David Folkenflik occupies a unique role at NPR: He’s a journalist who writes about journalism. And that includes the very organization where he works, which is once again being threatened by conservatives in Washington.
The second Trump administration has aggressively gone after the media in its first few months. It’s kicked news organizations out of the Pentagon. It’s barred other newsrooms from access to the White House. And Trump supporters in Congress have targeted federal funding for public media.
In late March, the heads of NPR and PBS testified on Capitol Hill to defend public broadcasting from Republicans accusing them of political bias. Meanwhile, some major news organizations seem to be capitulating and bending to the will of the Trump administration.
Folkenflik, who’s been covering media for two decades for NPR, says journalism across the country is facing a two-pronged attack from both commercial and political forces.
“You’re seeing sort of discrete and specific and seemingly almost comedic attacks. You don’t say ‘Gulf of America’? Get to the back of the line,” Folkenflik says. “I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information.”
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Folkenflik talks to host Al Letson about this unprecedented moment for journalists, why more media outlets seem to be bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, and how journalism can begin to win back public trust.
Dig Deeper
Listen: Trump’s FCC chief opens investigation into NPR and PBS (NPR)
Read: Meet the New State Media (Mother Jones)
Read: The Media and Trump: Not Resistance, But Not Acceptance (Mother Jones)
Watch: PBS and NPR leaders testify on federal support for public broadcasting in House hearing (PBS NewsHour)
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Marjorie Taylor Greene: | The news that these entities produced is either resented or increasingly tuned out and turned off by most of the hardworking Americans who are forced to pay for it. They no longer view NPR and PBS as trusted news sources. |
| David Folkenflik: | My sense is that they’re trying to create kind of a pincer attack on the foundations of funding for public broadcasting just as they’re going after media in a variety of ways. So, there are calls on Capitol Hill from both sides of Congress to strip all funding from all of public broadcasting. |
| Al Letson: | On this week’s More To The Story, I talk with David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent about the challenges facing journalists covering the Trump administration and why some media outlets are bowing to pressure from the White House. |
| This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson. During his first term in office, president Donald Trump was openly hostile with the media. Trump famously called journalists the enemy of the American people and routinely mocked them for producing what he called fake news. But he faced a press corps that was determined and combative in covering his administration, and holding it accountable. It was an era when the Washington Post even added a phrase to their paper, democracy dies in darkness. Eight years later, Trump is attacking the media even more aggressively, but this time some news organizations seem to be bending their need to the administration. NPR’s David Folkenflik is here with us to help us make sense of it all. He’s been covering the people and the organizations who report the news for more than two decades. David, how are you? | |
| David Folkenflik: | I’m better all the time. How are you, Al? |
| Al Letson: | I’m good man. I just have to tell you, I’m a huge fan. I’ve been listening to you for years, so thank you for coming onto the show today. |
| David Folkenflik: | Pleasure. Thank you, Al. |
| Al Letson: | It feels like where we are right now, and I think I probably would’ve said the same thing to you if we had talked 10 years ago, which is scary, but it feels like we are watching the disintegration of media and journalism both from forces of commerce and also from political forces. It feels like that’s the moment we’re in right now, that it’s all breaking up and falling apart. |
| David Folkenflik: | I mean, I think that’s true. I tend to think of it a little bit like London. Have you been to London, Al? |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love London. |
| David Folkenflik: | I’m guessing. So, you’ve been to London, you’ve walked around, and so this is a place where you’ve got these incredibly modern soaring skyscrapers and impressive temples to modernity. You’ve also got stuff from the 18th century, these cathedrals and credible palaces. You’ve got stuff from the Middle Ages, the Tower of London, you’ve got stuff from the Roman eras and the walls there, and you’ve got these stuff from all these different centuries and all these different eras in British history, but they’re all coexisting. You’ve got these modern little zip cars going around these tiny little alleys that were probably constructed a thousand years ago or just about. |
| And that’s how I feel about the media. It’s that you have all these new major actors that have completely exploded, and disrupted and changed how reporting works, how gathering of information works, how it’s transmitted, how it’s absorbed, how people pick it. Yet the old ones are still around. Radio’s still here. Newspapers still exist. Now, I’m not Pollyanna-ish about it. I don’t think everything makes it for the better. I think a lot of wounds about the legacy media and about public understanding of journalism, and even journalists understanding of themselves, is affected by insignificant part, not only, but significant part by mistakes that major journalistic institutions and players themselves have made. | |
