Public radio vs. DOGE: NPR CEO Katherine Maher previews her testimony

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1:18Hey, everyone. We have a special episode today with Catherine Maher, CEO of NPR. Catherine has been called to Capitol Hill tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26th, to answer questions before a Doe subcommittee in Congress, along with the CEO of PBS. You'll hear an exclusive preview of how Catherine plans to face the congressional grilling and how she hopes to reposition NPR's liberal grand identity, appealing instead to all Americans and hopefully winning not only their trust, but their continuing tax dollars. Whether you're a regular NPR listener or not, we're at an inflection point in American society as questions about impartiality and information and truth come fast and furious.

2:03I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

2:10I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Catherine Marr, CEO of NPR. Catherine, great to see you. It's great to see you again. When you joined NPR last year, the organization faced plenty of business challenges, audience, engagement, business model. Since then, the environment just got a whole lot more fraught. There was a high profile criticism about newsroom bias last spring from an editor on the staff. That sounds almost quaint right now, though. You've been called to testify on Capitol Hill tomorrow to speak before the Doge subcommittee in a hearing titled Anti-American Airwaves alongside the head of PBS.

2:50I'm sure you love that label. What do you expect from that? What should we all expect? How do you prepare for that? Honestly, I view it as an opportunity. I view it as an opportunity to go and talk about all the great work that NPR does, but also the great work that our stations do. I think that that's something that often gets lost in the conversation about public radio is the overall percentage of funds that go directly to local stations, the importance of the local station network, the fact that when people are listening to public radio, they are not listening to us broadcasting from D.C. They're listening to their local station, which is probably, you know, chances are attached to a local university or it's a community nonprofit.

3:33And it's making the choices about what folks hear on the air. It's probably has some sort of call in public affairs show where you can talk about what's going on that matters to you as a resident of your town, your city, etc. So just just really getting back to that. That feels like such an important part of what I'm there to do. And, you know, how do you prepare? I mean, you prepare by making sure you know what you're there to say and you prepare by making sure you know what it is that, you know, you want to be able to communicate about the value of the work. And you prepare by a lot of practice.

4:08It's like trying to go to Carnegie Hall. It's a lot of practice. Over the last year, I reached out to you a few times to see if you'd come on the show and you've been hesitant. You've sort of tried to keep a low profile in some ways in all this noise. You don't have that choice. tomorrow? Well, I think trying to keep a low profile has really been about trying to keep my head down and get some work done. You know, as you rightly alluded to, I came into NPR not because I wanted to make a mark from a political standpoint at all. Like the goal for me coming to NPR was to really take this extraordinary organization and to think about what does our future actually look like?

4:44What does it mean to be a broadcaster in an era of digital? What does it mean to think about the next generation of audience? How do we think about what our programming mix looks like? How do we think about how to really strengthen our stations in terms of their service to their communities? And that was where my head has been for the past year. But you're right. Tomorrow is an opportunity for me to go out there and talk about all the work that we've been doing and all the work that we want to do for the future. I mean, this label of this session, anti-American airwaves. Today, people view NPR, a lot of people view NPR as liberal, regardless of what your content might be.

5:24Do you want to change that brand identity? Like, is that part of what you're going to talk to them in Congress about? Or are you proud of it? Well, I think it's a misunderstanding to be, you know, if I'm being honest. For starters, if you look at the data around who comes to NPR's websites or uses our app or downloads our podcasts, it is very representative of the political spectrum of the American public. In fact, it's almost a one-to-one. And so we know where we have data, which is on our digital platforms. It's harder to get that data for broadcast. Our audiences are coming from all over. The folks who come to the website are perfectly proportional to the states of the nation.

6:07That means that in terms of population size, yes, California is the largest, so we get the most traffic from there. But then it's Texas, right, in terms of who's coming to NPR's sites. And then when you look at the sort of cross-referencing of how people identify from a political affiliation standpoint, again, super representative of the nation, conservative, independent, you know, liberal, etc. So I think there's a bit of a misconception as to who we serve. I absolutely think it's an opportunity for us to reintroduce ourselves to the American public. And, you know, whether that is in terms of our political reporting or whether it is our science and health reporting, which is a powerhouse desk and then veterans and education beats.

