Does documenting momâs hidden labor take away from dad?
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[NPR Public Editor by Poynter's Kelly McBride](
Sometimes when you hear an NPR story, you immediately notice what’s missing. And if what’s missing is exactly what you were looking for, you are left wanting just that thing. In today’s notes from the audience, we have two examples of just this phenomenon. In the first note, the NPR listener wanted the story to be about something different. In the second, both the listener and the interviewer were hoping for something more.
Stories are small packages that show up on the doorstep of your life. The best of them provide delight and surprise. But sometimes you know exactly what’s in there. Occasionally you open them up and you are totally disappointed.
As we look behind the scenes for these two examples, you’ll see a few of the reasons that stories fall short for some audience members.
[illustration of a working mom and her kids](
SDI Productions/Getty Images
From the Inbox
Here are a few quotes from the Public Editor's inbox that resonated with us. You can share your questions and concerns with us through the [NPR Contact page](.
Working dad
Gary Hillyer writes: This morning while prepping for my 5-year-old for virtual school I was listening to NPR, I hear Ailsa Chang announce the topic of her broadcast tonight. While the exact title evades me, the gist of what I understand it to be is, how overworked moms now have to tackle the work of virtual schools too. "They do it all?" So, I guess dads are exempt from maintaining a home and raising a child. Particularly in a situation post divorce. I like and support NPR. I take great offense as a parent and a single dad to your upcoming topic. In a country full of division, this mentality only rips the fabric more.
This particular story was introduced by Tonya Mosley of NPR’s Here & Now. NPR hosts guide the show, but don’t have much control over assigning who reads what intro. The introduction was written by reporter Andrea Hsu. “I wrote the original version, my editors did some revisions, and then the show did some revisions,” Hsu told me in an email.
NPR has done several stories about the ways in which parents’ lives have been upended by the pandemic. There have been stories about fathers: There’s this touching [back-and-forth]( between a father and daughter and this story about how a [single father is approaching childcare]( along with other parents. But [the story you are referring to is about working mothers](. The intent was not to diminish the important role fathers play in their children’s development. There’s a lot of [research]( on the invisible labor women supply in normal times. The pandemic has exacerbated that. This story also notes that women left the workforce in September at four times the rate that men did, information that came from [the Labor Department](. Hsu dove into those numbers recently on [Weekend Edition Saturday](. — Amaris Castillo
Judging a judge
Chris Coppinger writes: I think NPR did listeners a disservice with [this piece](. Scott Simon did not present any of the numerous criticisms of [Amy Coney] Barrett — No discussion of her decisions to [allow] felons to own guns, not vote, and to gut the rights to privacy in Roe v. Wade. No mention of McConnell's views that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
This live [interview]( demonstrates that despite its best efforts, NPR can’t get the perfect interview every time. Weekend Edition host Scott Simon told us that the political experts on the NPR's Washington Desk set up the interview with Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell, who knew Barrett when she was a professor at University of Notre Dame.
So why weren’t questions about Barrett’s record at the front of Simon’s mind? Actually, they were, Simon said.
Simon points out that when he asked his guest what kind of justice Barrett would be, McConnell volunteered that she was a “warm, kind person.” Because he wanted McConnell’s answer to focus on her legal record, Simon said he asked the question again in several different ways.
1) What kind of justice she might be?
2) And I wonder if you've taken note of any particular rulings that she's had the chance to make in her time on the bench.
3) Does she have opinions that might surprise some of her supporters every now and then?
“He's a Stanford Law professor and former judge and a guest on our show,” Simon said. "He's entitled to express an opinion."
