We've noted that NPR's Public Editor Kelly McBride has kept her day job as an executive of the Poynter Institute, the parent organization of PolitiFact. So when Poynter touts something wonderful at NPR, we can assume their liberal partnership is clicking.
Consider this little press release of an article by Angela Fu:
New tool allows NPR to track source diversity in real time
After deciding to track demographics for all its sources in 2020, NPR built a tool to make the process part of reporters’ daily newsgathering
Journalists across NPR are now keeping careful track of which sources they use in their stories with a new piece of software:
Dubbed Dex (after “Rolodex”), the tool is attached to NPR’s content management system. For each story, reporters, producers, correspondents and editors submit information about their sources’ race and ethnicity, gender identity, geographic location and age range. They can also indicate if a source declined to provide that information. Dex tracks all of this information so that journalists can later pull up reports to monitor their source diversity.
The hope is that NPR, National Public Radio, will produce stories and shows that more accurately reflect its audience — the public. In other words, NPR wants to “look and sound like America.”
You can see ideology isn't a Thing in this screengrab:
Now when they mean "sound like America," they do NOT mean how many conservatives versus how many liberals. That's not being counted or measured. That would apparently be silly, or counterproductive. No, it's all about making sure minorities and women and the "gender-fluid" have a greater percentage of "the say" on NPR. They're working to insure the "marginalized" are brought in from the fringe.
The NPR Training team has a Diverse Sources Database, and they have a @SourceOfTheWeek Twitter account touting leftists of all shades and genders. In the "Gender and LGBT Issues" page, you can see how individual who call themselves "they" are celebrated. For example, there's this recommended source.
AC Dumlao is a queer/bi+ transgender non-binary activist and educator who focuses on centering and uplifting underrepresented communities. Dumlao is the program manager at the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) and the creator of the Facebook social justice community page “Call Me They."
Dex is designed for tracking your "sources so white" bias in real time:
“One of the ways that we can do this is to do the work that Dex is guiding us towards, which is daily, weekly routine assessments of inclusion at a time when we can do something about it,” [NPR chief diversity officer Keith] Woods said. “We were doing annual surveys before and by the time newsrooms learned about the numbers, it was a full year in the past. Now, by the end of the week, you can know how you’re doing.”
Because Dex is built into NPR’s content management system, it makes tracking source diversity a part of the newsgathering process. Journalists will build a habit of paying attention to who they interview, which will allow them to make adjustments sooner rather than later, said Woods.
"Political affiliation" may be worked in later, they say. We won't hold our breath.
