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Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina
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Here are a few quotes from the Public Editor's inbox that resonated with us. Letters are edited for length and clarity. You can share your questions and concerns with us through the NPR Contact page. |
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Disagreement over the final result of an NPR round table |
Alexis Schneider wrote on Jan. 4: I’m very disheartened to hear of the loosening of editorial standards at NPR, the outlet that I trust most with my news, and my daily morning listen. The Saturday edition interviewing V from Under the Desk News was disappointing to me, and I felt that V did not perform to the quality I am used to seeing from them. I then logged on to TikTok and heard V’s recollection of the interview where their words were cherry picked, they were dismissed, and the audience of people that get their news from social media was belittled. … V claimed that they were misled about the purpose of the interview and that their words were taken out of context. |
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Diana Miller wrote on Jan. 5: Talk about a journalist trying to disprove the authenticity of another journalist due to their apparent lack of education. …The editing of V’s interview is a gross misrepresentation of the facts and this story should be reevaluated of journalistic integrity due to the host and producers’ obvious bias of news journalists on social media. |
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V Spehar is a digital content creator who delivers news and commentary to more than 3 million followers on TikTok, as well as several other platforms. They were one of two guests who joined a Jan. 4 Weekend Edition Saturday conversation about the value and quality of news delivered by influencers.
Shortly after the interview aired, Spehar posted a six-minute video to TikTok that started with, “This morning I was featured on an episode of Weekend Update on NPR. And after what I tell you next, I can promise you you will never hear me on NPR again.”
The conversation, moderated by NPR correspondent Eric Deggans, who was guest hosting that Saturday, was an exploration of how social media influencers are changing the journalism landscape. In his introduction, Deggans mentioned a recent Pew Research poll that found that 20% of adults get their news from social media. Deggans then introduced Summer Harlow, associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, who created an online course for influencers who want to deliver news. And then Deggans introduced Spehar and began the discussion.
After the interview aired, Spehar made several complaints to their TikTok audience. Among the most significant were:
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They were invited on the show to discuss the pending TikTok ban, not the value of their work, and Spehar’s expert comments on the then-looming ban did not make the final version that aired.
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That Deggans was dismissive of content creators and that prejudice tainted the interview.
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That Deggans introduced Spehar as a “newsfluencer,” a term they’d never heard of and would never use.
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Spehar said that when the interview was edited, their sentences were truncated so severely that it changed their meaning and their natural cadence.
To make sure we had a full understanding of what happened, we interviewed several people: Spehar, Harlow, Deggans, Evie Stone — Weekend Edition’s supervising senior editor who was the show manager that day — and Eleana Tworek, the producer who came up with the idea, did the background research and booked the guests. We’ve read the emails. We looked at the raw transcript of the interview.
We also have loose connections to both Spehar and Deggans. Spehar is an ambassador for MediaWise, a media literacy initiative at The Poynter Institute, where we in the Public Editor’s office all work. Deggans lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., and does guest faculty work for Poynter. He also serves on the Institute’s National Advisory Board.
The back story Tworek first learned of an online course for influencers from a Dec. 10 story in The Hill. She pitched the story to her team in mid-December. Her bosses pitched it to Deggans on Dec. 14, who told us that he liked the idea but wanted to be sure to include an influencer.
On Dec. 19, Tworek contacted Harlow, who created the course. After Harlow responded, Tworek conducted a “pre interview,” a phone call where a producer explores the story idea with the source, to determine if the source will be good on the air and if the source has enough knowledge to carry the conversation. “We talked for about an hour, I explained everything about the course, about how it worked, who the instructors were, why we created it, because it was part of this year-long project with UNESCO,” Harlow told us. “I mentioned that V was one of the guest speakers for that course.”
Two days later, Tworek sought to contact Spehar, whose work she saw and admired on TikTok.
Reaching Spehar was more difficult. Tworek emailed Spehar’s agent at Palette Media on Dec. 21. She followed up on Dec. 26 and received a reply that looped in additional people, but did not commit to the interview. Tworek followed up again on Dec. 30 and established contact with an agent to discuss the details.
Spehar has a completely different view of the experience. On Dec. 19, Spehar messaged back and forth with an NPR producer on TikTok who had posted a video asking to interview creators about the pending ban. Spehar had no way of knowing that that was a different producer working on a different story, which Tworek and her team were not aware of.
Tworek’s email on Dec. 21 to Spehar’s agent read, “I’m reaching out because we are interested in doing a segment with V about the rise of news influencers. This conversation would be an in-depth segment/interview/round-table examining the changing landscape of journalism and media. Our host for this conversation would be Eric Deggans who will be guest hosting Weekend Edition Saturday and Summer Harlow, associate director of the Knight Center of Journalism at UT Austin. Summer recently created a course at the school for news influencers and how their roles intersect with journalism.”