6:44Those are two places where NPR is known for the work that we do. And we cover issues that really matter to Americans. In fact, we're the only non-paywalled media organization with a robust veterans beat. I was talking to a friend about doing this interview. he was telling me a story about talking to a colleague who's a MAGA Republican, and he mentioned in the episode, he said, oh, I'll send you this episode of This American Life. And they were like, oh, it's on NPR? Oh, you know, no. It almost sounds like there are people who are listening to NPR stations that maybe don't realize they're NPR stations or don't connect it to this sort of conversation about, I don't know, being anti-American.

7:25I really want to rebuff this idea that this, in any way that public radio is anti-American. For starters, we are a uniquely American model. We are a public-private partnership. For every single federal dollar, we get local stations raise an additional seven. They rely on their communities. They rely on local businesses. NPR is 25 % of what you hear on public radio airwaves on average. In fact, 75 % of stations programming are either other shows that they purchase or local shows that they produce. And This American Life is a great example. We love This American Life. Ira Glass used to work at NPR, but it's not an NPR program.

8:02It is a public radio program. It's part of the sort of diverse texture of what is actually available. So, you know, I think about the fact that we have, just at NPR alone, 246 member stations. There's 1 ,300 public radio stations across the country. You know, they represent their local communities in ways that are hyper-unique, whether we're talking about, like high school basketball, the price of sorghum wheat. These are the things that I think it's easy to sort of forget about if you're just listening to the radio in perhaps New York or DC, is that all of this is very much in tune with whatever's going on in American lives at any particular point in time in this enormous nation of ours.

8:43NPR isn't a federal agency, as you say. You get money from lots of different places, but the The subtext of this DOGE hearing is the prospect of losing federal funding or some important part of it. What would the practical impact of losing that funding be? I mean, I can imagine you've been preparing for this possibility even well before this hearing came up. I mean, I think we have to be prepared for all scenarios all the time. The thing that I would want everyone to know about federal funding is the impact that loss of federal funding would have on local stations. Again, of the$121.5 million, that's it,$121.5 million that goes to public radio on an annual basis.

9:26It's a lot of money. I want to acknowledge that. And it's also not a ton of money relative to the total size of the American public budget, right, the federal budget. A hundred million of that goes direct to local stations. And disproportionately, the percentage of those funds goes to support stations that serve rural communities, that serve less affluent communities, that serve communities with really large areas of service where the infrastructure investment in making sure that broadcast airwaves reach the country is significant. So I think about my colleagues in eastern Kentucky who have to put, you know, repeaters and hollers in order for eastern Kentuckians to be able to hear those radio broadcasts.

10:10So the loss of federal funding would directly impact the ability for stations to provide coverage, which is currently 99.7 percent of the nation has access to airwaves. It would directly affect our ability to be part of the emergency broadcast system, and it would directly affect the ability of local stations to be able to continue to support commission and purchase programming about their communities. That's where the harm would be. The harm would be for the local stations, and that's what we're trying to avoid, because it's very easy, again, in D.C. to forget that, you know, we've lost a third of newspapers across the country in the last 20 years.

10:46One-fifth of Americans live in a news desert. public radio, public broadcasting, your local newsroom is often the only news that folks have that actually cares about their community and covers the issues that listeners care about. One of the things that we really focus on is not trying to tell the news from D.C. It's trying to tell the news from America to Americans. And without federal funding, we run the risk that only large cities are able to afford newsrooms. What we want to make sure is that large cities, small towns, rural communities have newsrooms so that when something happens in the country that all Americans need to know about, you're not having someone parachute in from the coast to tell that story.

11:30You're able to ensure that the local reporter in the local newsroom can go out, report that story, and communicate that back. You can't do that without a 50-state network, And you can't have a 50-state network without federal funding. Beyond the federal funding issue, you're also facing some scrutiny from the FCC about how NPR acknowledges sponsors on the air. What's that about? Could that hamper your ability to generate revenue from another channel? on NPR. We receive donations from both private individuals, foundations, and corporations that sponsor or underwrite our programming. And then we give acknowledgements or credits on the air.

12:16These are not advertisements. We comply with the FCC guidelines, and we have a team of, you know, attorneys who review all of the language that goes out in order to make sure it is in compliance with FCC guidelines. We feel really confident about that process. We've been doing it for a very long time. We plan to comply fully with whatever inquiry the FCC wants to engage with. I think as a public broadcaster, scrutiny is always appropriate. It is appropriate for us to be accountable to the public. It is appropriate for us to be accountable to our listeners. We want people to be able to say, like, hey, we want our public radio, our public media to live up to the highest of all standards.

