NPR employees tuned in for a pivotal meeting late last year for a long-awaited update on the future of the public radio network.
After many tumultuous months, marked by layoffs, financial turbulence and internal strife, they signed in to Zoom hoping to hear some good news from NPR’s leaders. What they got instead was a stark preview of the continued challenges ahead.
“We are slipping in our ability to impact America, not just in broadcast, but also in the growing world of on-demand audio,” Daphne Kwon, NPR’s chief financial officer, told the group, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
For the past two weeks, turmoil has engulfed NPR after a senior editor assailed what he described as an extreme liberal bias inside the organization that has bled into its news coverage. The editor, Uri Berliner, said NPR’s leaders had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” — at the expense of diverse political viewpoints, and at the risk of losing its audience.
The accusations, leveled in an essay published in an online publication, The Free Press, led to a deluge of criticism from conservatives, including former President Donald J. Trump, who called for the network’s public funding to be pulled. The essay also generated vociferous pushback internally, with many journalists defending their work and saying Mr. Berliner’s essay distorted basic facts about NPR’s coverage.
But NPR’s troubles extend far beyond concerns about its journalism. Internal documents reviewed by The Times and interviews with more than two dozen current and former public radio executives show how profoundly the nonprofit is struggling to succeed in the fast-changing media industry. It is grappling with a declining audience and falling revenue — and internal conflict about how to fix it.
NPR’s traditional broadcast audience, still the bulk of its listenership, is in long-term decline that accelerated when the pandemic interrupted long car commutes for millions of people. The network has begun to sign up digital subscribers who pay for ad-free podcasts, but that business has lagged far behind that of its competitors.
While NPR still has an audience of about 42 million who listen every week, many of them digitally, that is down from an estimated 60 million in 2020, according to an internal March audience report, a faster falloff than for broadcast radio, which is also in a long-term decline.