Even after they reread the initial email during our interview, Spehar said, “Given the content that I make, that to me says TikTok, talking about TikTok, which is talking about the TikTok ban.”
Spehar assumed the interview was about the ban. But the responsibility for the misunderstanding resides with Spehar and their agent, not NPR. The email from NPR was clear and accurately described the goals of the panel. The email didn’t mention TikTok and Spehar didn’t notice that it was from a different producer. The delay in response made it difficult to schedule a pre interview in the short holiday week.
If Tworek, who was already cramming extra work into her days because of the holiday, could have insisted on squeezing in a pre interview on Thursday, Jan. 2, it would have corrected Spehar’s misunderstanding about the subject of the roundtable. The discussion was taped on a Friday (Jan. 3) and edited and aired the next day. That pre interview would have been a good place to ask Spehar how they prefer to be described. Journalist? Content creator? Influencer?
And, finally, the word “newsfluencer” is a bit obscure. It was coined by Harlow and her collaborators on the course. But it’s not a widely used term.
“‘Newsfluencer sounds more like a gimmick to try to make something more than it is,” Motta, the Roger Williams professor, said. “Like, ‘Oh, we’re saying this is a problem without defining the problem.’”
This is a minor point, but worth making. In the interview that aired, listeners hear the word “newsfluencers” four times, three times from Deggans and once from Harlow. Other terms would have been more clear, like influencers who deliver news, or even just people delivering news to their followers on social media.
When journalists use a poorly defined term, Motta said, it “doesn’t allow us to actually think about ‘What is this and why are we talking about it in the first place?’”
Was the host dismissive?Spehar told us they felt as if they were set up to be the frivolous counterpoint to Harlow’s serious academic experience.
“There was such a strong bias to keep this line that Summer was an expert and I was a TikToker and those were not even,” they said in an interview with us. “It’s just like a very unnerving experience.”
That was the exact opposite effect that the producers and editors were striving for, Stone said. Before a host sits down to interview a guest, producers and editors have done hours of work. In this case, in addition to lining up the guests and trying to prepare them for the interview, Tworek, Deggans and an editor put extra effort into writing the script that included the introduction and the questions.
Tworek “was putting in a lot of extra time on this, because she didn’t want the script to sound dismissive or disrespectful,” Stone said.
I read the AI-produced transcript of the unedited recording. Deggans asks questions like this one that made the final edit:
Now, traditional journalists, OK, like me, wonder about accuracy, accountability, and, frankly, the independence of newsfluencers. Who edits their content? What happens if they get something wrong? V, how do you handle these questions?
And this question, which didn’t make the final edit: So as we speak, one of the biggest platforms for influencers, TikTok, might be banned by the federal government. V, If the TikTok thing goes through, what’s next for you and other influencers on the app?
These are logical and reasonable questions to ask. Nothing that Deggans says in the raw transcript conveys disrespect. Harlow, the other guest in the conversation, told us that she did not detect any derision or impoliteness from Deggans.
The interviewIn their TikTok video, Spehar says, “Summer was introduced by all her credentials, as she has earned them. And I was introduced as V Spehar, newsfluencer. To which I said, What is a newsfluencer? I’ve never heard that term.”
Nowhere in the final edited interview or in the raw material does anyone directly call Spehar a newsfluencer. On the air, here’s how Deggans introduces Spehar, “We’re also joined by V Spehar from Under The Desk News. Spehar has accumulated over 3 million TikTok followers since starting their platform in 2021. Welcome, V.”
But Spehar’s presence in the interview implied that they represented the “newsfluencers” in question. The connection between Spehar—a citizen journalist and podcast host who has collaborated with and been featured on several national media outlets—and the term “newsfluencer” is closer in the digital story that ran on NPR’s website. There, a subhead states, “On how newsfluencers handle accuracy, accountability and the independence of news.” Directly under that, Spehar is quoted.
The first 11 minutes of the raw transcript involves logistics like sound level checks and name pronunciations. The formal interview lasts roughly 20 minutes.
Harlow, Deggans and Tworek all told us they left the interview thinking it went great. Deggans said, as far as he knew, no one stepped away feeling that the conversation was contentious.
“When I was doing the interview, it seemed like we ended on a collegial note. We ended on a friendly note,” Deggans said. “V made a joke about … ‘I always want to do NPR because that’s where the smart people are.’ So I was completely surprised to hear that they had such a problem with the interview that they posted this video.”
The editing After the recording was complete, Tworek and an editor worked together to get the conversation down to 7 minutes and still have it flow naturally. In their video, Spehar said that the editing cuts interrupted them mid sentence, “You know how I speak. And what you’re gonna hear in this interview is a Frankensteining of my voice.”
Overall, the editing is clean and captures the essence of what both speakers are saying. There is one spot, early on, where Spehar’s sentence is cut off.
Deggans says, “Now, V, I think you got started on a crucial date — January 6, 2021 — crawling under a desk to make an Instagram video while President-elect Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building?”
