A tricky reporting assignment: covering your own workplace

Consider This from NPR

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🗓️ 3 August 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The job of a media reporter is to examine the role the press plays in our democracy, and the choices the large corporations operating newsrooms are making every day. It's a tough assignment, even more so when it means covering the place you work.

For this week's reporter's notebook series, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik talks about how he navigates his beat, reporting on his employer and the larger media moment we find ourselves in right now.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Since he returned to power, major broadcaster after major broadcaster has made big financial concessions to President Trump.
0:08.0	He says he's been defamed and liable.
0:09.9	He has sued CBS, ABC, meta, Twitter.
0:12.1	25 million in the case of meta, Facebook.
0:14.3	10 million in the case of Elon Musk's X by doing this to the Wall Street Journal.
0:18.1	He's essentially saying, look, even those outfits that you
0:20.8	may think I'm sympathetic to or have a deal with, they're on notice too. That is NPR media correspondent
0:25.9	David Fulkenflick. Trump's attacks on the media and the lawsuits he has filed against ABC, CBS,
0:32.5	and other outlets have kept Fulken Flick busy. Covering such a powerful industry, it's key, he says, to know your audience.
0:39.9	I'm not trying to write for insiders who are the executives in corner suites or the stars whose names sometimes grace the gossip pages as well as the broadcast or the agents who represent them and are trying to strike deals.
0:53.9	Right now, Folken Flick says there is a lot to cover and real consequences to the stories he's chasing.
0:59.7	You know, everything is contested, truth is contested, facts are contested, bias is thrown around.
1:05.3	Sometimes news organizations also bring things on themselves and make incredible mistakes.
1:09.7	All of this deserves covering.
1:11.2	And covering all of this isn't easy, especially when it is your own company you are reporting on.
1:17.8	NPR has been in the news more than usual lately, repeatedly accused of bias by President Trump.
1:23.3	And so I think that's important to do is to demonstrate to folks that we actually believe
1:27.2	what we say, that we commit to the mission even when it's uncomfortable.
1:30.6	Last month, Congress approved a Trump administration plan to rescind more than $1 billion in previously allocated funding for the corporation for public broadcasting.
1:40.4	It's a move that cuts all federal support for NPR, PBS, and their member stations.
1:45.9	Some stations may close down and go dark and not serve all 99 plus percent of the nation that we do now.
1:52.4	Consider this. The job of a media reporter is to examine the role the press plays in our democracy
	...

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