Opinion: Lessons from NPR’s past efforts to reach minority listeners
Stan Barouh / NPR
Janet Dewart, director of Specialized Audience Programs at NPR; Donna Limerick, associate producer for the show "Horizons"; and Frank Tavares, "Horizons" EP, in a photo circa 1980.
Despite its former slogan “Hear Every Voice,” National Public Radio has faced ongoing criticism for its lack of minority-oriented programming and its inability to hire and retain journalists of color. During a brief but prolific period in the 1980s, NPR actively developed and promoted programming for minority audiences implemented tracking mechanisms to ensure it was delivering on its diversity mandate. Much of this work was produced under the direction of NPR’s Department of Specialized Audience and Programs, a dedicated unit responsible for ensuring the development of programming “by, for, and about” minority audiences. As NPR considers how it will navigate a changing landscape, there are four key lessons to be learned from the past.
Lesson one: Publicly commit to minority programming
NPR was established in 1970, during a time when civil rights activists sought to address discrimination through legislation. The original architects of NPR believed that public media should serve the most disenfranchised members of the public by engaging them in civic discourses. In its first years, NPR management was preoccupied with the task of creating a national public radio network, but policymakers, advocacy organizations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting pressed management to take formal steps to fulfill its diversity mission.
In 1974, NPR leaders issued a policy memo titled “Special Interest Programs at National Public Radio” that stated their intention to dedicate resources toward the development, production and acquisition of programming for minority audiences. A year later, NPR President Lee Frischknecht laid out a formal plan for developing specialized programming, which would be rolled out in two phases. The first phase involved an audit of existing resources, while the second phase involved the production of new programming. To gain momentum behind the effort, Frischknecht appointed a special interest programs coordinator, who led an ad hoc committee tasked with determining how NPR would work with member stations to acquire programming designed for women and minority groups.
Lesson two: Define your terms
The term “specialized audiences” was first used in a 1974 report by a CPB Advisory Panel for Effective Minority Programming. While all public radio listeners were said to have special interests, the panel was most interested in the “disadvantaged minority,” It defined the term “minority” as “a racial or ethnic group which, by virtue of its cultural or ethnic identity, is subjected to the disadvantages inherent in a position of inequity in the American social structure.” A minority program was defined as “a program that is closely identified with the social, economic, and cultural experience of the minority group, and focuses on a need or an interest of the specific minority group with which the program identifies.”
NPR would adopt this terminology when it developed its specialized programming. To provide clear direction for producers on how to create specialized programs, NPR commissioned a guidebook titled Content Criteria for Producing, Evaluating, and Coding of Special Interest Programs, which was meant to serve as a practical resource for producers attempting to create programs that included women and minorities. The guidebook was organized into five sections, each corresponding to one of five specific interest groups identified as being of particular importance: Blacks, Hispanic Americans, Women, Pacific Asian Americans and Native Americans.
Each section was written by an expert with cultural knowledge of a respective category. In the section on “Women,” for example, journalist Laura Bertran cautioned producers to avoid using the terms “the fair sex” or “the weaker sex.” Instead of identifying someone as a “career girl,” Bertran suggested that they simply refer to an individual by their profession: administrator, doctor and so forth. The section on “Hispanics” was written by media advocate Nick Reyes, who advised producers to consider whether a program inadvertently demeans or stereotypes Hispanic Americans. Reyes urged the producer to ask, “Are Hispanic Americans in the program presented as foreigners rather than Americans? If so, are they presented as intruders or second-class citizens?”
Lesson three: Create a dedicated production system
Early in the development process, NPR had to contend with the question of whether specialized programming should be integrated into its generalized programming efforts or be produced by a separate unit altogether. Parke Blanton, representing an ad hoc committee on specialized programming, issued a memo to NPR’s VP of programming arguing that the efforts should be kept separate. “While special interest programming can appear as a part of general interest programs, specialized audience programs must, by their very nature, be discrete,” Blanton wrote. According to Blanton, such programming could be of interest to the general audience, but its focus should be “by, for, and about” the specialized audience concerned.
To ensure the unit’s autonomy, NPR created the Department of Specialized Audience Programs, a dedicated unit that occupied a space in the NPR building separate from the News & Information division. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, the DSAP acquired, developed and produced several award-winning programs, including Crossroads, a public affairs program that focused on minority issues from a minority perspective, and Horizons, a documentary radio show focused on music, culture and food. Two programs, Let’s Hear It! and Connection, focused on disabled communities. During the 1980s, NPR also had a formal Hispanic programming initiative, which included Enfoque Nacional, a 30-minute Spanish-language news program that was produced by KPBS in San Diego.
In addition to stand-alone programs, NPR also developed its Specialized Audience Module Service, a half-hour package of self-contained short segments that included news pertaining to minority audiences. Also essential to the DSAP enterprise was a reporting mechanism for ensuring that NPR was delivering on its mandate. Each quarter, NPR would issue a “Minority Programming Report” that included an exhaustive list of topics about specialized audiences, their air dates and the programs in which they were included.
Lesson four: Apply pressure — lots of it
The commonsense belief is that NPR has continuously faced political and economic pressures that have limited its ability to fulfill its diversity mission. However, internal memos reveal that NPR pursued minority programs not in spite of but because of external pressures. In 1974, CPB released its “Essentials of Minorities in Public Broadcasting” report, which found that minorities were underrepresented in public media programming and were excluded from key decision-making processes. NPR’s lack of diversity programming became public a year later during congressional proceedings for the Public Broadcasting Act of 1975, which was meant to secure long-term funding for CPB, NPR and PBS. Testimony from a variety of advocacy organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Education Association, indicated that public media had consistently failed to serve minority listeners.
