When are protests newsworthy?

Every day, editors in newsrooms around the country identify the most important stories. In addition to their own knowledge, these editors take in advice from their reporters in the field, trends from social media and historical information about what their audience found interesting last week and last year.

With all those data points swirling around, editors then compare and contrast the news stories of the day against each other, sifting and sorting, placing bets — in the form of resources — on each one. Which are the most compelling? What’s truly surprising? What’s most relevant to the audience? What matters the most?

They must decide where to have their journalists devote their attention, how many words or minutes to allot to each story, and how much promotional energy to use to drive the audience to the material.

As campus protests related to Israel’s war with Hamas started spreading, NPR listeners and readers started writing in, asking questions and critiquing the coverage. Some thought NPR was paying too much attention to Columbia University, an Ivy League school in the middle of New York City. Others thought NPR was distorting the causes that motivated the demonstrators. Still others believed that NPR was ignoring or minimizing destruction and hate speech among some protesters.

Today we address several of those questions. In doing so, we get a glimpse into how the news leaders at NPR identify and meet the needs of their audience.

We also highlight a story about an often-overlooked group of people caring for aging loved ones: Black men. — Kelly McBride

How NPR covers and describes the protests over the war in Gaza

For the past month, the Public Editor’s inbox has been flooded with emails from audience members questioning NPR’s reporting on campus protests and demonstrations related to the war in Gaza. Their viewpoints have run the gamut, and we’re responding here to sometimes contradictory perspectives.

NPR is collecting its stories in one place under the headline “Campus protests over the Gaza war.” It includes coverage of four schools that came to agreements with demonstrators, the police clashing with protesters in New York City and Los Angeles, analysis of the “outside agitator” narrative and how divesting in Israel (a central demand of protesters) would actually work. NPR has also reported how the protests compare to those in history and how Passover arrived at a tense time on Columbia University’s campus amid the demonstrations.

We point this out to acknowledge that NPR journalists have produced a lot of coverage of campus protests from a variety of perspectives. No one story represents the entire body of work.

We spoke with Eric Marrapodi, vice president for news programming, about the newsroom’s strategy in devoting resources to protest coverage. We selected just a few of the many emails we saw in our inbox, and we’ve organized the selection by sentiment and have a response to each.

Describing the protests and the protesters: Some audience members believe NPR’s coverage misrepresents the demonstrators’ purpose in protesting, although they do not agree how.

Genevieve Stephenson wrote on May 2: I believe that the NPR reporting on student protests would be better served if they were referred to as protests against genocide and/or investiture in war instead of calling them pro-Palestine protests. Perhaps that would stop them from offending certain persons or calling them anti-Israeli.

Don House wrote on April 29: Why is NPR using the term “pro-Palestinian” in its coverage of the anti-war protests around the nation on college campuses, instead of “pro-peace,” or “pro-cease fire,” or “anti-war?” When anti-war protesters were in the streets against the Vietnam war, NPR referred to them correctly as “anti-war protesters” and did not call them “pro-North Vietnam” or “pro-VietCong” protesters.

Jane Horowitz wrote on April 30: I want to understand why NPR reports on the recent activity on college campuses and its news reports refer to these protests as pro-Palestinian and not what it also is — Anti-Israeli. … At the very least the protests could be referred to as: pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli.

Marrapodi told us that NPR strives to describe behavior and statements, rather than label the protests. “Not every protester at every school was there for the same reason,” he said, and “it’s challenging to lump them in with one label.”

The best reporting shows audience members the reality on the ground, Marrapodi said. This includes interviews with demonstrators and organizers. However, NPR journalists try to avoid amplifying messages without adding additional context.

For instance, he said, many of the protesters have accused Israel of genocide, but NPR, like many newsrooms, is cautious about using that language. Generally NPR doesn’t use the word “genocide,” standards editor Tony Cavin said on All Things Considered in April.

“We may quote other people using that word,” Cavin said. “That word is essentially an accusation. Genocide is a legal term. It’s a crime. And one of the things you need to prove genocide is you need to prove intent, and that makes it very hard to prove.”

When listening to NPR’s coverage of campus unrest, audience members should expect to hear a variety of viewpoints, in addition to fact-checks that help situate those views within the big picture of the war itself, as well as within political events in the United States.

On calling the protests peaceful: Other audience members feel NPR has miscategorized some of the protests as peaceful when, in their view, they are not.

