NPR ombud Alicia Shepard has posted an article (4/2/10)headlined “Where Are the Women?,”a summary of a study of the gender diversityofhigh-profile NPR programs.
The most important findings:
With the aid of NPR librarian Hannah Sommers, we compiled a list of regular commentators, who are not NPR employees but are paid to appear on air. There are 12 outside commentators who appeared at least 20 times in the last 15 months. The only woman is former NPR staffer, Cokie Roberts (51 times), who is on ME [Morning Edition] most Mondays talking politics.
And:
We also looked at the number of people from outside NPR who were interviewed by NPR news shows, or whose voices appeared in reporters’ stories. For this analysis, we examined 104 shows, using a “constructed week” sampling technique from April 13, 2009 to January 9, 2010.
Those figures are equally discouraging.
NPR listeners heard 2,502 male sources and 877 female sources on the shows we sampled. In other words, only 26 percent of the 3,379 voices were female, while 74 percent were male.
Shepard pointed out that women are much more prominent as reporters and hosts on NPR–close to 50-50.
The findings about NPR sources reflect only a slight improvement over the gender imbalance documented in previous FAIR studies of NPR programming: A study looking at shows from 1991 (Extra!, 4-5/93; press release, 3/29/93) found only 19 percent female sources, while a study of 2003 sources (Extra!, 5-6/04) turned up 21 percent. In terms of commentators, NPR might have been doing slightly better in 1991, when four of 27 commentators featured more than once were women.
Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep expresses hisproblems with the survey; he calls it “unsatisfying,” though the same could be said for his criticism. He suggests, without offering evidence, that NPR‘s lengthier in-studio interviews are more often with female guests; when public broadcasters have offered similar rationalizations in response to FAIR criticism in the past, such objections haven’t held up (Activism Update, 10/18/06).
The upshot is that NPR says it’s trying hard to make improvements in this area, and they’ll try even harder. But given the fact that 11 of the top 12 commentators on NPR are men, and that the only woman is Cokie Roberts, it looks like they’re not trying hard enough. Kudos to Shepard for doing this work.
Hmm. I read this and think, that’s corporate liberals for you.
They’re perfectly content with their corporatism and jingoism and torture apologism, but they feel angst over a lack of the right gender balance among the hacks.
I wish they’d do a similar analysis of how many Republican/conservatives are interviewed compared to Democratic/progressive interviewees. The balance sure seems to tilt heavily to the right.
And Cokie? COKIE?!?!? Paying her for her insipid commentary is as insulting to women as thinking Sarah Palin was Republicans’ Hillary Clinton. What a waste of bandwidth (and NPR donor dollars).
I’m less concerned with wasting donor dollars than the use of the word “public”
Shepard will, no doubt, welcome Sara Palin, Michele Bachman, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Monica Crowley, Debbie Schlussel, et al. Leave to Alicia to define a problem whose solution will make matters worse.
Whatever happened to the Equal Rights Amendment? Not so
fast, some say. After all women just got the right to vote in
1920. There are people alive today–men and women–who can
still remember when women could not vote. When the ERA is
passed, when women receive equal pay for equal work, maybe
then NPR will have a balance between men and women who
appear n their show.
Listening to NPR is a total waste of time. NPR = CNN = FOX. Enough said.
NPR ‘s public affairs programing is the same baloney you find on the cable news networks. They just repackage it for the elite snooty big time rich minority. WASP males are what this group wants and NPR delivers. NPR never ever broadcasts anything that would truly offend their mighty corporate sponsers. The expose they did on the Death of Howard Zinn was offensive, and bias. There is nothing in the rest of NPR’s programing that would be of interest to middle class or poor Americans and we are the vast majority of the PUBLIC . They have a regular 1 minute or so feature called Bird Notes, now who would that aimed at? WASP MALE CEOs? Big private donations and corporate money pay for NPR’s programing. Small public donations from their never ending whiney plege drives are just enough to pay their utility bills.