A tricky reporting assignment: covering your own workplace

0:00Since he returned to power, major broadcaster after major broadcaster has made big financial concessions to President Trump. He says he's been defamed and liable. He sued CBS, ABC, Meta, Twitter. $25 million in the case of Meta, Facebook. $10 million in the case of Elon Musk's ex. By doing this to the Wall Street Journal, he's essentially saying, look, even those outfits that you may think I'm sympathetic to or have a deal with, they're on notice too. That is NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Trump's attacks on the media and the lawsuits he has filed against ABC, CBS and other outlets have kept Folk & Flick busy.

0:35Covering such a powerful industry, it's key, he says, to know your audience. I'm not trying to write for insiders who are the executives in corner suites or the stars whose names sometimes grace the gossip pages as well as the broadcasts or the agents who represent them and are trying to strike deals. Right now, Folk and Flick says there is a lot to cover and real consequences to the stories he's chasing. You know, everything is contested. Truth is contested. Facts are contested. Bias is thrown around. Sometimes news organizations also bring things on themselves and make incredible mistakes. All of this deserves covering.

1:11And covering all of this isn't easy, especially when it is your own company you are reporting on. NPR has been in the news more than usual lately, repeatedly accused of bias by President Trump. And so I think that's important to do is to demonstrate to folks that we actually believe what we say, that we commit to the mission even when it's uncomfortable. Last month, Congress approved a Trump administration plan to rescind more than$1 billion in previously allocated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's a move that cuts all federal support for NPR, PBS and their member stations.

1:45Some stations may close down and go dark and not serve all 99 plus percent of the nation that we do now. Consider this. The job of a media reporter is to examine the role the press plays in our democracy and the choices that large corporations operating newsrooms are making every day. But that job gets more complicated when the company you're covering is the place you work.

2:10From NPR, I'm Scott Detra.

2:21It's Consider This from NPR. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflick has covered the industry for two decades, and sometimes that means reporting on his own workplace. He's been doing that a lot more lately. NPR has been repeatedly targeted by President Trump and along with PBS has recently been stripped of all federal funding. So for our latest reporter's notebook, I wanted to talk to David about how he navigates his beat, reporting on his employer and the larger media moment we find ourselves in. I started by asking him if it's trickier to cover his own industry than other beats. I actually covered Congress for three years before starting to cover the media for the Baltimore Sun back in 2000.

3:03And before that, I covered higher education. And I've got to say the politicians and, you know, all the private institutions couldn't hold a candle to the level of control, paranoia, vindictiveness and vituperativeness that you experience in covering the press. It is extraordinary. There are a lot of great people who work for media companies, journalists, but there are a lot of egos. There's money in play. The industry is sort of at a point of anxiety. So that heightens, I think, the perceived stakes for people who talk to you. But, man, the effort to control, to keep you away from talking to people who might actually know things is extraordinary.

3:41And so, you know, my feeling is, you know, at times, you know, I've occasionally even reported on this. But at times people say, well, you won't get this kind of access if you do that kind of reporting. And my feeling is the reporting has to go where the reporting goes and they can give me access or not. But ultimately, there are enough people who care about what's happening at these institutions, enough people who believe in the mission of journalism that you're usually going to find out anyway. And so if the executives or the chief executives aren't going to talk to you, that's a price I can pay.

4:14Yeah. And I think that brings me to what I want to spend the rest of the time talking about, which is the challenge of covering your own company. It's something you've done for a long time. I remember a long time ago when I was a station reporter, we had some layoffs. My boss said, well, you're going to have to do a Vulcan flick here and report on us. So even back then it was a poor bastard. So you had a reputation even back then. I think most people listening will be aware that NPR is a little bit in the news these days. Can you just tell us how you generally approach reporting on your own company?

4:46Kind of the guardrails you set in place, the way you think about it, the choices you have to make as somebody in the Slack channels also trying to write the stories. You know, the overriding philosophy on this or way of thinking about this is that we want to cover NPR as though we're covering The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, some other major outlet. But over the years, it's really been more than 15 years now. We've developed a formal protocol, and I've done that with editors over time who have really bought in and locked in, to set up a protocol that allows us to kind of shoot off in a little space station away from the mothership.

5:26You know, we have this thing that we now say on the air. You may have read it online where we say, you know, no corporate official or news executive has seen this or heard this before it goes out. That is real. And, you know, I know that because sometimes they're upset. And do they let you know? At times, it finds their way to be sometimes quite directly and sometimes not. We have a firewall for a reason insulating us generally from corporate interference, but also specifically for this protocol. It's much more explicit. And that serves a purpose of reminding folks. And each time I meet a new chief executive or a new top official coming from the outside, I have a conversation.

