Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi has chronicled the latest racial guilt exercise at National Public Radio. Blacks think there’s a “whiteness problem in public radio.” It sounds too white, apparently.
A journalist named Chenjerai Kumanyika wants to put his black voice on when he gets in front of the microphone. He says his black friends turn off NPR because it sounds “too white.” None of these people hear how racist this sounds. Turn it around, and imagine whites saying D.C. radio has a “blackness problem,” and that whites won’t listen to blacks.
In a commentary that aired nationwide on All Things Considered, Kumanyika demanded change. “We really have to think about who is the public in ‘public media’? The demographics of race and ethnicity are changing in the United States. The sound of public media must reflect that diversity. So get on it. It’s time to make moves.”
He explained that while editing a script aloud for another public radio program last June, he realized he was “imagining another voice, one that sounded more white.” Sounding white and sounding professional are the same thing: “Without being directly told, people like me learn that our way of speaking isn’t professional. And you start to imitate the standard or even hide the distinctive features of your own voice. This is one of the reasons that some of my black and brown friends refuse to listen to some of my favorite radio shows despite my most passionate efforts.”
Naturally, Kumanyika raised the notion of Ferguson, and how the sound of blacks standing on the street there talking about the Michael Brown shooting added so much "weight" to the story. No one can argue that NPR or the national media in general offered too little coverage of Ferguson, or that they under-reported the voices of black rage on the scene.
It’s true that the NPR sound is a easily mocked soft-voiced monotone, if that’s “white.” But while the tone may seem like a brand, there are different accents: there's some Texas drawl in Wade Goodwyn, some Italian flavor in Silvia Poggioli, a British accent on Louisa Lim. What about Ofeibea Quist-Arcton in Ghana?
Farhi noted NPR has long struggled with the “diversity” czars.
Like many news organizations, Washington-based NPR has long struggled with diversity, on and off the air. Most infamously, it drew an avalanche of criticism in 2010 when it dismissed news analyst Juan Williams — its only African American commentator — after he made some intemperate remarks on a Fox News program. It also drew grief last year when it dropped “Tell Me More,” a daily news-discussion program designed to increase NPR’s minority audience.
Amid those episodes, NPR started "Code Switch," with a team of journalists covering race and culture, both online and on the air. The unit organized the Twitter discussion about public radio voices.
In other words, NPR created its own "diversity" complaint department. Imagine if they could do that for liberal bias....
