House Republicans held a hearing this week, “grilling” the leaders of NPR and PBS. I know this is the verb everyone seems to be using, but it feels like giving far too much credit to the people supposedly in charge of the grill. Let’s dig in.

I’m sure we all expected this to be a somber fact-finding mission from the start, especially when Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green had an aide hold up a picture of a random drag queen she referred to as a “child predator,” while calling PBS, the network of Mr.Rogers, “one of the founders of the child trans abuse industry,” whatever that means. 

Nothing in this hearing was particularly surprising, though I have to be honest I couldn’t bear to finish all two and a half hours of it. I had hoped for a more full-throated defense of public media and its editorial independence, particularly from Katherine Maher, the network’s CEO. But I shouldn’t be surprised - it’s an age-old tradition to indulge bad-faith concerns from conservatives about the supposed left leanings of public radio. Their own glass house is full of fabulists spinning wild tales about how the world works, but sure, let’s hear them out when they accuse PBS of transing the kids.

I have worked in public media in some capacity since I graduated from journalism school in late 2013. I am one of those mission driven people. To this day, I harbor a sincere and abiding belief in the concept of public media: the notion that everyone everywhere is entitled to a front row seat to the best of what the world has to offer – for free! But as my other writing might suggest…I don’t have the rosiest feelings about all of my time spent as a full-timer in the public radio system.

I started writing this piece weeks ago as a slow simmering reaction to early announcements that NPR and PBS were pulling back on DEI initiatives. So maybe that’s still a good place to start.

In early February, PBS sold out DEI. In a statement, PBS president Paula Kerger said: “In order to best ensure we are in compliance with the President’s executive order around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion were have closed our DEI office,” adding that they had let go of two staffers. Later in the month, NPR announced that their Chief Diversity Officer Keith Woods would be retiring. Good for him, truly. Rumor has it he’s been trying to retire for a while. However, Maher later told Semafor that she would not rehire for his role. Woods’ staff will basically get glommed into the COO’s office, according to an internal memo.

I want to stress something other, smarter people have pointed out: executive orders are not binding law, and the administration is also being sued for this anti-DEI order. But Kerger and Maher rushed to appease Trump anyways. Hence my simmering.

“Doing DEI” 

At every station where I worked, I have “done DEI,” sometimes unwittingly. My first job in public radio was in 2014, at WRKF in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It’s the capitol city, and it’s more than 40% Black, and so neatly segregated, it’s like someone drew a perfect square around the urban core, forcing all the Black people to live outside of it.

I remember returning from reporting a story in Scottlandville, the heavily Black neighborhood in north Baton Rouge. My general manager asked where I had been, and when I told him, he responded with a chuckle and asked: “Were you lost?”

I remember our office being similarly segregated, with not a single Black person on air or on the news staff. This was all a long time ago, and mercifully, things have changed.

My next job was at KUNC in Northern Colorado, where my general manager once cornered me in the break room to ask me where I’m from, no like where I’m really from, like where is my family from? This is one, small, benign episode in what would turn out to be a powerfully toxic workplace. A litany of all the indignities I suffered at this job would be long, and honestly, not fun to read. But that was a long time ago, and mercifully, things have changed.

When I landed at Colorado Public Radio in 2017, it was a good job at first. Then I had an editor who tried to assign me a story about how “gentrification can actually be good for Black people.” A year in, the station hired a new CEO, who had been leading KUT, the station in Austin, Texas. That fall, Current published a story detailing what sounded like a hostile workplace at KUT. One without apparent consequence for clearly unprofessional and baldly racist behavior on the part of leadership. One where’s it’s apparently cool and fine to ask someone in a job interview: “Why should I hire you - other than because you’re Black?” 

Anyways, this all happened on Stewart Vanderwilt’s watch, and these revelations were coming to light pretty much around the same time he was heading up the highway to become our new boss.

I started to realize the same disfunction lives everywhere in public media, that to remain in this work was to encounter this garbage from countless editors, managers and people with fancy bloated titles in front of their names. I haven’t even gotten to CPR’s “racial reckoning” that occurred in summer of 2020. That probably needs to be a whole separate post because…jeez. 

Necessary Disclaimer

Things improved at my past stations because I complained, and because other people complained. Somehow along the way, those complaints turned into “DEI,” basically getting drafted to fix problems you didn’t cause. I’ve been on committees, I’ve been part of workgroups, I’ve just done stuff that was outside of my job description because so help me, I just wanted to work in a less shitty environment. 

Being involved with DEI efforts in multiple workplaces means that I have also seen all the ways these efforts go awry. You can pour hours into something you’re convinced will really make a difference, only to have your toil and trouble turned into a toothless press release by the bosses. I’ve done a lot of side work that I now know was unappreciated, unvalued and ultimately left by the wayside. In the public radio system, that experience is commonplace – at least among those who are still around. A lot of people have left, like me. 

