Christopher Chávez: There are two background stories. The first is interrogating my own ambivalent relationship with NPR. I’m a longtime listener of NPR, and at the same time I’m very aware that I fit comfortably within their ideal audience: I have a certain degree of cultural capital and I’m English-proficient. I’m already overserved in some ways in civic discourses by other news organizations. I fit nicely within their current profile.

But I also knew that NPR was really intended to have a broader net and to serve a broader and more disenfranchised audience. It became an urgent conversation for me when Donald Trump was running for office and I noticed that mainstream national news organizations were often so passive about the rhetoric that was [being used], about some actual physical violence against Latinx bodies that was occurring at the time. I noticed just how long it took national news organizations to really humanize Latinos during this process, or even to include their voices.

I was interested in the specific practices that undermine this larger goal of representing the public and integrating different kinds of voices. Because that’s the way NPR sells itself: It sells itself on the idea that it’s a public broadcasting network. Just recently, it had its 50th anniversary under the tagline “hear every voice” and a promise that it’s going to be very inclusive. But it’s not.

Chávez: There are kind of two intersecting factors here. One: NPR faced economic pressures almost immediately. It was given funding, but the funding was inconsistent. It always had to hustle to be sustainable. It started off as a semi-amateurish professional organization that was very, very scrappy in its early term, but wasn’t really viable.

Over time, realizing that it had to become economically sustainable, around the early 1980s it started to pivot toward a marketplace model. [That meant]: Segment the programming for an audience that it thinks is going to be able to underwrite the program, that is going to give the necessary annual donations. It implemented the process of market segmentation to identify the kind of listener that it wanted to pursue and then refocused its programming toward that listener.

There’s also the overlying factor of the racial ideologies that shape some of these practices. If NPR was going to pursue diverse audiences, they had to fit really nicely within the package. There are some ideological implications at play — for example, that America is an English-speaking country, that America is a primarily white country. I argue that it made an effort to exclude a whole range of the public that it had originally been tasked with serving.

Half of the book focuses on case studies for [the NPR programs] Alt. Latino, Latino USA, and Radio Ambulante. Each one does something really interesting. Each chapter starts off with a moment of violence against Latinos, either state-sponsored violence or otherwise, and the failure of mainstream media to really capture the humanity of some of those stories. Then these players come in and tell these stories in interesting and compelling ways, drawing in the voices of Latinos. I try to trace the conditions that allow those stories to happen within the space of public radio. Some of the book attends to that. I think one of the things that the stories need in order to sort of reach a broader audience and to survive is just consistent support from NPR. And so in the postscript to the Latino USA chapter — this wasn’t in the book — Maria Hinojosa ended up taking Latino USA outside of NPR’s portfolio and going with PRX because she never really felt that it was supported or funded consistently by NPR.

I don’t want to speak for any of those producers of the other two programs. But, yes, NPR has them. They are on the portfolio of products, but [I believe] NPR doesn’t truly support them in a meaningful way and in some cases, uses the digital landscape to sort of have it both ways. Like: You can see we have this Latino-serving podcast, but at the same time, it doesn’t really impact the terrestrial experience in any kind of meaningful way.

Chávez: I think we can look at NPR as just another product of the media marketplace. We’ve moved from the general audience model that we may have had decades ago to something that’s really hyper-segmented. There are many properties that are targeting working-class Latinos — a lot of Los Angeles Spanish-language radio stations, for example, target working-class Latinos, and serve that audience with music, but also with politics, in some cases much, much more politically than you might find on NPR.

NPR, if you look at it from that perspective, is targeting a very different kind of audience that’s congruent with who The New York Times or The New Yorker is targeting: People who are highly educated with significant amounts of social resources and economic resources. It’s a small [audience] and one that’s over-served already, civically.

Chávez: I do, in some ways. Public radio, especially the larger [stations] that purport to be mainstream, are facing the same kinds of pressures. They’re not sure how they’re going to pivot to meet a younger, more diverse audience with more inclusive sensibilities.

That said, when you look at the programming on NPR versus PRX, I think [PRX’s] focus is really different in the kind of the risks that it’s willing to take in terms of language, in terms of subject matter. NPR is much more conservative than some of the other approaches that you might see on public radio.

There are also smaller efforts like Radio Bilingüe, which is in Spanish but also in Triqui and other Indigenous languages. They have much smaller budgets and they are serving a really different kind of audience.

Chávez: I think it’s important because it seems as if any time [a problem] comes up, the changes made are cosmetic. This became evident recently when we saw the departures of Audie Cornish and Lourdes ‘Lulu’ Garcia-Navarro. A number of high-profile hosts left and it prompted this conversation, as it does every few years, about diversity and whether NPR is reaching the public. The solution always comes to be, “We need to hire another Black or Latino host. We need to hire more or maybe invest in programming here or there.”

