Source Diversity At NPR: Grassroots Initiatives Address Challenges

Last week, NPR released the fourth year of internal studies examining the diversity of its sources: people who are interviewed or quoted in stories, either on-air or online. The results of those studies, conducted in fiscal years 2013 to 2016, pointed to a serious challenge for NPR: Its sources were overwhelmingly white, male and coastal. In FY2015, the latest year of the study of on-air programs, sources heard on the newsmagazines Morning Edition and All Things Considered were 70 percent male and 73 percent white, and about 40 percent came from Washington, D.C., California or New York combined.

This is a problem for NPR, just as it's a media-wide problem that has drawn the attention of scholars and media analysts and prompted the creation of source banks (like NPR's Source of the Week) and discussion around newsrooms' unconscious biases.

Listeners, too, have written the Ombudsman's Office with concerns, specifically about women's voices being underrepresented. Barbara Hart, of Portland, Ore., wrote to us about a story that focused on a women's health care issue: "Include women at all levels of your reporting. Do your work to identify and include female experts and leaders! And for goodness sake, rely on women to discuss women's healthcare!"

Her concern was hearing only a male reporter and a male newscaster in one version of the story; a longer Web version quoted a female patient. Still, Hart's point is well-taken: The findings from NPR's 2015 study of, notes that when women's voices are heard, they still may not be heard as experts or as people of authority.