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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
I was listening to you interview Princeton professor and author Cornel West, talking about recently fired Notre Dame head football coach Tyrone Willingham. West talked about two kinds of liberalism, the "brave version" and the "weak version." The "brave version" believes in "equal status for black people and is not threatened by black excellence," while the "weak version" is "frightened by the Tyrone Willinghams, who exemplify such high levels of excellence" -- it embodies "a kind of cowardice that really doesn't want to follow through on the very principles that they enunciate and articulate." Do you think NPR and its listeners fall into either category?
I think that the notion that is so often promulgated by our friends on the right, that NPR is the liberal media elite establishment, is wrong. It's wrong for a few reasons. Number one, I believe that NPR makes an effort in its programming to truly be fair and balanced. Number two, it's wrong because it took them 33 years to find me. That is to say, in 33 years this network had never had a program hosted by a person of color that was specifically designed to help expand the audience and the reach of the network. But it's wrong, thirdly, because if the network were as committed to the notion of inclusion as I would like for them to be, then I would have re-upped with NPR. I decided not to re-sign because I just could not secure the kind of commitment that I felt we needed to continue to grow the program.
David Giovannoni, the public-radio researcher, has numbers that show that NPR listeners want a unified sound. They don't want to hear a show geared toward younger or minority listeners. If that's true, it seems like NPR has a problem, because if it wants to be more diverse it's potentially looking at a smaller audience.
I think, with regard to the researcher, that would be an exclusionary way of looking at the reality that is America. That said, "NPR" stands for National Public Radio. It's not National Some-of-the-Public Radio, it's National All-of-the-Public Radio. And NPR has got to do a better job of making that moniker -- National Public Radio -- a reality. The fact of the matter is, with regard to the researcher, my research says the exact opposite, that if you have a person of color who gives the audience a program that is smart, that is thoughtful, that is diverse, that has high energy, where the host is not trying to sound like NPR sounds -- this is National Public Radio -- a host who is more willing than most others to be expressive and to expose himself -- and to laugh, for God's sakes -- when you have a host that attempts to do those things, my research shows that the show can defy the minimal expectations that the network has for it.
NPR -- and I've not discussed this publicly -- but NPR's internal projections were that my show would be on 35 stations by the end of year 3. I started with 16, 16 very small stations. I was missing all the top 10 major markets. And so, they thought, if we were lucky, we might be on 35 stations after three years. We broke through that in the first year. And conquered the top 10. And then conquered the top 25. We're on almost 90 stations, over a million listeners, in less than three years. And, moreover -- and there's no debate, and they will confirm this -- we have the most multiracial audience in the history of NPR, since they've been tracking this data. We have the youngest demographic in the history of NPR. And clearly we have not alienated the traditional NPR listener.