I don’t regret any of these efforts. But I do acknowledge that there’s often a disconnect between how DEI initiatives are conceived and how they actually play out in reality. People of color tend to take on the brunt of this work, on top of their everyday responsibilities, and get burnt out. The workload causes the burnout, but it’s also because this work is often done by people who have no institutional power. 

You essentially spend a lot of time doing your boss’ job, and at the end of it all, your boss can take all your hard work and disregard it anyways. Because DEI always ends up being a side project. I used to joke that stations care about diversity until the next breaking news event. But there’s a truth to this – there is routine failure to embrace the sort of transformative change many DEI believers truly want. And so it often gets boiled down to lunch-and-learns, hiring quotas, or source tracking spreadsheets. Stuff that’s fine, I guess. But not transformative.

I think there is a place for discussion about why these efforts fail, and yes, why certain people come to resent them. But I think it’s a tactical failure to back away from DEI right now, while it’s under sustained attack. I think it’s a foolish distraction to engage in debate about these shortcomings when the administration is using the term “DEI” as a fig leaf for a campaign to resegregate public life. As Gabe Schneider wrote for The Objective back in February: 

While Schneider was referring to how outlets are covering this administration, I believe this logic needs to be turned inward, too: adopting this bad-faith framing of DEI, and remaking the workplace accordingly, is conceding ground to this campaign of resegregation. 

Often, workplaces adopt DEI initiatives as a result of pressure from employee organizing. However imperfect the result, to mothball those efforts is also a big fuck you to people like me, who toiled and busted their asses to make their workplaces more fair. 

More than that, shrinking away from DEI at this moment feels like betraying the core mandate of public media.

The Bigger Picture

Public media is a miracle. Built on a foundation of educational broadcasting and enshrined into law in the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, the purpose of public radio and television was to reach precisely everyone it could. From day one it was conceived of as an equalizer - a way to bring educational programing to communities hurting for it, and a means for entertainment that ignored class and status, delivering news, theater and commentary to living rooms across America. 

To quote the act: “[I]t is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”

Republicans have been slavering to cut public media for much of its existence. This anti-DEI purge is truly just the latest coat of paint on the same set of tired arguments against federal funding for NPR and PBS. Look around at the administration’s sustained efforts to rip funding away from disfavored parts of government, and you’ll see there are few paths for survival here. I think public media leaders would be silly not to prepare for the hammer to come down either way.

What I would have liked to hear from Maher or Kerger is that the very principals under attack are interwoven into public media’s founding document. To abandon them, or even to downplay them, would not only be cowardly, but it would fly in the face of the very words on the page, a mandate to create media “that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences.” 

I would have liked Maher or Kerger to defend this mandate as honorable, because it is. I wanted to see fighters, and there were none. I know I’m expecting a lot from CEOs who are lawyered up their eyeballs, but it really did feel like there was little to no pushback. Elected Democrats and their admittedly eye-roll worthy invocations of Big Bird and Cookie Monster did more advocate for the system than the system’s own leaders. That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

I know what some people are thinking – if they pushed back, wouldn’t that just give Republicans what they want??? A confirmation that NPR and PBS are indeed state sponsored commie DEI transgender media? My response to that is: they already believe all of this! And I promise you no one left this laughable hearing with their minds changed. 

At the top of the proceedings, Rep. Greene laid out all the conservative arguments against public media, which essentially amount one single solitary complaint: tax-payer funded public media does not look or sound like conservative media. But what an incredible miscalculation for public media leaders to hear that, and react with sympathy. 

Public media does not sound like conservative media because conservative media is on a whole other planet, part of its own fucked up solar system. Conservative concerns about the ideological makeup of public media staffs are a lazy trap. And it’s concerning that Maher finds these concerns “concerning.” Obviously, you cannot ask job applicants for their party affiliation, not in a newsroom, not in any kind of workplace. Republicans understand this. 

It’s taboo to acknowledge this in my business, but it’s fairly obvious to anyone who is awake: conservatives do not apply for these jobs in the first place. They self-select out of working for NPR because the type of “news” they’re accustomed to is more akin to breathless propaganda. If you think Steve Innskeep is a commie, why are you going to go work at Morning Edition? That conservatives don’t work for NPR is not a failure of public media, it’s a failure of the conservative movement to value a fact-based free press at all. Why must the rest of us atone by giving oxygen and attention to viewpoints that are based on lies? 

This is the debate we can’t have when leaders like Maher and Kerger pay lip service to concerns about “ideological diversity.” When the public is watching, it’s verboten to say something like: a free press is fundamentally a liberal idea in and of itself, and that’s the precise problem that conservatives have with it. Maybe drawing elected Republicans into a debate like this could have been illuminating for the people watching at home. But instead we got two and half hours of wild lies about what public media is and does. I guess the silver lining is that defunding public media remains a broadly unpopular idea, but I have to wonder if that’s made our leaders complacent. 

Time will tell whether carefully crafted statements will win the day, but I’m not feeling optimistic. I swear I’ll write about some some fun next time.

(thumbnail image is a sketch by Giacomo Cavedone in the public domain)