“We Have to Earn the Trust of the Public”

At a recent event, Carnegie senior fellow Jon Bateman spoke with NPR President Katherine Maher about the effects of disinformation and technology on journalism and the information environment. This Q & A was adapted from a transcript of the event and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jon Bateman: NPR is unique among media organizations in that it’s a member organization comprised in part of local member stations. And our research here at Carnegie on what actually helps to build civic trust, fight disinformation, and generally improve the state of public conversations is investing in local media. We’ve found it to be one of the most likely effective interventions, although it’s extremely costly. And we're going to get into some of those financial challenges.

First, I think it might be helpful to talk about [recent] events. Many people will have seen an essay published by a now former senior editor at NPR, Uri Berliner. He argues that NPR has lost its culture of curiosity and that formerly it was a place that had lots of differing views and was able to draw upon [them] in the framing, investigation, exploration, and storytelling around key media events. Berliner argued that the culture of NPR has shifted toward the embrace of a progressive worldview.

You and NPR leadership have very publicly pushed back on that, but I want to give you the opportunity to respond to that claim. You’re just a few weeks into the job, but what’s your assessment of that claim?

Katherine Maher: Because of this firewall between editorial and management, I don’t sit in our newsroom discussions. I know that, in walking around the building, the editors and the journalists that I have met have been absolutely rigorous and committed to upholding a strong culture of inquiry. And this is exactly why we have the facility of the newsroom and we have editorial meetings to engage in these conversations.

I think the other interesting piece of this is that we’ve done this great research over the course of the last year trying to understand better how we serve the American public. We have been doing qualitative and quantitative research that reaches into every corner of America. We talk to people from every demographic, every background, every political belief in order to understand what they need out of public media [and] their information ecosystem, and what’s important to them in the news.

And the cross-cutting line when we have these conversations, whether they listen or not, is that they’re curious. A newsroom that is curious serves an audience that is curious, and that curiosity is something that’s incredibly consistent across every demographic. It allows us an opportunity to have a conversation with the American public about what is interesting to them. They’re open-mined. They want to understand the world around them. They want to listen to the stories that our NPR journalists tell about the world, help illuminate what’s going on, help inform.

They’re much more interested in how the news affects them than the covering of what goes on in Washington, which makes complete sense when you think about the role that journalism plays in their lives. It’s really about: what does this mean for me?

I think that that through-line of curiosity is just so promising because if we uphold that commitment as a newsroom and we bring people in with differing perspectives, it allows us to be curious with one another. It allows us to be curious about the world around us. And it allows us to serve that audience, which is all of America, so much better.

Jon Bateman: One of the unfortunate things that we’ve seen in the United States and a lot of democracies is a fracturing of audiences and trust around media. More and more of us are moving toward listening to media voices and outlets that we personally trust, and then we might distrust others on the other side of some dividing line.

But there’s another camp of people who genuinely don’t trust mainstream media organizations in general—including NPR specifically. They might ask: what’s the data that you can cite to show that there is curiosity and a diversity of perspectives? How do you think about that as a leader?

Katherine Maher: An institution that serves a public interest mandate, particularly one around information, should always start from the perspective that we have to earn the trust of the public.

NPR is in a really interesting position. There’s research that finds that among people who know who we are, we are among the most trusted media organizations in the country. Not as many people know of us as some of the bigger brand names, but the people who do—there are more than 40 million people who actively participate in consuming our journalism—trust us very highly.

I think that understanding that the public trust is not automatic—it doesn’t come by virtue of being a media organization, and it’s something we earn day in and day out—means that I don’t want to fall back on statistics. I want to make sure that every person who listens to us is judging for themselves about whether to have confidence in what we do, because that’s something that we owe the public.

Jon Bateman: It’s pretty common today to paint a harrowing picture of journalism in the United States, and it’s not exclusive to the United States either. Thousands of newspapers have closed over a twenty-year period. We’ve talked about the fragmentation across outlets, the loss of public trust. And we’re in a very polarized age where it seems like a generational perfect storm for the journalism industry. Is that how you see it, or are there bright spots?