6:02I'll say at some point I may report something you don't like and you're still signing my paycheck. And that's part of what I do for a living. And the thing that I say to them, to listeners or station officials as I make visits around the country, as I say, you know, it is proof that we can live our values even the time of the greatest crisis. It does mean at times you're reporting on internal network stuff. I will if, you know, recently, for example, our chief executive, Catherine Marr, has held all staff meetings. I'm guessing you probably attended some of them where she's laying out the challenges now that Congress has essentially clawed back all federal funding for all of public broadcasting.

6:38And, you know, I inquired, is this on the record? Is this off the record? I was told it was off the record. I didn't go. My mediator didn't go because we're trying to hold off having sort of insider knowledge that we wouldn't have as reporters if we were outside the company. On the other hand, I've got sources. So I say to people, hey, let me know what's going on. And I get, you know, two, three, four, five, seven people telling me what's happening. And sometimes if it's really newsworthy or really in the moment, I'll tweet it out or put it on social media, Blue Sky, to say, hey, this is what's happening, as I would if it were happening at The Washington Post.

7:10Can I just pause there, though? Yeah. Because I think a lot of people have asked me about this when they hear your reporting. Like, how do you think about and approach coworkers and sources? Like, are you actively cultivating sources the same way you would at an outlet like The Times and Fox News? Or how do you think about that? What would you say? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, is it do people know me a bit better because I'm I'm not I don't physically work from NPR's headquarters, but I'm inside the institution. Yeah. And they've heard me on the air because they're more likely than the average bear to tune in on a given time in working for the for the network and the company.

7:45And, yes, you do have conversations, as I do with people at Fox and The New York Times and all kinds of other places where you're not on deadline and you you do the sourcing. You don't shy away. If it's inconvenient, you know, one of our officials made comments in a meeting last week that I then tweeted out. And I'm told by people I didn't go to the Slack, all staff Slack messages myself because I'm again, I'm trying to at a time we're in the news, stay away from that. You know, I don't go into the union Slack channels either. I stay away from that just to let people talk. But if other people report it to me and it's something that I might think was valuable to report if it were the New York Times in a similar situation, I reflect that publicly.

8:26In this case, I did one statement from one of our officials and I'm told she she didn't take exception at me, but said, hey, folks, I'm trying to tell you things in confidence to give you the best up to the minute insight that I have. And it makes my job harder. And that is attention. But it's not my job to make her job easier. It's my job to report the news. And that's what they pay me to do. So my feeling is, again, it's complicated. It means people might be working in directions that seem not consistent with one another and in conflict. And yet the way in which it's reconciled is I'm trying as hard as I can to embody my job responsibility, but also the mission of this network, which is to tell the truth as best as can, to report the facts as fairly as it can.

9:08I want to end with this just to state a few of the big themes that you're covering right now. You have an administration that is openly, directly pressuring news organizations through lawsuits, through the pressure of merger approvals, through defunding, through many other forms. You have this extended climate that we've been living in for a decade plus now of deep distrust of the mainstream media. There is more and more misinformation just kind of inundating the Internet. You don't even know which which which posts and articles are written by humans at this point. I could take off six or seven other things.

9:47What to you are the biggest questions on your beat right now? What are the things you're wondering about over the next year or two years and how the media changes? I think that in some ways the most immediate problem can be found in single word at the beginning of your question, which is pressure. We are seeing the exercise of political pressure and presidential power to seek to control the flow of independent information from the press, but also from in other ways from the press. Well, look, you're stripping all money out of public broadcasting. You can argue whether or not you feel that public media captures, you know, is fully reflecting things fairly and properly exactly in the right balance in the right way.

10:35But to strip it of all funds immediately is not to seek a new balance. It is to try to crash the system in some way. And in fact, that's what's been talked about by some of the people promoting this. You know, the president Trump has called NPR and PBS monstrous, not not mistaken, not biased, simply biased, although he said that. But, you know, monstrous. It is to discredit and to to weaken. But he's also, you know, his chief regulator has gone after every single major broadcast network for formal reviewer investigation, except for Fox, which, of course, is owned by Murdoch. You've seen a number of media and social media companies settle defamation suits or other lawsuits filed as a private citizen by President Trump against them on what are considered legally pretty flimsy grounds to utterly specious grounds.

11:25That's the range that outside uninvolved legal observers have told me for figures of$10 million or more simply to be able to continue to do business with the federal government or be heard favorably by regulators appointed by the president. So my question is just going to be how constricted will the flow of independent information and assessments and criticism be a year, two years, three years from now of this presidency and of this administration? That was NPR Media correspondent David Fulkenflake. This episode was produced by Kiera Joachim. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

12:06It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.