This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 16, 2010 - When you plug the name of the NPR ombudsman into Google, you don't have to scroll down too far to find an entry titled: NPR's Alicia Shepard is a pinhead.
Welcome to the world of the woman who takes the heat when her employer makes a controversial decision.
The most recent storm, of course, was NPR's decision last month to fire Juan Williams over remarks about Muslims he made on Fox News. NPR later apologized, not for the firing but over how the situation was handled, and it has now named an outside law firm to review what went wrong.
For Shepard, questioning how NPR handled something the way it did is nothing new. Since she became its ombudsman in October 2007, she has operated in somewhat strange waters. Her colleagues are wary when they see her coming, she told the Beacon in an interview during her trip to St. Louis this week, and she describes her job as having elements of the "Stockholm syndrome."
"I'll ask a colleague and say, 'Hey, how are you doing?' They'll pause and respond, 'That depends on why you're calling.' "
"Overall, I've tried to be respectful of the unique situation I have. I'm paid by NPR, I work inside of NPR and yet I'm independent of NPR and I'm paid to criticize, to criticize them constructively. I try to make sure I bend over backward to be fair to them.
"It's not anything different from what I would do as a reporter. I'm just aware of the fact that it's an awkward situation. People inside NPR see me as Internal Affairs; people outside NPR see me as a shill for NPR. Trying to establish that I'm neither is always a challenge. It's in the nature of the job."
Before coming to NPR, Shepard contributed to such publications as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, American Journalism Review and others. She has written books on the lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during and after Watergate and on the public roles that journalists played as they covered 9/11.
She also teaches media ethics at Georgetown University.
NPR was the first U.S. broadcast news organization to create the position of ombudsman, a post that has become less common among journalism organizations as newsrooms have shrunk in recent years. Shepard's three-year term in the post, which was extended for six months as NPR searches for her replacement, ends in March 2011.
Shepard is a director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen -- known as ONO. She always talks about NPR in the third person, not as "we."
Talk about how you approach your job and how the public views what you do?
Shepard: It's a crazy job, when you think about it. I'm paid to publicly criticize NPR. They call it the loneliest job in the newsroom.
People who bring a complaint to me from outside of NPR want and expect me to side with them. That isn't always the case. It requires that I look at the transcript of a story, talk to the editors and reporters who worked on the story and determine whether the complaint is valid. It's not an either-or. Sometimes people have valid complaints, and I'll say they're correct.
It's incredibly challenging. It gets you thinking all the time. You're always questioning everything. I listen to the radio in the morning and think, 'Oh my God, that story is going to cause trouble today.' I can almost predict it. But I care very much about journalism staying at a high level and being credible, so it's a privilege when your role is to try to make NPR journalism better. In today's world, there's a cesspool of journalism out there, and making brands credible is more critical than ever. People ask, whom do we trust and where can we go? If they can trust the Beacon or St. Louis Public Radio or NPR, they're going to go there.
What lessons can be learned from the Juan Williams affair?
Shepard: Clearly, it wasn't handled well -- the decision making, how it was communicated and how NPR responded to it. Those are the things that the law firm that NPR hired is looking into.
The one lesson is that there needs to be a lot of thought and consideration into any big decisions, to try to anticipate what the implications of those decisions are going to be. The reaction to the Juan Williams firing came as a big surprise to top management. Any time you fire a high-profile person in your organization, there's going to be some pushback or feedback. I don't care who it is. That's certainly what happened when they fired Bob Edwards.
This is really about management. My bailiwick is journalistic issues. I wondered about that. I understand it's ultimately a personnel issue, that NPR fired an independent contractor who worked for them. Any organization that fires someone typically says it can't talk about it, it's a personnel issue. But in this case, it's bigger. I think what happened speaks to problems in the management structure, and that's why they're doing a review.
Obviously, NPR exists in a larger sphere of public radio stations and Congress and public funding, and the decision was made when several dozen public radio stations, including St. Louis Public Radio, were in the midst of their fund-raising. At the same time, public radio stations were already concerned about what the change in Congress, from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority in the House, would mean, before Juan Williams was ever fired.
Since I arrived in October 2007, I've gotten more complaints about Juan Williams, and more often than not about what he said on Fox News, than about anything he said on NPR.
How much of this is about the contentious times we're living in?
Shepard: This whole event needs to be considered within the context of the culture wars that exist now between the right and the left. While there were a lot of people on the right who were furious about this, there seemed to be a certain segment on the left who have come to NPR's defense, donating more money as the threats come from the right to defund public radio.
There is actually something called the hostile media effect, an academic term where people have analyzed the coverage and concluded that the more neutral a story is, the more like it is that people will determine it's biased, because they bring their own views to it. If you're pro-Israeli and there is a piece about living conditions in Gaza, what I hear is that NPR is National Palestinian Radio and why didn't NPR mention this and this and this. Instead of hearing that this is a piece about living conditions in the Gaza Strip, they feel NPR is being empathetic. I have found that more and more.
I would say 75 percent of it is perceived bias. I have learned in three years that bias is in the eyes of the beholder. It's very difficult to say what is bias. Every once in a while, there will be some piece that is missing, and you can say that it is biased. But we live in a fairly polarized society, and when people hear a story that they don't agree with, they determine it was biased.
NPR is not a radio station. It is a content producer. Public radio stations buy that content. Sometimes they use money from the federal government to buy that content, but they also have money from listeners that they use. So concerning calls to defund public radio, I guess you could say they would be indirectly, potentially hurting the stations. In general, though, I think most people donate directly to their public radio station, not to NPR.
NPR said Williams was fired because his comments "undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR." Do you think people understand the distinctions between a reporter, a commentator and an analyst? What are the differences?
Shepard: A news analyst is someone who could step back and say, "Here's what happened and why the Republicans took over the House." They would be analyzing what happened, why they think it happened, the role of the Tea Party. That's the role of a news analyst.
A commentator is someone who might say, "This is bad for America, that the House turned Republican," and then give some well-researched explanation of why they think that. It's difficult enough to have news analysts in the newspaper. You can see it in the New York Times, where a reporter who covers something does news analysis and you will have a little box saying so.
I don't know that the public could or did draw the distinction between what Juan Williams was saying on the air and what Mara Liasson was saying on the air, when they had two different roles. Juan was a news analyst, and Mara was a correspondent.
What's next for you after you leave your ombudsman post?
Shepard: I'll probably go through some withdrawal. I think about Clark Hoyt, who was the public editor at the New York Times, who said, "Now, I can just read the paper."
A few weeks ago, Peter Sagal, the host of "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" a show produced by NPR, said on the air that he wanted to praise NPR for going 11 days without a self-inflicted wound. I sent him an e-mail, saying that you've got to love a guy who can go on the air and criticize his employer. He wrote back and said you've got to love an employer who lets you do it.