Katherine Maher: No, I’m not disheartened. I can overwhelm you with numbers and statistics. We know that the average listener listens to four hours of [our content] a day, and that’s been very consistent. Sometimes that’s entertainment, sometimes that’s news, sometimes that is a blend of both. But we know that there’s a real hunger from the public to understand the world around us and to understand the context in which we operate.

I just found out before [this event] that the trust in NPR among millennial and gen Z audiences is actually a little bit higher than other segments of the population. And that is really exciting, too, because I think we often write off younger generations as not being as interested in the news.

It’s also the case that when you talk to news consumers, very few of them rely just on one source. Most people compare and contrast. I think it does a tremendous disservice to the public to assume that people are only receiving information from one place. There’s an intuitive media literacy that exists in the up-and-coming generation, in millennials and gen X, about how you actually consume news now that the landscape is so different than it was when we just had a few major broadcast channels.

So I’m not negative about this at all. I think it’s a huge opportunity and it’s an exciting opportunity to speak in different ways to audiences that have been looking for this and have a desire to find something that they trust, even if they augment it with all sorts of other sources.

Jon Bateman: I’m glad you brought up media literacy. In our research on disinformation, civic trust, improving the information environment, in addition to investing in local news, investing in media literacy, again, seems to be one of the interventions that probably has the most promise.

It’s long term, it can be costly. And we know that media literacy today looks very different than it might have looked ten or twenty years ago. You need to teach very different skills. You might even need to teach an emotional reaction to news and information where you can actually encourage people to have a sense of responsibility and the prospect that they could succeed, that they could successfully navigate the information environment actually seems to be really key, and not just skills development. . . .

I’d love to ask you about the digital side. You spent [five] years running the Wikimedia Foundation. I think Wikipedia is a bright spot [in the information landscape]. Wikipedia has somehow managed to be the only nonprofit in the top-fifty most visited sites on the internet and is now being used by so many other services that are looking for grounded truth in an era of generative AI and so on and so forth.

What are the lessons that others can learn from that, and particularly that you bring to NPR and the journalistic sphere?

Katherine Maher: We would always say that we start from the position that we’re transparent about where we’re accurate and where we’re not. We start from the position that when we make mistakes, we’re very open about that with the public, so that people have the ability to decide whether they trust us.

The other piece is bringing people into dialogue and into conversation. There’s been research that you can take people from widely opposing viewpoints, particularly in the political space, and bring them into dialogue with each other, and by the end of the day, their contributions and their commitment as they continue to participate in the Wikipedia ecosystem become more constructive and more engaged.

The best Wikipedia articles are often the ones that you would think are the most contentious. They’re about world leaders or major historical events. And those articles are robust, well-cited, and heavily debated and engaged with. And if there’s ever a disagreement that can’t be resolved, the editors pause so that everyone can agree before moving to updating. And I think that we can talk a little bit about how that plays out in the disinformation space, but I think that’s a really important lesson to be learned about how we engage and find common points of reference and consensus.

Part of that trust comes too from knowing that you have to have really good coverage about everything. You have to have really good coverage about Beyonce’s new album, as well as really good coverage about your hometown, as well as really good coverage about the current members of Congress. If the coverage about the album isn’t good, then somebody who enters into that point, they’re not going to go on to the next article. You have to be consistent and also humble about understanding what people’s information needs are. And if you can meet those needs very consistently over time, you build a tremendous amount of trust and credibility.

Jon Bateman: I’ve been doing tech policy for a while. It’s hard to remember a time when there has been more hype and fear about any particular technology [than generative AI]. It’s relevant to this conversation because it’s a technology fundamentally about producing content.

From the media perspective, you have institutions like New York Times that are worried about AI being trained on unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted content or being able to reproduce that copyrighted content without an authorization. And then lots of fears about how it will disrupt the way that people access information and the business models [that fund] the people actually producing high-quality information these algorithms are trained on.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people who see generative AI and other AI tools as a general-purpose cognitive enhancer—a tool that any researcher, writer, analyst, or journalist could use to make their work more efficient and productive and to surface leads and ideas.

