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Username: Tonya
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 24, 2007 - 05:35 pm: | 
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Blasted for its Rocky History with Black Programs, NPR Launches Show with Michel Martin
Date: Thursday, May 24, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com
National Public Radio has had a rocky history with black-focused shows. To be sure, there has been diverse content in the network’s programming, but some shows that examined the black perspective on a range of issues, as well as shows with black hosts, have lacked sure footing.
After a strong start, "News & Notes with Ed Gordon" lost 17 percent of its original weekly audience -- about 185,000 listeners -- in 18 months. Gordon left NPR last year, and regular contributor Farai Chideya took over as host in September 2006.
Gordon’s "News & Notes" was rushed on the air to replace Tavis Smiley, who had hosted a self-titled show from 2002 through 2004, but left when contract renewal talks fell apart. Smiley’s show started with about 300,000 listeners a week in 16 markets and eventually pulled in more than a million listeners on 86 stations. Thirty percent of Smiley’s audience was black, giving the network its highest proportion of black listeners.
When Smiley left NPR, he told the St. Petersburg Times, “We disagreed about how to program and market a show to black people, most of whom have never heard of NPR. To reach those folks and truly live up to the ‘public’ in public radio, you have … to do things differently than you’ve always done them. You have to take risks. NPR lost interest in those goals after our first year on the air.”
In an interview last year with the Times’ media critic, Eric Deggans, NPR’s executive vice president Ken Stern acknowledged that program diversity was not where the network wanted it to be.
“We’ve been trying to bring in people from the outside and build an even more diverse staff," he said, "and just because we didn’t get it right the first time or second time doesn’t mean we won’t keep trying.”
“NPR News brings a diversity of voices to air throughout its reporting and programming. It's something we strive to do -- to interview the individuals or groups who best represent a given story or topic,” Anna Christopher, manager of media relations for NPR, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
NPR recently launched “Tell Me More,” a syndicated show hosted by veteran black journalist Michel Martin, who worked for The Washington Post and ABC before joining NPR. The network hopes the show will achieve the mission that Christopher described.
“The NPR audience has grown tremendously over the last six years,” Martin told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “One of the reasons is Sept. 11th. It was a wakeup call that you have to be aware of what’s going on in the world. You can’t just stick to your knitting.
“NPR is expanding not only domestically but internationally,” Martin said. “Black folks haven’t been as attracted to public radio. They have every reason to be attracted to it now.”
Martin said public radio would become even more important as other news media outlets cut back on news to save money and spend more time on entertainment stories and less effort examining issues in depth.
Even with 24/7 networks and the steady development of talk shows, a look at content analyses of the media -- broadcast media in particular -- “shows that though there are more media groups, the number of stories whose issues tend to be (covered in depth) are done less often and have less diversity,” Martin said.
She also noted the lack of diversity also extends to free network television, pointing to a study by the National Urban League that on Sunday morning news talk shows “the overwhelming majority of guests are white males.
“That’s one reason I came over here (to NPR),” Martin said, “to bring voices to the table that haven’t been heard before.”
NPR, she said, can provide broader coverage because it has 18 international bureaus, including three in Africa (Kenya, Senegal and South Africa), as well as regular contributions from veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Latin American bureaus in Mexico City and the Andes.
Martin said the “three pillars” that support her show are a diversity of voices to public radio, exposure for women in positions of authority and an examination of what the nation’s changing demographics means for America.
“It’s bringing voices to the table that otherwise are not being heard,” Martin said. “When you look at women in positions of authority, many of them are political leaders. There are 11 female heads of governments that are U.N. member nations, including Jamaica, Chile and Liberia.
“According to new census data, a third of the country is of color now. We’re interested in the intersection of worlds and color in ways that haven’t been discussed, particularly the black-brown dynamic” between black Americans and Hispanics, Martin said.
Part of attracting audiences to the show, she said, is a matter of style.
Her “Mocha Moms” segment is a discussion group made up of women of color who are also stay-at-home moms.
“We got to them for their perspective on a number of issues. The group is primarily African-American, but is open to all.”
One issue the group debated was transracial adoptions and the challenges white mothers have when they adopt black children.
“All those mothers were much more mindful of the police and how that felt to them to have to teach your child how to handle the police. It was a little tougher than some (listeners) liked, but so be it,” Martin said.
In the “Barbershop” segment, a group of men regularly discuss politics and social issues. Recently, Martin said, “they had a really rich conversation about what it means as men of color to be partnered.”
Martin said her goal is to raise the issues people talk about at home and among friends but don’t hear addressed in the mainstream media.
“We’re not really waiting for anybody to give us permission to talk to someone,” Martin said. “That’s one of the advantages of being a startup.”
"Tell Me More" airs on 23 stations, including New York, Las Vegas and St. Thomas, V.I. It is broadcast live at 9 a.m. daily and is posted on NPR’s Web site by noon, EDT. It has been picked up by the African-American Public Radio Consortium and will air on many public radio stations at historically black colleges and universities.
Martin said while the focus of her show examines issues of importance to communities of color, she intends for it to be inclusive for anyone who wants to listen.
“News is news -- the subprime mortgage issue, student loans, changing demographics. If you really want to be true to bringing new voices you really have to bring it,” Martin said. “We are all raised to see our stories in Abraham Lincoln, but we are not raised to see all our stories in Martin Luther King, Jr.”.
“I think NPR is in a rebuilding phase right now,” Deggans told BlackAmericaWeb.com. In addition to Martin’s show, which was launched after a delay, MSNBC’s Alison Stewart was recently hired to co-host a new morning show for the network. “But that will be battling for carriage with the super-popular current a.m. show, Morning Edition,” Deggans said. “It is taking them a long time to get these changes to the airwaves, and none of them really address the problem of behind-the-scenes diversity, which I also hear is problematic. Even if these programs do work, they all feature black women, which is only part of the diversity puzzle."
“Indeed, other than correspondent Juan Williams, I can’t think of another high-profile minority male at NPR since Tavis, Ed Gordon and Ray Suarez left," Deggans maintained. “I think the next year will be an important one for NPR and diversity. I hope they learn how to make their own organization as diverse as the world they cover.”
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