A public radio producer's declaration
We are not
Ron Schiller
“Are you okay?” my husband asks from the other side of the bed.
“I’m okay,” I say softly. It’s 5 a.m. I’ve been awake for an hour. “It’s just what happens when I don’t have anything else to put my mind to.”
I’ve just learned that my public radio program has lost its funding. I’m the assignment editor at the World Vision Report, a respected, nationally broadcast show about social justice and human rights around the world. Technically, I’m an independent contractor. But I’ve been there for almost seven years, building up the program, reporter by reporter, award by award. Our funding doesn’t come from NPR or CPB. It comes from a Christian humanitarian aid group, World Vision, with no editorial strings attached. But now it’s going away, courtesy of the Great Recession.
A core group of us who work on t he show believe in it too much to let it die. All we need is seed money, we say, to hire someone savvy to write grants and get underwriting. What company wouldn’t want to be associated with such an upstanding program? We dare to hope, even to plan.
Then we get the news that conservative provocateur James O’Keefe has stung NPR’s soon-to-be-former fundraiser, Ron Schiller, in an undercover video. Schiller says many unfortunate things: that the Tea Party has hijacked the Republican Party; that most ordinary people aren’t as smart or sophisticated as public radio listeners; and that NPR doesn’t need public funding. Thank you very little.
There are a lot of perks to being a public radio journalist — you don’t get bored, you get thrown out of your own comfort zone in a refreshing way, and sometimes people actually listen to what you have to say — but making tons of money is not generally one of them. Especially if you’re a freelancer, as I was for a time. I survived by always delivering, never going to the dentist (I did floss and brush) and being too ornery to quit. Ron Schiller, drinking fine wine in his fine suit at a fine restaurant, is nowhere near my orbit, and I like it that way. He is not a journalist. He doesn’t speak for me or anyone I know, and I’ve been in this business for 28 years.
He definitely doesn’t speak for my reporters, Bonnie, Megan and Gabriel.
Bonnie is like a racehorse. Let her out of the starting gate and she will run unbridled to her next story. We send her to Cairo on a shoestring, and she hitches a ride into Benghazi with a convoy of volunteers. She meets a Libyan journalist who hadn’t written one article in 25 years because he didn’t want to dispense Gadhafi’s propaganda. Now he has started a newspaper where he can write what he wants. The first issue is called, “The Sun Has Risen.”
Megan has just gotten back from the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, reporting on North African refugees there, when I call to ask if she would go to Tunisia for us. I hear the exhaustion in her voice. She says yes. Days later, she meets pro-democracy bloggers who have set up shop at a tent camp in Tunis. Some volunteers at the camp won’t let the state television network in. They doubt they’d get a fair shake from the government’s mouthpiece.
Then there’s Gabriel. At least, that’s what I’ll call him, because it’s too dangerous to use his real name. Gabriel plays cat and mouse with the authorities in his country — using an alias when he has to, changing his email address often, gathering his tape indoors only. I ask him what happened one time when he got arrested. “Let’s just say I couldn’t sit down for a few days,” he says. Yet when they let him go, he gets back to work.
Bonnie and Megan are Canadian. Gabriel is African. The newspaper editor is Libyan and the bloggers are Tunisian. They all understand, in a deep way, the value of free speech — that it’s not something to be taken for granted, not something to be twisted and tangled in a debate that’s a lot about politics and very little about honest journalism. Free speech is precious, and priceless. People on all sides of this discussion might do well to remember that, too.
Leda Hartman has been a public radio and print journalist for nearly 30 years. Besides her work with World Vision Report, she has had stints at WUNC in Chapel Hill, N.C., and at New Hampshire Public Radio. Email:
Copyright 2011 American University