Which candidate gets more air?

/ Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

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Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

As the journalists at NPR map out coverage of the presidential election, they aim to keep the audience abreast of relevant developments and explore the platforms and promises of each candidate.

Listeners and readers should expect to find the most recent and interesting news as well as a balance of stories about both candidates and parties. But measuring evenness in political coverage is highly subjective.

A handful of audience letters got us wondering if the simple metric of how often a candidate is quoted on air gives any insight into the broader question of fairness. The letters we’ve received object to the number of times former President Donald Trump is heard in NPR stories.

These complaints hearken back to Trump’s first run at the presidency in 2015-16, when he garnered more press attention than other candidates through his unconventional approach to campaigning. Was that still happening?

We set out to compare the number of times listeners hear Trump on NPR’s airwaves to how often they hear Vice President Kamala Harris. You can see the detailed results in our direct response to the letter writers. The headline is this: As a presidential candidate, Trump no longer attracts disproportionate attention, at least on NPR. In fact, Harris is quoted slightly more often.

But should the number of direct quotes be relatively equal? American news consumers expect political balance, even if we in journalism don’t have a universal way of defining what that looks like or how we could measure it. Many of our letter writers asked for “equal time” for Harris.

In another era, broadcasters were expected to comply with the Fairness Doctrine in order to maintain their licenses to use the public airwaves. Often reductively (and somewhat inaccurately) interpreted as the equal-time rule, the policy faded in the 1980s after the FCC repealed it and President Ronald Reagan vetoed a congressional bill that would have made it a federal law. A modern equal-time policy survives, but it applies to mostly advertising and exempts news content.

Yet the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine lives on in public media, explicitly in NPR’s mission to reflect all of America. Fulfilling that promise requires a level of institutional awareness, particularly in political coverage. The newsroom assigns equal reporting resources to both campaigns. The political conventions generated a relatively equal number of stories. Through the work of their own reporters and those at member stations in every state, NPR is hearing from voters who support both candidates.

Counting quotes, or even entire stories, is a crude tool, at best. If the numbers were significantly tilted, it would tell us something was off. But it’s more likely that the score will remain relatively close at all times.

Still, the exercise itself was an opportunity to ask why the mix of stories looks the way it does and if that mix serves the needs of the audience.

Finally, we shine a spotlight on a series of deeply reported stories on caring for senior citizens in rural America. — Kelly McBride

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Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina

Are we hearing more Trump than Harris?

In addition to these letters, many other audience members have written in to express similar objections: Too much Trump, not enough Harris. We began to wonder if it was true. Is NPR airing more audio clips of Trump than of Harris?

It’s a hard question to answer because some weeks we would expect to hear more from one candidate than the other. Those include political convention weeks, vice president announcement weeks and any other time when one candidate is making more news.

For example, a big story out of the presidential race last week was Harris’ first major interview as the Democratic presidential nominee. NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about it with clips of Harris’ interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. The week after the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, there were more stories about him.

We selected a 14-day stretch, and, with the help of Ayda Pourasad at NPR’s Research, Archives & Data Strategy department, we looked for stories featuring the voice of Harris or Trump on NPR’s magazine shows. We zeroed in on a two-week period that did not include a political convention week (July 28 to Aug. 10). We looked at NPR’s flagship magazine shows, which are specifically curated to present a balance of news: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday.

During those two weeks 39 stories featured audio from either Harris or Trump. And Harris had a slight edge.

Stories with a Harris quote: 26

Stories with a Trump quote: 21

Eight stories counted in both columns because they included quotes from both candidates.

Our team went through the entire batch to determine each story’s focus. The stories about Trump were more likely to challenge a statement he made. Many of the stories about Harris were neutral reviews of her past résumé, which makes sense given that she became the presidential candidate only a month ago.

Here’s a sample of three stories about Trump:

• A Morning Edition story from July 30 on Trump’s TikTok presence.
• A Morning Edition segment on Aug. 1 about Trump’s attacks on Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
• An All Things Considered story Aug. 8 about a Trump press conference. 

Here’s a sample of three stories about Harris:

• An All Things Considered story on July 29 about her time as a prosecutor.
• A Weekend Edition Sunday profile from July 31 about Harris’ late mother, Shyamala Gopalan.
• A Morning Edition story on Aug. 7 about Harris’ record and what she might do in office around climate change.

Why is it that NPR listeners are noting and objecting to hearing Trump? It could be a coincidence that the listeners just happened to tune in during Trump stories. It could be that Trump is often making memorable or bombastic statements. It could also be that more NPR audience members support Harris and so they have a negative reaction to Trump’s voice.