There’s never any serious reconsideration of the thing itself and what it was intended to be. That raises questions, for me, about what diversity even looks like on public radio. It’s different than it might be on television, where you can look at diversity phenotypically. On radio, is it a surname? Is it a sensibility? Is it a linguistic choice in how you’re allowed to speak? You can have diversity, in some cases, without really having diversity. I think, again, if we don’t know the history of NPR and what it was actually intended to be, we just look at the thing that we currently have and say, “Ok, how do we make modifications to it?” without thinking about wholesale, transformative change.

Chávez: Some senior-level interviews with current NPR executives [didn’t happen].

[Editor’s note: From NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara: “Chávez says he reached out to NPR executives and got no response yet the only request that came to media relations was for permission to use a photo in his book. I would have been happy to talk to him & to help arrange additional interviews.”]

A lot of the senior executives just wouldn’t [respond] to me, and it makes sense, because they’re currently invested in what NPR is. I would have loved to have spoken with Lulu Garcia-Navarro. [Talking to] some of these folks that had a prominent role at NPR at the time would have been insightful, but I get the reason why they didn’t. In some cases, I‘m also skeptical of whether, if I had spoken to them, they would have been forthright or honest. But overall I think I was pretty lucky in getting to speak with some of the folks that I was able to speak with.

Chávez: The American public looks different now. When we look at the world, demographically, we’re changing. We’re becoming much more diverse in really beautiful and interesting ways. There are all kinds of important stories to tell. During my research, I found that some of the policing [over what can be on NPR] comes from executives and broadcast-level producers, news directors who make small choices. But some of the policing comes from audience members themselves. Some people would react negatively when they heard somebody speaking in an accent, for example, or when a lot of time was spent on a Latinx-oriented story.

Consumers are very vocal, and in today’s digital environment, that feedback can be given to institutions immediately. And it can be swift and severe. That often came up and it was really profound in terms of the range of stories in Los Angeles, where I grew up. L.A. is a predominantly Latinx city. The radio station KPCC’s motto is “We speak Angeleno,” but it’s really speaking in English, speaking without an accent, excluding people that are primarily Spanish-dominant, not telling their stories, and just not showing the breadth of the reality that I know there to be in Los Angeles.

Chávez: Speaking with executives, [I found] they know the business realities. They know that their audience is getting older and that they need to go younger. At the same time, they don’t want to make any aggressive decisions that are going to, what they call, “take the network into a precipitous decline.” Like, you make these decisions and all of a sudden you might lose listeners significantly. This was palpable at the executive level and at the station manager level. Nobody seemed willing to make any kind of changes that would disrupt the listening audience, for fear of losing any kind of revenue stream.

But transformative change comes at a cost. Transformative change means that you might lose significant amounts of listeners if you want to become something fundamentally different. All of the change that I think that anybody was willing to entertain was, again, cosmetic. How do we keep this thing as it is, but just maybe give it some makeup?

Chávez: That was somethingthat kept up coming during the interviews: “We tell stories and we’re interested in characters.” It always struck me as as interesting. For me, you’re talking about real people who have real lives and real lived experiences, and so this trope of the character really fascinated me, because when you look at it from a business perspective, it’s a form of entertainment. The idea is to hook listeners to make sure that they continue listening and that they get something rewarding out of it.

That requires a flattening-out of experience. You have to make it cohesive and coherent to the audience that you’re telling the stories to. Since NPR’s current audience is primarily white, educated, maybe liberal-leaning, but certainly not Latinx in and of themselves, Latinx stories almost become content to serve up to audiences that are not Latinx. Even after having done this research, I’m not sure what many of [NPR’s] Latino-oriented shows do. Like, are they actually serving Latinos? Are they delivering Latino stories to white audiences? I’m not sure where I end up on that one. I guess there’s a little bit of both going on.

Chávez: It’s a really interesting moment for the soundscape. There are so many different kinds of properties emerging that are, in some ways, outdoing NPR. NPR has lived by this marketplace model and in some ways, it’s going to die by the marketplace model because these other properties are emerging and telling compelling stories that are siphoning off talent from NPR. We’ve seen that begin with Audie Cornish and Lulu Garcia-Navarro. People are investing resources to out-NPRing NPR. I think that’s going to create new kinds of opportunities.

It could create a two-way channel. Before, if you worked in public radio, you stayed within the public radio circuit and the problem was that there were so few opportunities relative to the larger media landscape to move up. Now there’s sort of a pipeline out and back in. You can go to other kinds of properties that are doing similar kinds of stories, get some great experiences, and then in some cases, come back. Jasmine Garsd Garcia would probably be an example of that. She was cofounder of Alt. Latino, [left and] ends up at Marketplace, did some other work with the BBC for a while, and then ends up coming back with NPR as the New York correspondent, with a much more prominent voice on the network. I think some interesting economic pressures are going to be exerted on NPR that are going to force it to react.