The first is interrogating my own ambivalent relationship with NPR. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.Ĭhristopher Chávez: There are two background stories. I caught up with Chávez to learn about the challenges in studying NPR from this lens, who he thinks is serving Latinx audiences in audio, and what NPR might need to do to be more relevant to the largest minority group in the country. “By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that is meant to be accessed by the broader spectrum of the American public, not just the country’s most elite.” “I hope to address how power is enacted in everyday broadcast practices,” Chávez writes in the book’s introduction. In his new book, Chávez uses media industry data and 50 interviews with public media workers to argue that NPR’s growth has come at the expense of serving Latinx audiences in the U.S. He’s a scholar of Latin American media who published a 2015 book about how “language, power, and industry practices are reshaping the concept of Hispanic television” and, last year, published The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public. That’s different from the NPR we know today, argues Christopher Chávez, the director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. The listener should come to rely upon it as a source of information of consequence, of having listened as having made a difference in his attitude toward his environment and himself … National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a market, or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals who are looking for some understanding, meaning, and joy in the human experience.
The editorial attitude would be that of inquiry, curiosity, concern for the quality of life, critical problem solving, and life loving. It would speak with many voices and many dialects. It would not, however, substitute superficial blandness for genuine diversity of regions, values, and cultural and ethnic minorities, which comprise American society. The program would be well-paced, flexible, and a service primarily for a general audience.
Its original mission statement reads, in part: NPR was founded in 1970 after the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The departures of NPR hosts Audie Cornish, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, and Noel King over the last few months has spurred immediate questions about why the network might be “ hemorrhaging hosts of marginalized backgrounds,” and also broader ones about who, exactly, NPR serves.
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