David Keohane wrote on May 5: … I was listening to NPR on my way to work this week and one of the first stories was about the campus protests over the war in Gaza. The newsreader referred to the “Gaza solidarity encampments” and in the process embraced a deceptively innocuous sounding term used by the protest organizers and supporters. …

Laura Winther wrote on May 2: Why are you calling the protests peaceful when they clearly are not. … No one is covering the effects these protests have had on non-protesting and non-Jewish students. These people are having their college dreams interrupted. Many families pool money to afford to send these children to college only to have them go sleepless due to the noise all night, have their dining halls become inaccessible, etc. … I support the protest against hunger and killing but not the rest of the hateful speech and actions I see and hear. There is no excuse for your program referring to the Columbia University protests as peaceful. …

Marrapodi said NPR aimed to cover each protest as its own event and worked to appropriately describe the developing stories as they happened. While many demonstrations were peaceful, others weren’t.

“That’s why we worked hard to describe: were there arrests last night, were windows broken, were buildings taken over?” he said.

In our view, the word “peaceful” can be a label or a description, depending on how it’s used. Describing protesters as peaceful is unhelpful to the audience. Instead, describing protesters as “sitting on a lawn,” or “carrying a sign” or “chanting a slogan” is more precise. Labels that don’t include enough context can be perceived by listeners as biased. Descriptions, on the other hand, require reporting to support the adjectives journalists use. Telling the audience what’s happening at a protest, who is involved and why they’re demonstrating is more important than deeming it peaceful or not.

How important are the protests? Some audience members feel NPR is overemphasizing the encampments and rallies on college campuses.

Peter Delorme wrote on May 6: The broadcasts about higher ed campuses with student protests do not mention that the vast, vast majority of higher ed institutions are not having noteworthy protests (violent or otherwise). … How about reporting that ### campuses out of 6000 are having demonstrations and that in the XX% of those having violent protests, XX% of those have had ‘outsiders’ among those arrested. …

NPR has devoted a significant amount of coverage to the demonstrations at Columbia University. When asked why, Marrapodi said, “I don’t think many people would dispute that this took off at Columbia,” he said. “It may not have been the first, but it certainly took off there.”

Since then, NPR reporting has mentionedprotestsall aroundthe country.

It would be helpful to have more details. How many campuses are experiencing protests? How many graduations have been disrupted? On specific campuses, how large is the student body and what percentage of students on any given campus are participating in the protests?

“When you say this is a group of 300 students protesting, is that automatically clear to the audience that that’s not every student in the student body? Maybe not. Maybe we could do a better job of clarifying and explaining that,” Marrapodi said. “I think our journalists did a really good job describing what was happening at these college campuses. And it’s also true that there were things that were not happening at every college campus.”

More prominently sharing where protests were and weren’t happening could provide the audience with more insight. NPR has long been aware of the hazard that comes with having most of its journalists and offices on the East and West Coasts.

While the protests are newsworthy, like many news organizations, NPR has limited resources to cover the many issues its audience cares about. It’s important for NPR leaders to look carefully at how much coverage the newsroom is collectively devoting to the protests over the war in Gaza and weigh those efforts against other topics that it can’t cover because of the allocation of resources.

NPR recently announced that it will invest in a new layer of leadership, in part to provide this level of analysis and oversight. While it’s never popular to add more management, gaining the ability to assess NPR’s sprawling body of journalism and intentionally steer it in the direction of its mission is critical for a publicly supported news organization.

The coverage of campus protests is a microcosm of the larger challenges that NPR faces. Created to serve and reflect all of America, NPR’s news leaders must constantly justify and explain their news judgment, telling the audience why stories are worth their attention. This is particularly true of the campus movement.

Some stories were important because they happened at campuses led by presidents who were being pressured by Congress. Others provided a window into the tension between constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and the need to ensure public safety for everyone. Some stories were opportunities to explore the shifting public support behind Israel and Palestinians.

Reporters who are immersed in a story often forget to tell people in the audience, who are usually far removed from the events, why it matters. It’s the job of editors, hosts and producers to ensure that explanation is delivered, especially when a developing story is in its infancy.

While much of the campus protest coverage has focused on elite institutions, it’s clear from the body of work that NPR is reporting on the national picture as well. Most of the time, the language and reporting choices within each story appear to be deliberately constructed to represent one day of one protest, rather than attempting to characterize the entire protest movement. That’s a responsible choice. But the audience can’t see it, unless it’s pointed out.

When journalists are explicit about the choices they make and the reasons behind them, listeners and readers are less likely to see bias in those choices. — Emily Barske Wood and Kelly McBride

Underrecognized caregivers

A recent NPR digital story highlighted a demographic of caregivers for older adults who are often not talked about: Black men. For the feature, which also included an audio version, Ashley Milne-Tyte reported the stresses faced by this portion of caregivers. She tells the story through the lens of one man, a professor and medical researcher who cares for his father with Alzheimer’s. The storytelling speaks to the universal themes of caring for loved ones while also drawing attention to the unique needs of a group that’s underrecognized. — Emily Barske Wood

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Emily Barske Wood and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, X 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