| There’ve been a ton of self-inflicted wounds. Financial, the sort of greed involved at times. The failure to embrace new ways of people getting information so that Craigslist, and Monster.com and Realtor.com ate the lunch of news organizations for job ads, real estate, auto, all these things that were part of the texture of the financial basis of news organizations. And similarly with television. They’ve often lost their relevance and they are chasing after things. | |
| And yet in terms of journalism, we’ve lost a connection with audiences because we haven’t led the pack at being compelling on new platforms and technologies because we’ve been fearful of it. I wouldn’t say that’s the case now, but that’s certainly part of what’s baked in. And because of self-inflicted wounds on reporting, people didn’t see themselves reflected, or on the air or in print. And sometimes that meant that people of color for years were not adequately represented. It meant that the New York Times, which is now seen as the exemplar of woke by people on the right, was deeply hostile to covering gays. And so, there isn’t a reservoir of trust and goodwill for the press to draw upon when it’s still perceived as operating in a way that I think it does a lot less, but it has to be much more responsive. It has to take into account alternative sources of information, and yet it’s still feels detached from rather than a part of. | |
| Al Letson: | Right. I’m thinking about Trump’s first administration, and it was really clear that he was antagonistic to the press. I mean, he called the press the enemy of the people. But it feels like Trump 2.0 is more targeted and much more effective in targeting the press. Looking at what’s happening with who gets to cover the White House. Looking at what he’s doing with AP because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. He’s taking decisive actions against anybody that he feels is going to give him bad press. |
| David Folkenflik: | Yeah, I think that that’s true. And when it comes to the press, what’s fascinating to me is how many different levers he’s been pushing. So, before he came into office, he filed a number of suits against news organizations and social media companies. And a lot of them have been settling these suits. Even if in an earlier age, one would say that a number of them don’t seem to have much or any merit. And so, you saw just ahead of the election from the LA Times and the Washington Post, where there are billionaire owners who each have significant business interests in front of federal government, federal regulators. In the case of Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, his company has a billions dollars contract with the federal government, as well as being regulated heavily by it. They basically pulled the editorials that had been planned and drafted to run to endorse Kamala Harris. And they’ve remade their editorial pages to be more sympathetic to, or at least less antagonistic to now once more empowered President Trump. |
| Since going into office, you’ve seen him do the things you’ve described. To flood the White House with non-conventional correspondents to be asking questions, as in the question of Volodymyr Zelensky the president of Ukraine, “Why are you dressed like this?” For one thing, he’s been dressed like that since the outbreak of the war. And to be more sympathetic, ask openly affirming and sympathetic questions. They’ve tossed news organizations including NPR, out of their workspaces in the Pentagon. Doesn’t mean that we can’t report from there, but can make it more complicated for TV networks like NBC and CNN that he’s pushed out. That’s really makes things much more complicated for them. And it’s been done with intentionality. And media companies are trying to figure out how to still cover this administration while clearly trying to show deference to it in a way that would seemingly be antithetical to the journalistic mission. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So, thousands of Washington Post and Los Angeles Times readers have canceled their subscriptions over the way those newspapers are run, the decisions they’ve made about editorially what will be in the newspaper. Does that make a difference? I mean, people canceling their subscriptions. And what power do readers have to reach out and say that they’re not cool with this, like, “The direction that you’re going with, this is not something that we support?” |
| David Folkenflik: | Well, it’s fascinating. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. We were able to report that in the, I think it was about 10, 11 days whenever it was between the revelation that the Post was not going to endorse Kamala Harris was going to block a planned endorsement of it due to the wishes of its owner. And election night itself, 300,000 people canceled. |
| Al Letson: | That’s a huge number. |
| David Folkenflik: | Just to give listeners some sense, 2.5 million people were digital subscribers. They lost 300,000. It was like 12% in something like 10, 11 days. That’s unheard of. The LA Times lost about 18,000 to 20,000 in a similar stretch of time and off a smaller base. |
| The fascinating thing to me is if there is a guy who I think of as savvy about digital commerce and the inclinations of a consumer base, if Amazon Prime had lost 12 13% of its paying subscribers in 10 days, you can be sure that Jeff Bezos would be on the horn on every hour, on the hour, probably around the clock, figuring out with his people what led to that and how to reverse it. And in this case, the Post’s finances are a rounding error for him. It’s the amount of money in the cup holder he has at the side of whatever incredible sci-fi James Bond-like car he drives. So, it’s nothing to him. And he can bear those losses, even though he had just been in a several year process to turn around the a $100 million, $77 million a year that the Post had been losing of late. But for him, it was worth it to him. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s a calculated risk. I mean, if he loses all of those subscribers, but he gains favor in the eyes of the administration, it means way more money than those subscribers are given to him. |
