NPR's Good Taste And The Public Good

Forbes

a day ago

The odd spectacle of a DOGE Subcommittee hearing titled 'Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable' trotted out the usual rhetorical suspects. Republicans, at least one of whom confused 'editorial standards' and 'editorializing,' echoed Uri Berliner's criticism of NPR's 'agenda-driven journalism by and for progressives.' Democrats invoked the spectre of McCarthyism for other Democrats with heavy-handed satire and puppets. NPR's President, Katherine Maher, performed a pop-therapeutic mantra during testimony. 'I hear, respect, and understand your concerns,' she testified. 'I want to recognize your concerns,' she reiterated. However, none of the stars of 'Anti-American Airwaves' seemed concerned with fundamental questions about what constitutes 'essential educational, local, and cultural programming.'
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) speaks in front of poster of Sesame ... More Street's Big Bird during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The heads of NPR and PBS appeared before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency to address allegations of bias in their programming against conservatives. (Photo by)
Should the state sponsor journalism in the first place? Are there 'essential' elements of American culture that ought to be subsidized? If so, what are their artefacts or touchstones? Information and meaning are not the same thing. Determining that some stories or intellectual habits enrich the common good more than others first requires having a cultural outlook – whatever it might be – and a willingness to privilege it over alternatives. Arguments about what is or is not 'bias' often obscure this. Congressional Republicans can be quite wrong, for example, about journalistic standards at NPR and still be quite astute in their emphasis on rhetorical ethos. As former NPR Managing Editor, Bruce Drake, remarks, the 'NPR issue is not as much political bias as its sound, cultural orientation, sensibilities and tone.'
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: Katherine Maher, Chief Executive Officer and President of National Public ... More Radio, testifies during a hearing in front of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in Washington, DC on March 26, 2025. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, described NPR and PBS as 'radical, left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives.' The first part of Greene's claim is tenuous. Indeed, consistent ideological stances are odds with the searching, faux-conversational, performative ethos that informs the aesthetic of the 'NPR voice.' The network has been criticized for being both pro-Isreal and pro-Palestine. It has garnered its fair share of passing controversies for, among other things, soliciting commentaries by Mumia Abu-Jamal for All Things Considered, but it also censored a poem by Martin Espada about Abu-Jamal. It aired Andrei Codrescu's remarks about Evangelicals, but it also condemned Codrescu for having 'crossed a line of taste and tolerance.' It maintained an editorial policy of refraining from calling waterboarding 'torture' during the Bush Administration, but it made glib work of titles like 'Waterboarding: A Tortured History.' As NPR's then-ombud, Alicia Shepard, remarked 'people have different definitions of torture and different feelings about what constitutes torture.' Policing speech around 'different definitions' can be a matter of journalistic distance or a philosophical commitment to tolerance, but one often has the sense that NPR's concern for 'different feelings' is also a matter of taste.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: Subcommittee Chairwoman U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-SC) holds up ... More a poster of Democrats making gestures during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The heads of NPR and PBS appeared before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency to address allegations of bias in their programming against conservatives. (Photo by)
For the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, 'taste' is an imagined criteria of value that allows privileged groups to communicate their own social capital, assert dominance, police social borders, and control access to class status. Greene's characterization of a 'narrow audience' echoes this. NPR's demographic does tend to vote Democrat and identify as liberal. However, the Democratic Party's membership rolls do not mirror NPR's audience makeup at all. Ideological self-identification is simply one of numerous social markers that comprise this demographic's high-status cultural position. The same might be said of expecting – and perhaps secretly wanting – to be called 'urban liberals' by Marjorie Taylor Greene's voters. NPR's listeners, for example, are overwhelmingly upper middle-class. They are also 104% more likely to be in top management positions than other Americans, 69% more likely to be C-suite, 112% more likely to have visited art galleries, 54% more likely to have purchased organic food, 85% more likely to go backpacking, 193% more likely to have contacted a politician, and 60% more likely to describe travel as their passion.