How are you thinking about that at this early moment of your leadership?

Katherine Maher: I don’t know that I have a singular thought about this. What I will say is that in 2019, Wikipedia was already being used as a major training database for a lot of this because we have articles that are written by people. We have a very human voice. A lot of the large language models were being trained on Wikipedia’s information.

I wrote a piece that was in the New York Times—an op-ed that talked about the importance of having humans in the loop. And when we [considered] the deployment of AI on Wikipedia, what we always thought about was: it should do tasks that can be better done by AI so that humans can do tasks that are better done by humans.

We have editorial judgment. We have the ability to have difficult conversations. We have the ability to weigh trade-offs. So what we always focused on doing was giving our editors the chance to be able to decide whether they wanted to use AI, being transparent about where it was being used, making sure that it was a tool that did not interfere with a reader’s ability to discern information. We weren’t offering articles up based on what we thought you wanted. That always was very much about the ability of an individual to consume and discover information as they needed.

I think those are very similar principles that I would consider in the newsroom. There has to be a human in the loop. It has to be additive and augmentative to the tasks that people already do really well. It should never come between a listener or a reader or a citizen and the work that we do. [We] should always be very transparent about how we use it. We should have really strong guidelines, and those guidelines should be audited all the time, and they should be public.

Jon Bateman: We’ve gone through several election cycles where the media has really been in the spotlight, and people on all sides are asking tough questions about the role of the media during elections and how it can behave responsibly. Do we need a new rule book for the media?

Katherine Maher: I love that you said “all sides.” I think that that’s so important. We start from the position in our work and in our reporting that no single person can be reduced to a single belief. People come to the table with very complex and nuanced perspectives. Sometimes they can hold contradictory perspectives. I know I hold contradictory perspectives at times. It’s important for us to see the totality of people.

And there’s an expression, that comes out of James Joyce, that the specific is actually the universal. So I think that the more that we’re able to tell the stories of individual voters, priorities, issues, and candidates—that is actually the sort of thing that is going to be much more meaningful in terms of our ability to be in service to the public.

What didn’t come up yet in our conversation is that, in the context of information trust, the more that people understand in advance of an issue about an issue, the more confidence they have in the outcome after that event has happened. It’s giving people awareness about what the context is going into the vote. It’s about giving awareness about what the events are going into the vote. It’s about performing that service well.

Jon Bateman: There are several audience questions on the theme of disinformation and how it’s tackled at NPR, and several are framed in terms of the Uri Berliner essay and what can be learned from it. One of the questions is about how you as a manager and leader send the right signal to your employees about what they can do about their internal concerns.

Uri went public with his concerns, ended up being suspended, and has now resigned. What’s the message to your staff about how they can actually have their concerns heard in a meaningful way without fear of reprisal?

Katherine Maher: I read Uri’s letter, and I never had the chance to meet him personally. I wish in some ways that I had had that chance so that we could have talked about what his concerns were. I don’t have any editorial guidance on the newsroom, but it would’ve been interesting to hear and be able to think about: structurally, what can we do?

I already talked about audience research—that’s a big priority for us, understanding what it is that Americans need. That is our public mandate.

But one thing that I did right away in coming in was set up a quarterly editorial meeting that brings in our member stations—nearly 250 newsrooms that have a pulse on what’s going on in their communities to participate in the editorial process, to make sure that we’re covering the right range of issues that speak to the wide variety of people in this nation and their beliefs, needs, and interests. We’re doing that in a way that feels as though it’s fair and representative, and we’re able to serve all of those audiences without fear or favor.

The other thing was setting up a monthly newsroom meeting where we’re able to take a look at what the coverage has been looking back over the course of the past month and how we are covering certain topics. Do we have enough balance around certain issues? Have we leaned a little heavily on one topic over the course of the month, maybe because it's the news? Are we also taking a break to say, “What aren’t we covering, and what are the issues that need to be in here as well?”

So those are two things right off the bat to think about how we [can ensure] a really wide range of perspectives and views. I think another piece is making sure we have active and robust debate in the newsroom from a wide variety of perspectives, so that those conversations are being had.