| David Folkenflik: | Absolutely right, Al. I mean, a way to think of it is this, he obviously has Amazon where he is the executive chairman. He’s also the founder of Blue Origin, which has huge contracts with the feds as well. |
| Al Letson: | Right. That’s his space technology company. |
| David Folkenflik: | Right. The best-case scenario, I think you can say as a question of principle, is that he says, “Look, I’m watching all these other titans who are watching Musk and figuring out how they can get in with him too,” particularly Mark Zuckerberg who he paled around with at the inauguration. And he said, “How about I Scotch poking Trump in the eye repeatedly on the editorial page, but I see if I can still protect the integrity of the newsroom.” Which so far has been covering his administration aggressively, breaking stories, doing really good work. Despite a flood of talent going elsewhere as a result of the choices he’s been making, they’re still doing excellent work. “Maybe if I can do that, I can protect the billions that I need to. I can make sure that regulators don’t come after me out of spite and retaliation, and still I can allow the news side to do its business.” |
| Maybe. That is the best case scenario you can make. Because otherwise, it’s very hard to argue that 10 days before an election is to decide when an editorial has already been written is the time to make a principled decision. Had he done this when he appointed his new publisher who took office in January of last year, Will Lewis, and come in and said, “New publisher, new era, we’re not going to make endorsements anymore.” That’s a legitimate stance. He’s entitled to do whatever he wants with that page. If he wants to have them endorse the Libertarian candidate, or Lyndon LaRouche, or Jill Stein have at it, that is absolutely entitled. But to decide that you’re shutting that down, and then more recently, they lost another 75,000 in 48 hours. 48 hour period. That’s a ton. | |
| Al Letson: | That’s a lot. |
| David Folkenflik: | When he said, “We’re going to change it to a Libertarian approach, free markets and free ideas, which are very Wall Street Journal-y, and not print opposing points of view,” which is an astonishing assertion. What he said is you can find them elsewhere in the internet, but the whole point of the Washington Post is they’re desperate to find things that are sticky for people to come there and not go elsewhere. What does that say? It says, we don’t want to say things that might be badly received by the guy who regulates everything. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, we discuss what journalists can do to win back public trust and the difficulties of covering politicians in this current era in Washington, |
| David Folkenflik: | We live in a time where you don’t have any room for error, and that’s unfortunate. All of the public figures, it used to be the reverse where the press could get things wrong and the politicians had to be perfect or we’d pummel them. And now it seems like the politicians almost doesn’t matter what mistakes they made because they just sort of deny it or move past it. |
| Al Letson: | There’s a lot more to talk about with David. But first, since you’re here with us, I know that you must appreciate what we do at Reveal and we don’t want you to miss a thing. So, sign up for our free newsletter by going to RevealNews.org/newsletter and we’ll send you the latest from our newsroom in a weekly email. Okay. Don’t go anywhere. There’s more to the story. |
| It’s More To The Story. I’m Al Letson and I’m back with longtime NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. | |
| So, moving on from newspapers, and Amazon and Bezos, the new chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr in January launched an investigation into sponsorship practices of NPR and PBS, and their member stations. What is Carr claiming is illegal about these sponsorships? | |
| David Folkenflik: | Sure. So, Carr is saying that they appear to him on their face, at least he wants to investigate whether there’s any real difference between those, what we call underwriting spots, and corporate commercials that you see on major for-profit networks like CNN or ABC. And he says, “I can’t tell the difference.” There are some specific differences under policy and law. For example, a big one is, as you know, call to action. We could say NPR is sponsored in part by Searchlight Pictures, which has a new film that’d be coming out soon. What we can’t say is go buy tickets at Fandango.com. We can have a spot run that say, this program is sponsored in part by Toyota. You can learn more about the new Tercel at Toyota.com. But you can’t say, “Run out now, go buy yourself a Tercel.” Not that they exist anymore. |
| Al Letson: | It’s like we can give vibes. We can say, “Hey, this is a good thing,” but not necessarily tell you you should go out and buy this thing and this is where you buy it. That’s the difference. |
| David Folkenflik: | Carr is saying, there’s no distinction to be made. What the senior executives at PBS and at NPR are saying is, “Look, we always bend over backwards and err on the side of caution when it comes to complying with the FCC codes and regulations. But furthermore, we are all the time in contact with FCC officials and have been following scrupulously their guidelines as those guidelines evolve over the years. So, we feel as though whatever we’ve been doing has been what you folks have been telling us to do.” And my sense from having reported on these issues over the years, but not something that’s been said explicitly would be is that if the FCC were to say, “We’ve changed guidelines to say actually we’re drawing the line more pristine or away from commercial ads,” that the networks would follow, that would adhere to that. |