We have no way of proving any of these theories. Eric Marrapodi, vice president for news programming, said NPR’s magazine shows strive for overall balance of ideas, meaning that if they have a story featuring one presidential candidate, they might balance that with a story about a differing political point of view. But that wouldn’t necessarily include the opposing candidate. “You are always looking at what is newsworthy,” he said. “And sometimes one candidate will say something that is newsworthy, and the other candidate will not have said anything that’s newsworthy for that day’s broadcast.”

Individual campaign styles do still influence news judgment. “There are some candidates who do a lot of events and are very dynamic and are changing and doing things differently every day, and that becomes newsworthy,” he said. “There are other candidates who are very disciplined and go out and give the same stump speech every day and stick to their plan, and that becomes less newsworthy as a result of that.”

Bill Adair, a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and author of the forthcoming book Beyond the Big Lie (which explores how and why politicians lie), cautioned against placing an emphasis on numbers. He said news judgment should determine the balance of coverage of the candidates.

“What’s most important is how much they reflect the overall issues, and the enterprise reporting that your journalists are doing, and the larger topics of the election,” Adair said. “And so numbers are great, but they shouldn’t overshadow the bigger things that should determine news coverage.”

Adair said he doesn’t believe journalists should be overly focused on using an equal number of audio clips from Trump and Harris. “I think there’s an overall concept of fairness in what you examine,” he said. “You don’t want to fall prey to putting so much emphasis on balance that you distort what your listeners hear and, in doing so, report things that don’t reflect the larger concerns in this race.”

For instance, Trump’s July appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, where he assailed Harris’ identity and questioned her Black heritage, had relatively long staying power, generating news stories on NPR for 48 hours.

NPR first reported on Trump’s comments about Harris’ identity in stories on All Things Considered, and the following day on Morning Edition. The morning news brief also featured an audio clip of Trump saying, “and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don't know. Is she Indian or is she Black?”

Marrapodi pointed to that particular event as an example of a candidate making a lot of news. “There were a lot of very interesting editorial threads to pull on with that story that merited a lot of coverage,” he said. “Former President Trump is a very interesting candidate to cover. He seems to view unpredictability as a virtue, and that often makes news.”

Trump can also be combative in interviews, which is uncharacteristic of presidents and former presidents. Trump’s comments about Harris’ biracial identity were a new critique that was certainly worth reporting on. “And it was important in that sense for the audience to hear those comments in their context, because it’s not our job to sanitize what candidates say,” Marrapodi said. “It’s our job to contextualize what candidates say and help people understand them.”

The gap between audience perception and the hard data surprised Adair. “You know, he’s memorable,” Adair said of Trump. “He says things that are outrageous. Harris is a different kind of politician and does not say things that are as outrageous. So I would bet that that’s a factor.”

Just as NPR journalists felt it was important to air audio clips of Trump’s comments at NABJ, Marrapodi pointed to last week when the organization focused on just one interview: Harris’ and running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash. He said NPR aired clips from that interview, and added context from White House correspondent Asma Khalid.

“One of the things that I love about our medium in audio is sometimes the way someone says something or the reaction they get in the moment, a pause, a beat, is just as important to understanding what happened,” Marrapodi said. “And you sometimes lose that in a text version.”

Marrapodi didn’t want to join our speculation about audience perceptions. “We always are glad that they’re listening, and I love that they’re listening so carefully,” he said. “And I would just remind them that news ebbs and flows. Sometimes one person gets more than the other, but we are always working on making sure we achieve fairness and balance and completeness in our coverage.”

NPR doesn’t and shouldn’t promise to feature the presidential candidates in equal amounts. That would not enhance audience understanding of Trump and Harris as presidential candidates. Instead, NPR journalists tell us they seek to curate the stories in every show to bring the best mix of sound and to spark a little curiosity. If producers felt obligated to balance quotes from one candidate with quotes from the opponent, the result would likely be a show that was less informative and boring.

Additionally, NPR is obligated to ensure that its listeners are informed and equipped to vote. That means digging into the candidates’ claims, pushing back when needed, and airing their voices when they say something new and interesting. Equal time for candidates is a form of stenography, not insightful journalism. — Kelly McBride and Amaris Castillo

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The growing cost of senior health care, through the eyes of rural farmers

In rural North Dakota, 74-year-old farmer Sherwood Haakenson needed round-the-clock care for ongoing health issues. His wife and fellow farmer, Cindie, found him the help he needed, but didn’t know how long the pair could afford the cost. NPR Reporter Juliana Kim discussed her story on the Haakensons and their growing concerns about the cost of senior care, with host Scott Detrow this past Tuesday. The story covers this widespread issue while zeroing in on how the cost of senior care is complicating matters for a specific community within the larger American population. The radio story, in conjunction with its written companion piece and poignant photos, help illustrate the issue in a human-centered way. The piece is part of a special series on senior care in rural America. — Nicole Slaughter Graham

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo, Emily Barske Wood and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, X 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

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