Kelly McBride on her NPR public editor role and substantial changes to NPR's ethics policy

Reliable Sources

CNN

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3.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

When is it appropriate for journalists to take a side? When is it okay for journalists to participate in a march or use a political hashtag? NPR recently addressed these questions with a revision to its ethics policy. Poynter SVP Kelly McBride, who also serves as NPR's public editor, discusses the policy changes and what they mean for the public radio outlet and the journalism industry more broadly. She says "good journalism and having an opinion about a moral position" should not be mutually exclusive," and points out, "When you talk to journalists of color who are trying to make their way in American newsrooms, they are disproportionately harmed by these conflict of interest policies." To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	When, if ever, is it OK for a journalist to attend a protest, to participate in a demonstration?
0:10.6	When is it in bounds to express a political point of view, and when is it out of bounds?
0:17.3	Those are questions that many newsrooms have been grappling with in the past year.
0:22.9	And now MPR is out with an update to its ethics policy.
0:27.1	It changes some of the rules of the journalism road.
0:31.1	So what are the changes, and what do they mean?
0:34.2	Those are some of the questions for this week's Reliable Sources podcast.
0:37.9	So let's cue the music.
0:41.0	I'm Brian Stelter, and this weekly podcast is our chance to go more in-depth talking with
0:46.1	media leaders and newsmakers about how the news is shaped, how the news is made.
0:51.8	And that's exactly what this update to the MPR ethics policy is about.
0:57.1	MPR, of course, is a huge news organization in the United States.
1:01.6	The public radio network sets the tone for local stations across the country as well.
1:07.5	It has an ethics policy first drafted a couple of decades ago, then updated a decade
1:12.8	ago, and now it's being revised again.
1:16.0	It's new language around when it's all right for a journalist to attend a protest,
1:22.2	march in a parade, take a position on issues.
1:26.6	Kelly McBride recently shared these revisions to the policy in a column for mpr.org.
1:33.3	McBride is the public editor for MPR.
1:36.4	She's also a senior vice president at the Pointer Institute.
1:39.9	She has worked there since 2002, and in that capacity she's one of the country's top
1:45.0	voices on media ethics.
	...

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