As the host of the show, Simon’s goal was to draw a substantive analysis from his guest. NPR can’t control every aspect of a live interview. That’s where the rest of NPR’s coverage comes in. This [story]( from legendary Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg takes a closer look at Barrett's record in greater detail. It’s six minutes that balances personal anecdotes about Barrett with detailed analysis of her record. NPR National Correspondent Sarah McCammon has been covering abortion and reproductive rights for several years. She did a deep dive into Barrett’s record on [abortion]( specifically. NPR has thoroughly reported on Barrett, and even if this interview subject didn't get into her legal record, his perspective gave us a window into her philosophy. — Meredith Roaten
Spotlight on
The Public Editor spends a lot of time examining moments where NPR fell short. Yet we also learn a lot about NPR by looking at work that we find to be compelling and excellent journalism. Here we share a line or two about the pieces where NPR shines.
The future of science education
[photo illustration of lab equipment](
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images
SHORT WAVE
[Want To Dismantle Racism In Science? Start In The Classroom](
NPR's science podcast Short Wave [released]( an episode about the racist side of science. Like so many good stories, the idea for the episode came from a listener, an antibody engineer named Esther Odekunle.
The thoroughness of this episode stands out. It doesn’t just talk about the racist scientists who you may not have known promoted discriminatory ideas. The educators interviewed on this episode discuss solutions and resources, for a news-you-can-use effect.
The podcast demonstrates that its stories can be more than clever fun, and this episode is a perfect example of good journalism as an educational tool, including links to additional resources. — Meredith Roaten
Rhyme and punishment
[Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden hosts of Louder Than A Riot](
NPR
NPR MUSIC
[Introducing NPR Music's Louder Than A Riot](
NPR’s much anticipated music culture podcast Louder Than A Riot drops today. NPR Music’s Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden will host episodes about how the culture of mass incarceration surrounds and influences the best rappers in the business. The episodes feature industry legends like Bobby Shmurda and Killer Mike.
NPR Music has long reached younger, more diverse audiences than does the organization more broadly; The Tiny Desk Concert is the most successful example. This podcast will likely do the same.
— Meredith Roaten
A new way of teaching PE
WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY
[Learning Curve: How Physical Education Works In A Virtual Learning Environment](
How do you teach physical education during a pandemic? [Weekend Edition Sunday]( answered this question as part of NPR’s “Learning Curve” series. Listeners heard from Megaera Regan, an elementary school PE teacher from Port Washington, N.Y., who now teaches some students virtually and others in person. Hiba Ahmad, a production assistant with Weekend Edition, found Regan months ago when she put a call-out for a teachers roundtable on Twitter.
“With ‘Learning Curve,’ the goal is to highlight the realities of this moment for families, students, and teachers. We can do this in a number of ways — with an interview, with a roundtable, with a reporter, with an audio diary, with a self-narration,” Melissa Gray, a senior producer with Weekend Edition, wrote in an email. “With Megaera Regan, once we’d done the pre-interview, we realized she was good enough to sustain a self-narration. The goal with this self-narration was to give the listeners a better understanding and a better sense of ‘being’ in the teacher’s shoes.”
I was immediately drawn to the intimacy of the story because we only heard from Regan, and at times her students in the background, singing. The PE teacher talked about livestreaming lessons for her students, who are fully virtual, and how the students who are face-to-face need to be 12 feet apart and have to wear their masks if they want to come closer and talk to her. She’s reinvented how she does her job. Gray told me they have more stories from “Learning Curve” in the works.
“I mean this time really is a learning curve for so many after all (hence the name of the series!),” Ahmad told me in an email. “Hopefully, listeners hear themselves in the stories of others, and find a moment of solidarity or new ideas on how to tackle this challenge.” — Amaris Castillo
Behind the Scenes
This is how the news gets made. We want your ideas for how we can do it better.
A climate reporter takes on a pandemic
By Meredith Roaten
As she reports on climate change and the environment, Science Desk Correspondent Lauren Sommer faces the effects from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
While she is working from home, she runs an air-filtration unit, which she silences while she records two-ways and narration for her audio stories. It’s been harder to get outside for recreation with her family since the California wildfires started.
Here’s how she works from her home.
[Lauren Sommer's work space](
Lauren Sommer works from her renovated garage.
What does your work station look like?
We have an old garage that's converted into an office space that I share with my husband and my 5-year-old-kindergartener. We're all kind of crammed together with competing Zoom meetings at the same time.