| And my sense is that the FCC has been a little more lenient in recent decades as the public broadcasting has weaned itself off a lot of federal funding. NPR gets 1% of its funding directly from the federal government. And if you include it from indirect sourcing, my math would show it’s about, I don’t know, 2.8% additional indirectly through the stations paying us money. So, even that is not an enormous amount of money, but you’re getting money from other ways. My sense is that they’re trying to create a pincer attack on the foundations of funding for public broadcasting just as they’re going after media in a variety of ways. So, there are calls on Capitol Hill from both sides of Congress to strip all funding from all of public broadcasting. And then there’s this pressure on the commercial corporate funding source. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s like a two-sided attack. And I think it’s fair to say that several republicans in Congress have been trying to defund public media for many, many, many years. I mean, I started in 2008 and we were always worried about the calls to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to defund NPR. I think what you were saying earlier about so little money from the federal government goes to the mothership to NPR. A lot of federal money does go to rural member stations all across the country. So, if they did close it up, the thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is that we’re not really talking about an extinction level event for NPR. We are talking about hard times and a lot of tightening of the belts. But we are talking about an extinction level event when it comes to local media from member stations across the country. |
| David Folkenflik: | I think it’s a really important point, Al, and I want to offer my usual and very sincere disclaimer. NPR signs my paychecks, but I don’t speak for the institution. They don’t always love everything I report on them, but they give me, to their great credit, the liberty to do so. With that clarity for your listeners when they’re listening to me say this, it is an issue when I talk to station managers. The average amount, if you pool all the money that the stations get and divide it by the number of stations, it’s about 10% of their budget. But for some stations it’s 20%, 30%, 50% of it. That’s particularly true for rural stations where the audience is more scattered and it’s hard to have a unified source of funding from major local donors for example. |
| There are stations that serve Native American reservations. There are stations that serve Spanish-speaking audiences. Stations associated with historically Black colleges. Some of these things get more funding. But there are stations that would be hard to replicate and would probably close. And it has actually been one of the sources of defenses for public broadcasting, is that much like people loathe Congress and typically like their own member of Congress, folks may be sympathetic to saying, “Oh, NPR, PBS. These big folks are just sucking us dry.” Even if it’s actually a relatively modest amount of money, it’s $500 million a year spread out over 340 million people. It’s about a buck a piece. But the local stations are actually, people recognize the voices, they recognize the names. They’re often constant presences on their drives. And one of the nice things about public radio is that it’s there. You have people actually there. You hear the voices of people in your community. They aren’t stripped down to six second sound bites. They’re pretty darn good at modeling civic and civil discourse, and that’s appreciated. | |
| And I do think that what you’ve identified, Al, is really important here. You’re seeing sort of discrete and specific and seemingly almost comedic attacks. You don’t say Gulf of America, get to the back of the line. It seems ridiculous on its face. And I think there are a lot of folks sympathetic to the president think it’s funny and great. But you’re seeing the effort to delegitimize, and also the effort to block out and the effort to knock the economic pillars out from a number of different kinds of media outlets. And I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information. | |
| Al Letson: | Exactly. Exactly. |
| David Folkenflik: | In ways where you’re seeing these agencies having their research budgets cut back, but also information that’s already been done being pulled back from the web, and being pulled back from the public and people being told they can’t talk publicly about what they do, even non-partisan professionals. And I think it’s actually that part of that broader range of concerns where we’re in a time where there’s a tightening and centralizing of control by an administration that believes that the message is the messenger. |
| Al Letson: | I think that one of the biggest challenges today is that news is so fractured and people just get different types of news. Like when I’m talking to a family member of mine who happens to be conservative, they don’t know half the things that I know about what President Trump has done and what he’s doing. They just don’t know it because they primarily watch Fox News and listen to Christian broadcasting. And the messages that they’re getting there are very in lockstep and basically frame the world for them in a way that is favorable towards this current administration. It’s like these bubbles that we have going on. How do we get out of that? Do you have any ideas about how we break that system, that idea that it’s like politics has become sports and media has become sports radio. And so, you go to the favorite sports radio people you like because they’re talking about your team. |