Again, that is something that is a newsroom imperative. But giving people the ability to feel as though those conversations are welcomed, those are incredibly important priorities for us in order to be of service to the widest number of people.

I think the best way to bring up issues is to have these conversations with our colleagues. I was not there over the course of the previous few years. I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen. I can’t speak to that, but I know that there’s a real appetite internally within our newsroom to have these conversations. We want to have them. We want to know how to be accountable, how to be better, how to serve the American public as well as it deserves to be served.

Jon Bateman: I think your point about newsroom debate is essential and cuts to the heart of some of what people are discussing about journalism and NPR today. One notion that’s come up is having enough viewpoint diversity in a newsroom that those debates occur, are meaningful, and feel comfortable for people. Is that kind of diversity something that you track internally? How do you get a handle on whether those things are happening or not?

Katherine Maher: I think that’s reflected in the stories. I think that’s reflected in what is the audience that we serve and how much value do they get out of our work. Tracking individual viewpoints—this is the thing about journalism is that people come from all sorts of backgrounds. They have different lived experiences, but they come to the table to do the work and uphold journalistic ethics and integrity.

And that means reporting stories based on the facts. That means reporting stories that matter. That means ensuring that we’re rigorous with our sourcing. That means ensuring that we are focused on delivering what is accurate and what we know about the world today, and then updating it again, because the news is constantly changing and we’re going to need to follow those stories to make sure that we’re really doing it well.

That is what the most important work of journalism actually is: are we covering the stories from a wide enough variety of perspectives? Is it reflected in how well the audience feels served? Do we have a wide enough audience that is representative of our nation? That is the priority, and that’s actually the way that we should be thinking about this.

Jon Bateman: Sometimes the lines between disinformation and genuinely contested narratives or evidence are quite blurry—for example, of the effectiveness of different coronavirus response policies. How do you at NPR ensure that efforts to fight disinformation don’t inadvertently cut off genuine debate and discussion, which could even feed further conspiracy theories about what they don’t want you to know?

Katherine Maher: I think that the focus of our work really is around how do we cover the topic of disinformation in a really clear way. I don’t think [disinformation] is a great word, but it’s the word that we have, right?

Jon Bateman: Yeah.

Katherine Maher: And I think that, generally speaking, the way that folks like yourself define this is largely around coordinated campaigns to mislead.

Jon Bateman: I think often false information intended to deceive, and it could often be a coordinated campaign. Absolutely.

Katherine Maher: So for the most part, we’re not actively fighting that in the newsroom. What we’re doing is we’re covering it from a journalistic perspective in the sense of what’s out there. What do people need to know? What are the experts like yourself telling us and making sure that we’re really rigorous about that in terms of our work? So we do have a team that covers this, but they definitely cover it from the perspective of a news organization rather than working on disinformation internally.

Jon Bateman: One thing on my mind is what we’ve seen not only at NPR but many, many other news organizations: internal disagreement about how the news should be reported. And increasingly, these internal debates are spilling into public view and creating more and more intense demands on leaders to be a broker of different points of view on news.

Where do you look for inspiration in terms of organizational management perspectives—newsrooms or other organizations that you feel are handling this well—or how you hope to handle these challenges?

Katherine Maher: I think that humility is actually the most important quality of any leader, of being open to when we get it wrong, being open to self-scrutiny, being able to ask ourselves the questions of how do we do better? I think that starts at the top, and that is why the first thing that is important to me is understanding who we are serving. That’s where the focus on audiences came from. That’s where the focus on being committed to our member stations comes from.

And I think that good ideas can come from all comers. One of the things that I said to the organization was: a mission that is successful in the world, that is enduring and meaningful, is one that is held widely outside your own institution. It’s why you do the work that you do. I believe that our mission is very widely shared in the world too, and that’s about listening to your strongest allies. And it’s about listening to your most loyal opposition because they’re deeply invested in your mission, too.

Watch the full event on YouTube.

Read the report from Bateman and co-author Dean Jackson on countering disinformation effectively.