Describe your typical day?
It's a lot more flexible than it used to be. I’m constantly juggling everybody's needs. There's always some technical glitch with reading time in kindergarten, so I’m dealing with that and making my own phone calls and interviews. It's been extra challenging this summer because the smoke has been really bad in California. We've had a number of heat waves, and the air quality has been really bad. We've had to be inside in really hot temperatures, and we can't go outside at all to get that little extra bit of space.
As someone who covers climate change and science, field reporting is my focus. I want to be there. I want to be talking to people, seeing things happen in the natural world. I'm doing a lot more reporting remotely, where folks are doing FaceTime or Zoom with me, so I can still be out with them wherever they need to be and see what they're experiencing. There's been a lot of workarounds to bring a sound and richness into the radio stories like we always like to do. You want to hear things go crunch in the forest. You want to hear people walking around. With the fires in California. I've been able to get out into the field a bit, obviously doing outdoor interviews, which is the only kind of interview you can do when someone has just lost their home in a fire.
Covering climate change is tough all the time. How have you adapted now that there is constantly bad news?
It's still strange for me as a climate reporter because I've been on this beat for almost 15 years now. I've been writing about these things for a really long time. They're not a surprise to me. But I think this summer, with so many fires and hurricanes, it's brought it home for a lot of people. Even for me, knowing that this is a trend that's very much expected in a warming climate, it's still very shocking and stressful. My house has been in smoke for six weeks now. I had to spend half a day evacuating my aunt from the recent Sonoma fire and making sure that she got out safely in the middle of the night. I have two small kids and keeping them happy, making sure that we're getting outside has been really important. When we can, we're hiking. We're enjoying the parts of the Bay Area that we can enjoy when it’s not too smoky.
What’s your favorite story to have worked on during this time?
One, I reported entirely remotely about how [noise levels in the ocean dropped]( during the pandemic because tourists weren't visiting Glacier National Park in Alaska. There wasn't much boat traffic or cruise ship traffic. That story was really fun to do, because they have underwater microphones recording whales all the time. I listened to hours of whale sounds to figure out how we can kind of illustrate what the scientists are hearing and what questions they're asking. I got to listen to baby humpback whales calling, and felt like I was really there. The scientists I worked with did a fantastic job taking me out on her boat trip [virtually], recording all the really beautiful sounds of Alaska.
Right now, I'm doing a series of stories about wildfires, and I went out with a family that was returning to the site where their home used to be. It had just burned down, and they were taking their two kids to see it for the first time. That's a moment that's incredibly painful and poignant for them. As reporters, we want our audience to be able to feel that moment, to understand the stakes for a lot of these families and people who are losing their homes right now and are being displaced. That was a story that as a reporter, I felt being there [in the field] was really important.
How have you adapted your coverage to incorporate the pandemic and keep the climate change story relevant and poignant to people?
Climate change is going to make all of our existing problems worse. The health disparities that we see from the coronavirus pandemic, in terms of who's getting it, who's really suffering from it, those health disparities are also made worse by climate change. That's unfortunately a significant thing for the future is that when you look at climate change, it's just layering on top of all these other problems and disasters. We're going to get more things that we saw this summer, a lot of hurricanes, a lot of extreme fires on top of this ongoing pandemic. Disasters tend to feel random and sudden and maybe they go away. In a warming climate, we're going to see more of that.
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Researchers Amaris Castillo and Meredith Roaten make this newsletter possible. We are still reading all of your messages on [Facebook]( [Twitter]( 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](
Meredith Roaten, National Public Radio
Kelly McBride, Public Editor
[Amaris Castillo, Poynter Institute](
Amaris Castillo, Poynter
The Public Editor stands as a source of independent accountability. Created by NPR's board of directors, the Public Editor serves as a bridge between the newsroom and the audience, striving to both listen to the audience's concerns and explain the newsroom's work and ambitions. The office ensures NPR remains steadfast in its mission to present fair, accurate and comprehensive information in service of democracy.
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