Even at the height of the DSAP’s productivity, NPR continued to face criticism. The CPB report A Formula for Change: The Report of the Task Force on Minorities in Public Broadcasting found that NPR struggled to develop quality minority programming and to move people of color into senior positions. While the panel did acknowledge the establishment of the DSAP as a promising gesture, it also noted that NPR’s member stations spent relatively little on minority-oriented programming and recommended that the percentage of minority programming on NPR should match the percentage of minorities in the U.S.
The ghettoization of specialized programming
By the mid-1980s, NPR faced a financial crisis that reshaped its specialized programming efforts. An internal NPR report titled The State of Public Radio Programming in FY 1984: What It Is Now and How It Got This Way reflects a notable shift in how specialized programming was characterized. With limited resources, investment in programming became a zero-sum proposition. Money invested in minority-focused programming was money taken away from general programming. “By definition, specialized audience programming appeals to a certain segment and discourages listening by a general audience,” the report said.
By 1991, NPR management was signaling that it was scaling back on funding for the DSAP unit. Later that month, NPR President Doug Bennet announced that the DSAP would be integrated into NPR’s News & Information division. Internal memos suggest, however, that the transition was not a smooth one. In memos to management, DSAP executive producers indicated that NPR journalists were dismissive and uneducated about DSAP’s intended role. DSAP staff were often left off distribution lists for information about the general newsroom. Executive Producer Judi Moore-Smith wrote that she frequently had to explain to her newsroom colleagues what the DSAP was and even that it was part of the News & Information division.
As a matter of its economic survival, NPR has directed its efforts toward pursuing an audience that is affluent, well-educated and already civically engaged. However, the network finds itself navigating demographic, technological and political changes that will profoundly shape its future. The country is becoming more demographically diverse, while NPR’s audience remains older and whiter than the country in general. Unless the network pivots, it will be further out of touch with the public it purports to serve.
The proliferation of podcasting has changed public media, and NPR has made some inroads in this area. Its investment in the music-oriented program Alt.Latino, the politics and culture show Code Switch and the Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante have made these shows platforms for minority journalists. Yet they remain at the margins of the broadcast experience. Meanwhile, NPR’s flagship programs like All Things Considered and Morning Edition have remained primarily white public spaces.
The most complicated of these disruptions, however, are political. In July, Congress rescinded $1.1 billion for public media, leading to CPB’s decision to shut down. As NPR and its member stations confront the loss of federal funding, NPR management is attempting to sustain the network through litigation and fundraising. To account for the decrease in federal funding, NPR has activated its formidable fundraising mechanism, which again targets the affluent listeners most inclined to support the network. Donations to public media stations have surged since the rescission.
Rather than working to maintain the status quo, however, this could be the moment for NPR to reimagine its mission by broadening its listener base beyond an elite few. Again, there are lessons to be learned from the past. In 1987, when NPR’s board of directors sensed that management was disinvesting in Hispanic programming, it issued a resolution opposing the decision. In response, management conceded:
Programming which informs, educates, and enriches the quality of life is what we have to offer. In return, we stand to gain a new and large audience from among the 24 million Hispanics expected to live in the United States in 1990. Clearly, both the public service mission and the goal of audience building can be served well by the development of a significant public radio programming service intended for Hispanics.
Management would not heed its own advice, but at the time, leaders entertained the notion that NPR’s public mission was not incongruent with its economic realities. NPR’s board of directors argued that rather than committing to a privileged few, the network might economically benefit from broadening its listener base. It remains to be seen whether NPR has the fortitude to publicly commit to serving the role for which it was created. In today’s political environment, the allocation of dedicated resources to serving society’s most disenfranchised listeners seems to be politically fraught, and any efforts that have a hint of equity and inclusion are likely to be scrutinized. Yet it is also apparent that these listeners have the most to lose in the current political environment and that there is a clear need for a media system that can engage society’s most disenfranchised citizens in civic discourses.
Dr. Christopher Chávez is the Carolyne S. Chambers Distinguished Professor of and Director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) at the University of Oregon. Chris is the author of Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language Ideology and Practice (2015), The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (2021), and Isle of Rum: Havana Club, Cultural Mediation, and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity (2024).
This essay appears as part of Rewind: The Roots of Public Media, Current’s series of commentaries about the history of public media. The series is created in partnership with the Radio Preservation Task Force, an initiative of the Library of Congress. Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, director of the LOC’s Sound Submissions Project and chair of the RPTF, is Faculty Curator of the Rewind series. Email: josh7759@colorado.edu
On July 26, 1994, ten Clinton staff members were called to testify before Congress (about Whitewater). The all lined up to take the oath and the NPR reporter said “they looked like 10 little Indians.” I was the GM of the Nebraska Public Radio Network at the time and a few minute later, a staff member of the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium (on the same floor as me) came into my office in tears. When she explained how upsetting that remark was to her I called NPR and complained on her behalf. No one seemed to take this very seriously except the reporter, who was mortified and wrote a very sincere and heartfelt apology to my colleague. I poked NPR a little more and asked how many Native Americans were on staff. There were none. I was told they once had one but she had to be let for budgetary reasons. It’s now over 30 years since this incident but at least with respect to Native American staffing levels it doesn’t appear NPR has made much progress since then: according to one study I found, out of it’s 1000+ full time staff, 2 are Native Americans.