NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen issued a report Friday addressing the perception problem that NPR’s reporting on Iran was funded in part by the leftist group the Ploughshares Fund, which boasted in its annual report that it won the political battle over the Iran nuclear deal through its “high-impact grantmaking,” which would include NPR.
They’ve given $700,000 over the last decade, specifying it backs Iran coverage. The Ploughshares Fund's 2015 annual report explained their grant to NPR supported "national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran's nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security." AP's reporter found Iran was routinely specified as a reason for the money.
Jensen declared that due to the perception problems of bias, that NPR should stop accepting grants from leftist foundations. No, I’m kidding.
She said the grants shouldn’t come with so specific a rationale: “in the case of grants such as the one from Ploughshares, which are intended to fund reporting on specific, highly controversial issues, my suggestion is that NPR consider not accepting them in the future if they contain such specific language. No, the firewall was not breached in this case, but the damage that happened from perception is just too great a risk to NPR's reputation.”
One can’t expect that internal watchdogs are going to be fierce, but this recommendation is especially weak. In this case -- when a White House aide boasts of how he can create an "echo chamber" with help from his partners at Ploughshares -- their grant money still looks like an echo-maker. What Jensen won't acknowledge is that NPR can't just shake this echo-chamber reputation by feeling good about their self-image of objective professionalism, or keeping reporters ignorant of their funders.
NPR is incredibly predictable in the tone and bias of their reporting. Liberals know they are funding self-satisfied liberal tilt when they send in the check. Heck, that's why liberals fund their local NPR station. This is why someone like Juan Williams gets fired in the middle of a pledge drive. The donors wanted him gone for appearing on Bill O'Reilly's show.
But it’s still helpful to have an ombudsman to investigate -- and Jensen is probing to at least suggest inside NPR that they have a perception problem. For example, Jensen it's quite easy for listeners to have no idea about NPR funders:
One of my biggest concerns about all of this is the realization of how little I — as a proxy for the listener — know of these sorts of dedicated grant arrangements. The only way a listener can know is a) when they hear a disclosure attached to a particular story, b) when an organization such as the MacArthur Foundation issues a press release or c) by reading the annual reports of the funding organizations.
NPR's own disclosure is minimal to the point of being unhelpful. Ploughshares, for example, is simply part of a list in the annual report titled "2015 Supporters." There is no way for a listener or reader of the report to know whether those on the list made a contribution in exchange for an on-air funding credit or were, as in the case of Ploughshares, actually funding a dedicated portion of NPR's journalism.
Jensen also noted one of the sneakier forms of bias was that Ploughshares wasn't just funding NPR -- it was funding the Iran deal experts being interviewed on NPR. Then they boasted about that in their annual reports!
Where I found more cause for concern — and where both [NPR senior vice president for news Michael] Oreskes and [NPR CEO Jarl] Mohn agree that there was a breakdown, at least in internal processes and disclosure — is in the large number of Ploughshares-funded analysts and experts who made it on the air to talk up the deal, without any acknowledgment of that by NPR.
The coalition that Ploughshares assembled to push the deal was astonishing, and it would likely have been almost impossible to cover the story without talking to those sources.
Ploughshares itself laid out their names in a recent post titled "How We Won" on its website. A video there includes a list of nearly 70 organizations under the segment "Special Thanks To." Some of those names are of groups which receive grants from funded by Ploughshares; some give to Ploughshares itself. Many of them were quoted on NPR, without any acknowledgement of Ploughshares' involvement.
Take this March 2015 story, "Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations," reporting on the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference. The sponsor, Carnegie Corporation Endowment for International Peace, was part of the Ploughshares-led coalition and the organizations of two other people quoted in favor of the deal in the piece either received funding from Ploughshares to advocate for the deal or were working in that coalition. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares Fund, was also interviewed. NPR has already acknowledged that the piece should have included a disclosure of the funding agreement (and one has been added retroactively).
Here's how NPR's internal processes are supposed to work: When reporters and producers book a guest, the guest should be asked to disclose whether he or she is funded in a way that might be a conflict NPR needs to know about. The senior supervisors for each reporting desk and each show are responsible for making sure that any conflicts are then properly disclosed.
Because that process broke down in the case of Ploughshares, Oreskes said, NPR is conducting a review of its safeguards. The newsroom is also looking into why the Cirincione interview in particular did not raise any red flags. Standards and practices editor Mark Memmott said it may have been the case that Ploughshares had been a supporter for so long that supervisors did not know, "that institutional memory had been lost" and needs to be refreshed.
It's also possible that internally, NPR producers reassured themselves that a piddling $100,000 grant wasn't much in the larger scheme of the NPR system's overall funding. It was a drop in the bucket, so why disclose?
PS: I heard some of that when I granted an interview to a podcast for Current, a trade publication website for public broadcasting. If you want to hear how a liberal in that orbit argues in favor of the wonders of taxpayer-subsidized journalism, or how they deal with conservative pushback, you can listen here.
