NPR Public Editor by Poynter's Kelly McBride

Our top five most popular newsletters and columns of 2025 share a single theme. When NPR makes a journalistic error, or is accused of making a mistake, people want to know what happened.

We experimented a lot this past year with column formats. We targeted lessons for educators. And we did a series on news literacy. Yet the topics that garnered the largest audiences — by far — involved an accusation of wrongdoing, some investigation and an adjudication.

For this last newsletter of 2025, we are sharing the work that attracted the largest audiences. Four of our top reports involve an implication that NPR did something wrong. One column explained what would (and eventually did) happen should NPR be defunded. And our biggest audience on the web came to find out why NPR called teenage sex trafficking victims “underage women.”

Here are a few assumptions we make about the audience for the NPR Public Editor work, by looking at our most-read reports from last year:

NPR’s audience is interested in the fairness and context of NPR’s coverage of international conflicts. Whether it’s the war between Russia and Ukraine or the war between Israel and Hamas, we fielded many questions about language, fairness and context.
NPR listeners and readers see themselves as stakeholders in NPR’s work. People homed in on NPR’s coverage of itself as the administration successfully defunded the public media system.
The audience cares about how stories are framed and words are selected.
NPR listeners want NPR reporters and hosts to push back against distortions and inaccuracies in real time. When interview subjects say something that sounds inaccurate or like spin, the audience appreciates a tough follow-up question.

Thank you for your interest and your feedback. It makes our work better. (Drumroll) Here’s the top Public Editor reports from 2025.

Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina

#1 — From ‘shouting match’ to ‘public berating,’ how journalists described the Zelenskyy-Trump meeting

After a highly contentious February meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, audience members objected to NPR news coverage implying that both men were equally at fault for the conflict.

We reviewed dozens of NPR stories and reports that referenced the Oval Office event, describing the public event as a “shouting match” and a “heated public spat.” We thought the framing was off and had the potential to influence how people remember the historic moment. Read our full analysis in our March 13 newsletter edition.

#2 — Protests over the Public Editor’s views on protests

After my analysis of NPR’s coverage of mass protests, I received a flood of messages and comments on social media from NPR audience members who vociferously disagreed with my assessment that peaceful protests don’t make for compelling news stories.

In response to the pushback, I took a second look asking again how much coverage of the protests is appropriate, especially given the limit in not only reporting resources but also space on NPR’s shows. My biggest conclusion: NPR should get its coverage up on its website faster. You can read the full April 24 column here.

#3 — What’s missing from NPR’s coverage of antisemitism?

As incidents of antisemitism rose, an audience member asked us why NPR has never explored Muslim antisemitism, specifically. We talked to outside experts on this layered subject to help us understand what might be missing from NPR’s coverage. I found several stories that explored the experience of people who were subject to antisemitism. But ultimately I determined that more coverage would help the audience understand the varied ways in which antisemitism shows up in our culture. It would also help the audience engage in dialogue about it. Read our March 27 newsletter here.

#4 — We can’t answer audience questions about #DefundNPR without talking about the larger implications for public media

In a year when the administration successfully removed federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provided funding to NPR, our office took a look at how public media was funded and what it would mean for the whole of the public ecosystem if CPB were defunded. We broke down the differences between advertisements and sponsor messages. We looked at corporate sponsorships, philanthropic support and individual donations. We also discussed the correlation between public media and democracy. Read more in our newsletter published on Feb. 27.

#5 — Should a reporter have pushed back when the ambassador to Israel made an outrageous claim?

Over the summer, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, suggested on All Things Considered that the Oct. 7 Hamas attack was in some ways worse than the Holocaust — an outlandish assertion.

One listener wrote to our office asking why the reporter didn’t push back against that claim during the interview. We spoke with the reporter, NPR Jerusalem Correspondent Daniel Estrin, who walked us through what happened before, during and after that interview. We found that while it was understandable that Estrin didn’t press Huckabee on the matter — the conditions of the interview were difficult — it is still important for journalists to push back on alarming claims in the moment, as a means of accountability. Read more in our June 5 newsletter.

Most-read Public Editor web content — NPR described Jeffrey Epstein’s victims as “underage women,” then quickly corrected the error …

A last-minute rewrite of the script introduced this inaccurate language in the hour before Morning Edition went on the air. Epstein was accused of sex trafficking dozens of teenage girls, many of whom are now publicly telling their stories. Describing them as “underage women” is confusing and minimizes their vulnerability. I pushed hard to determine how it happened and was initially told that it wasn’t clear who made the change. After our report was published, many people from inside NPR pointed out that I was wrong. In fact, NPR’s software tracks changes to scripts. Just like Morning Edition, we quickly corrected the error, noting the correction in the website version of our Dec. 4 report. (The executive in charge said he didn’t want to assign blame to a single person.) We are noting it here, because if you read our newsletter, you should know that we got something wrong.

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming. And if you enjoy our work, please forward this to a friend. They can sign up for the Public Editor newsletter here.

Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute

Kelly McBride
Public Editor

Amaris Castillo
Poynter Institute

Nicole Slaughter Graham
Poynter Institute

The Public Editor stands as a source of independent accountability. Created by NPR's board of directors, the Public Editor serves as a bridge between the newsroom and the audience, striving to both listen to the audience's concerns and explain the newsroom's work and ambitions. The office ensures NPR remains steadfast in its mission to present fair, accurate and comprehensive information in service of democracy.

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