12:59And so my view is that when we hear concerns or criticism or there's somebody who gives us feedback that we need to take that on. We need to evaluate it and we need to ascertain what are we going to do with that with that feedback? We want to make sure that whether it's a listener who feels as though there's a perspective that's been missed or whether it's someone with a question about how we engage with our sponsorship practices, we're answering those questions and we're open to that scrutiny. I mean, I guess there's some people who sort of say like, you know, do we need public broadcasting in the digital age, right?

13:32Started in the 1960s when there was sort of a limit on broadcast airwaves, but now everybody has plenty of access to plenty of media like, do we need this anymore? Well, of course the answer is yes. And I'll give you a bunch of reasons why. For starters, NPR is actually the most trusted news brand in America, which not everyone knows. In terms of the number of people that we reach, we reach more than 10 million people on a weekly basis just on our morning show, which makes us one of the biggest morning shows in media organizations in terms of audience size. 43 million people listen to NPR in a week or engage with NPR's website or app, you know, or podcasts or broadcasts on a weekly basis.

14:14We're pretty big. Much of the commercial media right now is really attuned to a specific audience. You know, it might be a sort of political slant. It might be a generational sort of demographic that it's trying to get. That's not us. We're here for all Americans. We're nonpartisan. We seek to report the news. And so I would almost make the argument that in addition to being available for all Americans and for free, no paywall, another really important thing here, no paywall, we're here for connection of our communities. And we don't take the view that we are trying to hyper-serve a specific segment of society.

14:53We're trying to take the view that all Americans should be in conversation about the news that matters and that we're here to serve everyone. You're for all Americans, but you had, you know, an editor at NPR say like, no, the news has been biased the way you talk about COVID or, you know, the Mueller report or whatever, there is this impression from certain people in America that NPR is not for all Americans. And obviously, that's what the hearing's about tomorrow. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons that I'm here is I believe very deeply that that is our objective and our responsibility. I had someone come up to me and they said, you know, I'm a conservative.

15:34I grew up on NPR. I love NPR. And I'm just not sure it's a home for me right now. And that struck me, you know, that like cut me to the core. I want it to be a home for everyone. I want people to feel as though it's their, you know, home for curiosity. It's their home for understanding the world. It's certainly that's the role it played in my life as a young person. It's what I hear over and over again from listeners is that it broadened their horizons, it was an opportunity to learn about a thing that they wouldn't have been, you know, taught in school, whether it's like science or, you know, exploring the cosmos or just understanding what's happening in sort of global affairs or just down the street or connecting with the humanity and empathy.

16:15That's what we are here to do. And so we've done a couple of things since I've come in around really rethinking how do we serve our audiences and who are our audiences, which is designed to get at some of these concerns that we're hearing. So for starters, we have really reoriented the organization around audience needs. Broadcast radio is not the greatest way to understand audience needs because we just don't have that much information about how people are listening. But as we have more digital data around people who are coming to our websites or listening to our podcasts, or even just streaming from our app, those sort of linear radio experience, it starts to be able to help us understand how to better serve audiences.

16:58We've also gone out and done, for the first time ever, and I say this, like, this surprised me when I came in. I had to ask three times to be like, are you really sure? In the past, the only audience research that we did was with people with college degrees, but only 35 % of Americans have a college degree, which meant that we were not listening to the needs of all Americans, which just is like, how do you run a media organization and say 65 % of my potential audience, I'm not going to ask them what they want? So we're doing that, which I think makes a really big difference. The thing that we've identified in terms of our audiences is that curiosity is the most common characteristic.

17:36And the great news is that curiosity is not a partisan trait. Curiosity exists in every demographic, every age group, every political persuasion. And so that's a great place for us to hone in on is curiosity. What's going on in the world? How do we explain it? How do we give people the information to go a little bit deeper? Give them that context that helps them situate themselves. And I think it's time for us to reintroduce ourselves as if this is what we're here to do. And yes, we're here to do it for everyone. I admire Catherine's optimism that curiosity drives a common American perspective.

