Media "Inauguration" of Diversity Lagging Behind

It's more than ironic. It's disturbing and more than a little sad.

At the same time that the United States is inaugurating a new presidency that marks the crashing of a racial barrier at the White House, the "public broadcasting" establishment is going ahead with plans to knock out one of its very few daily public affairs programs aimed at people of color.

The program is called "News & Notes." It was actually staffed by African Americans who focused on information, commentary and discourse likely to be of particular interest to African American listeners.

National Public Radio has just pulled the plug on "News & Notes."

The newspaper about public broadcasting, Current, is reporting on the show's apparent demise. The account makes for grim reading about the cancellation, which NPR announced last month.

"NPR, which had been buoyed by the $230 million Joan Kroc bequest in 2003 and by growth in corporate sponsorships, is retreating from shows created to expand and diversify its audience and moving to protect its flagship newsmagazines and international newsgathering capacity," Current explains.

Money is tight, of course, and budgetary constraints require tough choices. "The network's 64 layoffs and elimination of 21 vacant positions will reduce its workforce by 7 percent," Current reports. "Just over half of the layoffs are in the news division, including 22 journalists who work directly for the canceled programs plus 12 other reporters, producers and editors, according to an NPR spokeswoman."

One of the ironies is that NPR, an outfit which many people regard as a bastion of wide-ranging discourse, has an internal atmosphere so corporate that many journalists there are afraid to talk publicly — to journalists!

Check this out from the Current article: "Several employees did not return phone calls requesting interviews or declined to discuss their situations out of fear that they would be fired or lose their severance packages.

Those who agreed to speak without attribution described rancor within the NPR ranks, including resentment about NPR's recent hiring of digital-media employees as it prepared to oust radio veterans."

Among those who declined to comment, according to the newspaper, was the "News & Notes" host. The program "debuted in January 2005 as successor to 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' NPR's first show created specifically for African-Americans. Hosted by Farai Chideya since September 2006, the program airs on 64 stations and has a weekly cume (audience) of roughly 500,000 listeners. Chideya did not respond to an interview request."

One mainstay of another just-cancelled show, "Day to Day," was willing to speak on the record. "There were many iterations of what 'Day to Day' should be, and that was one of the problems with the show," said co-host Madeline Brand. "It never did have a clear mandate from the powers that be about what it should be and who we should target. … The sad part was when we did figure out who we were and we had a cohesive identity — just when we were about to hire a new co-host and we had great new management in place, we're canceled."

I'm not saying that "Day to Day" was a great show, but at least it came at current events from a somewhat different angle than the drive-time NPR mainstays "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered." Likewise, "News & Notes" wasn't the most adventurous program on the airwaves, but it did meaningfully expand the diversity of NPR programming on a daily basis.

Now these attempts to diversify have been given pink slips.

Such developments do not speak well for what National Public Radio has become. Rhetoric aside, the priorities for programming can be heard loud and clear.

Sad.

Norman Solomon wrote the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.

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