NY to begin with because of this dynamic. But we were able to win the debate and it vastly changed the political content of that demonstration.

Anyway, I would not be surprised if a similar dynamic is present at NPR where there are assumptions made about what the mainstream is and what is and is not "alienating" that is more a reflection of the people making the decisions than on any real analysis of NPR's audience.

But I freely admit I could be wrong about that.

Two unrelated things.

1. Is HTML now verboten in comments?

2. This all triggered for me the fact that in the zeal to bring Air America to the airwaves in New York, the city's only black talk radio station was sacrificed.

I don't see how the column or the topic has anything to do with race at all. Timbaland was just the most recent (and perhaps most jarring) example.

As for NPR's "white feel", what does that even mean? The language you guys (and I suppose everyone else) are using ("black-oriented programming", "serving people of color") makes me truly uncomfortable. Am I just being a wimp and unconsciously trying to avoid confronting this issue? Tell me what I'm missing here.

What exactly makes you uncomfortable?

What I think Adam meant by "white feel" is just that NPR's programming appeals more strongly to white audiences than other audiences. Audience data backs this up.

"Black-oriented": NPR's Tavis Smiley was consciously created with a black audience in mind.

"Serving people of color" -- i.e., attracting more listeners who aren't white. (I prefer "people of color" to "non-white" or "minority," both of which put whiteness at the center.)

Lots of people within public radio are searching for ways to attract a more diverse audience. Public radio's mandate is to serve the public -- not just a white, well-heeled slice of the public. So I understand why people in the business are grappling with it.

What triggered 'race' for me was the use of words like "mainstream", "unfamiliar", "cultural outsiders", and "alienate."

Another reading makes me think that Age is perhaps more central than Race to his thesis, but language like that seems to assume that NPR's listeners are an insular and limited bunch and that the reviews were pushing some kind of boundary. (This may well be the case.)

(What I don't get is the other assumption that seems to be here that changing NPR to make it appeal to a more multi-racial audience is bad and/or impossible.)

But the whole thing treads very close to discussions of thinking of those outside of this assumed group as a kind of "other." Such formulations are most often race-based even if race is never expressly mentioned.

Personally, I much prefer the Pacifica network to NPR. I would posit that it does a better job of appealing to a broader audience--at least, that's my experience with WBAI in New York.

I didn't mean to imply that the whiteness of NPR was an explicit mandate from management, but I think it's a bit more than subconscious.

This would best be a question for Mr. Dvorkin, but am I wrong in assuming that NPR gets feedback like, "A number of listeners wrote in to complain that the sound was jarring and very un-[NPR]-like," every time NPR airs a distinctively black voice?

I bet it's literally *every* time. Frankly, I'm a little surprised the Timbaland piece drew "a number" of complaints. Listeners protested, and Dvorkin nearly concurred, that if they'd wanted to hear black people talking about black music, they would have tuned to a different station!

I have to dig a deeper hole for my opinion of these folks who make a point to complain.

What would a radio station with a "black feel" air? For that matter, what gives a station a "white feel"? In a country where the majority of the population nationwide is white, isn't any audience data for just about any radio station going to reveal that the audience is primarily white? Wouldn't a station with a "black feel" at the start eventually draw a primarily white audience? I'm in California--should NPR start broadcasting programs with a more "hispanic feel" out here for what will eventually be the majority population of this state? I understand what you're arguing for, but it just seems to me like a silly thing to worry about, so I'm largely playing devil's advocate here. It seems to me you're getting your knickers in a twist over some trivial stuff. Personally, if I heard a story on Toby Keith on NPR while driving to work in the morning I'd find it "hard to take", but I don't think then that you could extrapolate anything racial out of it. I bet the ombudsman would have had the same response to something like Glenn Branca, Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", or Black Flag.

This sounds to me more like a "little old lady" problem than a white/black problem, but then my mental image of NPR listeners is little old ladies (sorry, nedlog). You can blame my mom for that one.

I fully accept that there may be something I'm missing here.

Zagg -- have you ever heard anyone say anything anti-white or anti-Semitic on WBAI? Just wondering. Some people allege this.

"What exactly makes you uncomfortable?"

It's hard to explain. I think I just don't have the same context that you guys have, but talking about a program having a "white feel" or attempting to "serve people of color" feels like we're equating race to culture, which seems like a pointless but also dangerous thing to do, no matter how true it may seem to be in practice.

But I don't think that's what you intend necessarily. I certainly can't think of any better language to use. In past discussions with Adam and DJ I think I've just not made some conceptual leap that everyone else here has. I would not be surprised. My own cultural context probably has more to do with my discomfort than anything.

Zagg -- have you ever heard anyone say anything anti-white or anti-Semitic on WBAI? Just wondering. Some people allege this.

Not that I can recall, but I wouldn't be the best source on that.

There certainly is anti-Zionist content. I wonder if that's what people are talking about.