Spehar replies, “That is correct, yeah. So one thing about TikTok is you’ve got to have a schtick.”
The digital version of the story has Spehar’s full response: “That is correct, yes. So one thing about TikTok is you’ve got to have a schtick. Mine was doing news from under the desk as opposed to at the desk. It was a little bit more visually interesting. We’re living in very absurd times, so doing something silly felt like the right thing to do during a difficult story.”
It’s a more interesting answer. It explains Spehar’s brand more fully to those who are not familiar with it. Truncating that statement diminished their explanation.
Every other time we hear Spehar during the panel, their edited answers were robust and reflective of their longer answer on the raw transcript. Yes, the discussion about the TikTok ban was cut from the radio story. That happened for good reasons, Stone said. Spehar only briefly answered Deggans’ question about what they’ll do if TikTok is banned. Then Spehar expanded their comments by widely critiquing the reporting at most newsrooms for not reporting that the government is citing secret evidence as it seeks the TikTok ban. Because NPR has reported on the secret evidence, it didn’t make sense to quote someone saying otherwise, Stone said.
When we talked, Spehar mentioned that they’ve appeared on Here & Now in the past. “I felt like what I said is what was said. And it was a good experience,” they said. “And this experience felt very not that. It felt very not NPR.”
NPR has many different formats, from conversational podcasts like the NPR Politics Podcast to live panel conversations like Here & Now, to tightly curated and scripted news shows like Weekend Edition Saturday. Tworek says she told Spehar’s agent in a phone call that the conversation would be edited down to roughly 7 minutes. That’s a long time for a curated magazine show, but a short time if you prefer long-form conversations.
ConclusionSpehar misunderstood what they were agreeing to. That’s unfortunate, but rests on them and their team. The information was clear in the email. Could that misunderstanding have been prevented? Yes, with a pre interview, which would have been easier to schedule had Spehar’s team responded earlier.
Spehar’s TikTok video chronicling their objections is disproportionate to the shortcomings of the piece. A reasonable viewer would walk away thinking that NPR was both deceptive and disrespectful, neither of which is true. To their credit, Spehar posts a link to the NPR interview so their followers can see for themselves. And they pledged their overall support and endorsement for NPR’s credibility.
Yet, it’s clear that some of the letter writers in our inbox did not listen to the full NPR interview. It’s likely that many people who viewed Spehar’s post, which as of Jan. 15 had 310,000 likes, and 15,000 comments, now have a distorted view of the interview.
Journalism is messy, Motta told us. And social media makes it messier. “We still have a definition problem in journalism. It gets muddled,” he said. “When you are trying to define the term ‘journalism,’ you can’t.”
Messy, yes. But not ungovernable. Embedded in every form of journalism are systems that the journalists rely on for getting the information out. Even Spehar, a one-person operation, has systems for sorting ideas, reporting out facts and delivering their work to their audience. As a large newsroom, NPR has many systems.
Each system for creating news grows out of the values that govern the journalists and the news organizations. These values are the foundation of the relationship between the news provider and the audience.
Although they are mostly invisible to news consumers, that doesn’t mean they are unknowable. As a consumer, I can see that Spehar values a quick, earnest, no-nonsense analysis. As a solo operator, they don’t have editors to catch mistakes like calling the show Weekend Update (an SNL segment) instead of Weekend Edition. But they do have the ability and dedication to create many posts on a single topic that evolve and mature with time.
NPR is more explicit and formal about its values. From its mission statement, to its formal standards documents, to the existence of this office, NPR tries to make its hidden systems visible and accountable.
As news consumers, we should query our information sources as we consume them, looking for signals that their values and their systems serve our needs. Doing so will strengthen our ability to trust our news providers. — Kelly McBride, with research by Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham |
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The Public Editor spends a lot of time examining moments where NPR fell short. Yet we also learn a lot about NPR by looking at work that we find to be compelling and excellent journalism. Here we share a line or two about the pieces where NPR shines. |
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LA Fires Coverage and Landing Page |
| NPR’s journalists are reporting around the clock on the fires in Los Angeles County. They’re covering this catastrophic event from all angles: through personal stories, on-the-ground reporting, explanatory reporting, photos and more. They’ve also dedicated space on their California Fires landing page to a variety of resources, including a tab for resources for local residents and a tab on “How to Help,” which includes an article from a local Los Angeles publication, LAist. Covering an ongoing natural disaster of such scale is not easy. NPR quickly pivoted to ensure that its newsroom made coverage of the LA fires a priority and to create a necessary and timely resource page. — Nicole Slaughter Graham |
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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 Instagram, Threads, Facebook and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute |
Kelly McBride
Public Editor |
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Amaris Castillo
Poynter Institute |
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Nicole Slaughter Graham
Poynter Institute |
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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.
Read more from the NPR Public Editor, contact us, or follow us on Instagram, Threads and Facebook. |
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