I work for NPR, but not for NPR News, which I think makes all of us very happy, because I can make sophomoric jokes on the air and they can maintain complete deniability.
I am, however, a big fan of NPR news, and I count many of their hosts and correspondents among my friends. So: this is a pretty pointed critique of my friends, but I found it interesting, in that it discusses one of the big underlying questions of contemporary journalism: when do you owe your audience not just the facts, but the truth? And how do you determine what that is?
Facts are what they are; truth is what you decide it is. People are conditioned in our modern, information-oriented era, to accept what they see, or hear, or read, with very little filtering, perhaps assuming — rightly or wrongly — that the old ways of communicating news are still in force. Make no mistake, though: the days of Murrow’s Boys & Walter Cronkite holding your rapt attention with his fatherly voice are long over. Fact is no longer king, if it ever was.
People have a legitimate complaint. NPR is the closest thing to vox populi that we have now in the news arena, the last untainted source for straight-forward, unambiguous reporting. When NPR finds that it cannot cover a story, or cannot sift through the bones of a story thoroughly enough to present an in-depth set of details to allow us to make up our own minds, we are left with a sense of foreboding, as if an important tool passed to us through generations no longer works and can no longer be repaired or replaced.
I’m not asking NPR to make up my mind for me, only to supply me with the facts that allow me to do that in venues where I do not have the time and resources to compile the requisite information. I know it’s hard, and I know it costs money, but it’s important to me and everyone else in this nation that someone still does this work right.
Is there a link missing in the post? Maybe “this is a pretty pointed critique” should be a link? I guess I’m wondering where the pointed critique actually is. :)
Click on the title of the post, it’ll take you there.
When? Always. If you dispense facts, while hiding the truth, you’re a liar. That is not journalism, though it often plays it on TV (and NPR).