18:12We just have to hope that traits like distrust or apathy or in some cases hate don't beat out curiosity. We'll talk about some of that as well as NPR's DEI strategy, Catherine's own politically charged tweets and more after the break. Stay with us.

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20:22Before the break, Catherine Marr, CEO of NPR, shared how she's preparing to go in front of a Doge subcommittee in Congress tomorrow. Now we dig into lightning rod issues that have buffeted NPR, including its DEI strategy and Catherine's own politically charged social posts, plus how she looks at Jeff Bezos' influence on The Washington Post coverage and more. Let's dive back in.

20:52Your predecessor, John Lansing, said that diversifying NPR staff was critical to help, you know, attract younger, more diverse listeners, that this was kind of the company's North Star was his phrase. When your DEI officer retires in May, you said you won't be replacing the position. Was that North Star mission misplaced? I wouldn't say misplaced. I think that it was a really important piece of work for us to do. And we look at our staff today, and we do have a very diverse staff, both in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, but also in terms of generational diversity. That was really important work for us as an organization that was 50 years into our existence.

21:38You have to have the ability to have that refresh, to have new voices come in, people from different backgrounds, people who perhaps didn't have a non-traditional approach to their journalistic career. area. It's imperative that we continue to do that work, not just in the lens of, say, racial and ethnic diversity or gender diversity, but also in terms of socioeconomic diversity, for example. I think that that is the sort of thing that often gets lost in these conversations. Political diversity is another important piece of it. I think it's great when we have people who can sit around a room in an editorial meeting and challenge one another to see different aspects of a story.

22:16Groupthink doesn't help anyone, and it certainly doesn't lead to great reporting. That, to me, is an important piece of the work. So, yes, I think that we did good work there. And now the question is, how do we translate into serving all audiences in a way that feels reflective of the American public as a whole? So not replacing that DEI position, it's not, I mean, one of the things I worry about and there's conversations about is sort of the chilling effects of some of pullbacks or decisions, you know. I wonder how much you have to sort of balance, like, what is practical for you to keep moving forward today versus whether you're being impacted by some of these, you know, as you talk about one of your listeners feeling like, oh, it's not safe for me to listen to NPR.

23:03Well, I didn't say safe. I said that they didn't feel like they had a home. We want people to feel like they belong in public radio. And now the truth is, in the past, lots of Americans, perhaps people of color didn't necessarily feel like they belonged in public radio. So I think that we have to make sure that as we expand that tent, we're expanding that tent in a way that we're keeping everyone in it. I was talking to somebody who said, it's not that I want to hear my view all the time. I just want to make sure I hear my view some of the time. And I'm like, yeah, that's a reasonable thing. So we need to make sure that we're bringing on newsmakers.

23:34We need to make sure that we're interviewing people from across the political spectrum. this administration that we're covering today. It's transformative. Americans elected a transformative administration, and it's our job to cover that transformation and to do so from a place of, you know, awareness and respect for the fact that that's the will of the American people. And now we get to see where that transformation takes us. We'll cover the good. We'll cover, you know, the unintended consequences. We'll cover the impact on day-to-day. That's our job. But, you know, I do want to come back. I think you asked this question about, you know, where do we go?

24:07I want to be very thoughtful about this. We care very deeply about ensuring that our staff represents the nation to make sure that people feel welcome and that they can do their best work here. I think that it is important as an employer of people that we continue to serve our people well. And as we think about what does diversity look like in all of its forms, the work that we're doing is about how do we integrate that into our planning and our strategy and our goals so that our audience reflects the full range of the way that we think about diversity in the country as a whole. And so we're just, as we make this transition with our chief diversity officer retiring, we're moving some of his colleagues to sit in our chief operating officer's function so that all of their work is also incorporated in how we think about, well, how do we know that we're successful when we say we want to reach all Americans?

24:57What does that look like? What do we need to know? How do we need to plan and resource for that. Some of your old social media posts from 2018 have gotten attention, supporting Black Lives Matter, calling Trump racist. Now, you run the business side of NPR, not its content, but it seems increasingly risky to have business leaders share opinions in any format, unless your name is Elon Musk, in which case you can say whatever you want. What messages to some of your personal opinions of the past, how does that impact the way you're trying to sort of reimagine or I guess remind people about what NPR stands for now and into the future?