NPR's Susan Stamberg ,second from left and Bob Edwards rehearse their parts in a radio drama with Ed ... More Asner and Anne Meara. The radio play, "I'd Rather Eat Pants," will be broadcast on NPR in five parts beginning on Dec. 16. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Such statistics are readily available from the numerous sources that describe NPR's demographic for advertisers. This 'influential audience,' Market Enginuity promises, will build 'brand reputation.' As Kentucky's WEKU explains, 'NPR listeners are a highly sought after, market-leading group,' comprised of 'leaders.' Masterpiece viewers might see echoes of Poldark's Georgian England in this acute attention to social risks, rewards, faux pas, and reputations. In all hierarchical societies, formal, ostentatious patterns of financial acquisition, contribution, and consumption demonstrate proper taste. 'Most notable is the fact that public media never runs political ads,' Market Enginuity observes. 'Thus, your brand is never placed alongside political messaging that the listener may not agree with.' The parlance of 'messaging' rather than 'ideas' suggests consumers who prefer unanimities of class perspective to fraught exchanges with 'outsiders' that risk social discomfort.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) speaks in front of posters of NPR ... More headlines during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The heads of NPR and PBS appeared before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency to address allegations of bias in their programming against conservatives. (Photo by)
From a marketing perspective, it would be foolish to suggest that NPR's demographic includes the broad, unruly spectrums of American life. It is niche media for a high-status demographic and those who aspire to share its mores, forms of social differentiation, and unwritten rules of 'good' taste. Indeed, NPR funding is as much about the symbolic value of its federal subsidies – a kind of status loss – as it is about real-world financial impact. Former NPR CEO, Ken Stern, for example, thought it important 'that NPR receive some federal funds so it would have 'a place at the table' and could advocate for public radio stations.' The problem is that NPR's federal funding mechanism elides its demographic's finite cultural position with aspirational claims about what 'enrich[es] man's spirit' nationwide. What this means in practice is that NPR never really has to answer foundational questions about what stories or voices are 'essential' to American culture because the answers seem self-evident to most of its listeners.
UNITED STATES Ð MARCH 15: A group of public broadcasting supporters gathers in the Hart Senate ... More Office building to lobby lawmakers to keep funding the PBS and NPR on Tuesday, March 15, 2011. (Photo By Bill Clark/Roll Call)
In Federalist 10, James Madison rejected the hypothetical possibility of 'giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests' as being injurious to republics. However, NPR's special status and public funding subsidize the social fiction that the sensibilities of one high-status demographic are the republic's. 'No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause,' Madison remarks, 'because his interest would certainly bias his judgment […] With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.' Perhaps this explains the peculiar tone of so much NPR content that seems both memoir-like and sermonic at once. Overweening expressions of 'good' taste often give rise to myopic elisions between public and private identities.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: President and CEO of National Public Radio Katherine Maher (L) and ... More President and CEO of Public Broadcasting Service Paula Kerger prepare to testify before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The heads of NPR and PBS appeared before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency to address allegations of bias in their programming against conservatives. (Photo by)
When I was a bouncer, I once explained the job to a new hire by quoting Federalist 10, the part where Madison states that 'the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.' It was not lost on me that most of the affluent, underage would-be patrons I turned away would fit the NPR demographic in ten years. It was also not lost on me that their fake IDs all had addresses in Greenwich, Darien, Wilton, or other Connecticut towns that inspired Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. What is it like to be subsumed into a demographic fiction, as Levin imagines? The IDs were often quite realistic. I also found their owners' haughty, unearned familiarities and sense of entitlement quite realistic. 'How do you get from Greenwich to Bridgeport?' I would ask. 'How would you go to Waterbury?' If I did not see an unconscious scrunch of the nose or insulted scowl at the mention of such places, that is when I would catch them out. 'Do you expect me to believe that you would really choose to come here all the way from Greenwich to The Bronx? Do you know where you are?' I have a good tongue for bad taste.