| David Folkenflik: | I mean, that’s such a good way of thinking about it. If you think about the dominance of podcasting as a way in which people absorb information. It’s not actually the most effective and efficient way to do it. It takes time to listen to podcasts. Like Joe Rogan is three hours long. People aren’t listening to that because it’s the quickest way to get a quick fix in this day and age, which is what people assume. Look, partly, it’s almost a question of who you’re asking that of. Are you asking that of the receivers of that information? Are you asking that of the journalists or conveyors of information? |
| Al Letson: | I think it has to come back to the conveyors of information. How do we cross over? Or is it too late? Are we too fractured to be able to cross over now? |
| David Folkenflik: | Look, if we’re going back to my tortured London metaphor, we’re still here. We still exist. We’re still around. And we’re still relevant. And I say this for all of the networks and news organizations, large and small, who are you reaching? Who are you speaking to? I think partly it’s being less arrogant. And when people are attacking you on ideological grounds, it’s sort of you see news organizations shut down from listening to is there a point? May they have a point? Are Trump supporters sometimes correct? Is it worth stripping out some of the adjectives and adverbs, and focusing on the nouns and verbs in your prose so that you can capture what is happening? But you don’t layer in the judgment it’s there in the story. I just feel like as though there are ways in which you prove yourself to be reliable and careful. But I think you do aggressive reporting. I think you do responsible stuff. |
| To be honest, the problem is that things like CNN, they had great success by leaning more into opinion, and analysis and argumentation, which is a lot cheaper than reporting. And some of their reporting was good, but kind of transient, like ephemeral. And some of their reporting where they were trying to do aggressive stuff on Trump in the first time overshot the facts. And we live in a time where you don’t have any room for error, and that’s unfortunate. All of the public figures, it used to be the reverse where the press could get things wrong and the politicians had to be perfect or we’d pummel them. And now it seems like the politicians almost doesn’t matter what mistakes they made because they just sort of deny it or move past it. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I think that journalists have to wrestle with and understand in a sense that for a large swath of the American public, regardless of how they identify themselves, white, Black, Latino, gay, straight, whatever it is that identifies you, for a large swath of Americans, America is not working for them. The system is just not working. And I think that what we have is we have two different ways of thinking about why it’s not working. But if journalists can come from the understanding that it’s not working and this is why people are reacting in these different ways, maybe there’s commonality there that you can figure out how to thread the needle to talk to both sides. I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot, is that it’s not working for people and that’s why they are pushing back on the system and the status quo. |
| David Folkenflik: | Well, look, I don’t want to sound too hokey here, but it’s one of the things I like best about public radio. |
| Al Letson: | Absolutely. |
| David Folkenflik: | Is that it models that kind of conversation. It brings people in from different sides, not simply so that sparks fly, but so that people can hear and be heard each other, can listen to each other and respond. It’s not set up for people to yell at each other like Late Night on CNN, or to yell at some un-present person who’s targeted by know MSNBC or Fox. It’s that the idea is you’re trying to have some sort of synthesis of how do we go forward? What might make sense? And to hear people speak in voices that are not pre-programmed ais kind of a gift. So, that is a small, little, very old fashioned approach that makes a huge difference, I think. And we don’t do enough of that. And particularly we don’t do enough of that in the press writ large because I think we don’t realize that the problem that people perceive with the “establishment” or with the way things have worked is that we are perceived as being part of that. |
| We are not apart from it just because we’re operating in what we think of as at times an adversarial way. We are part of it and just noisy, and clamorous, and self-entitlement and perceived as just another one of these players that happens to wrap ourselves in the First Amendment. I think better of what we do than that, but I recognize that’s part of the perception of us, and I recognize at times that is part of what you’ve seen at very top levels. And that’s something we’ve got to unspool. At the same time, we are relevant. We are holding the power to account. We are telling hard truths. And we’re not being deferential simply because that advances our financial interest, because you know what? That’s just playing to be part of a system, too. That’s not doing the work for an audience that needs to know needs to have good enough information to be able to act as citizens and not just as consumers. | |
| Al Letson: | Yes. David Folkenflik, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me. |
| David Folkenflik: | You bet. Pleasure. |
| Al Letson: | David Folkenflik is NPR’s media correspondent. If you like this conversation, you might be interested in our reveal episode, the Spy Inside Your Smartphone. It’s about a group of journalists who were targeted by the government of El Salvador with military-grade spyware originally developed to go after criminals. We’ll put a link to it in our show notes. |
| Lastly, just a reminder, we are listener-supported. That means you. To make a gift today, go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift. Come on, let’s make it official. This episode was produced by Josh Samburn and Kara McGirt Allison. Theme music and Engineering by Fernando, my man, Yal Aruda, and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More To The Story. |