THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, AUG. 7 got off to a solid start for St. Louis Public Radio. Sarah Fenske, host of the station’s midday talk show, “St. Louis on the Air,” bubbled with enthusiasm as she interviewed Democratic congressional nominee Cori Bush.
Three days earlier Bush had upset 10-term incumbent William Lacy Clay in Missouri’s 1st congressional district primary, putting her on course for a November general-election victory in the heavily Democratic district. Bush is set to be Missouri’s first black woman in the House and is a prospective recruit for the “The Squad” that includes New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives.
“My mission is to love humanity,” Bush told Fenske during a wide-ranging conversation, capping a week in which “Black Girl Magic” was one of the dominant St. Louis election narratives. “People that are marginalized, disenfranchised, under-resourced…that’s where I have to start.”
For St. Louis Public Radio, Bush’s triumphant interview was a prime example of the station’s long-running efforts to elevate and amplify the voices of people of color – many of them, like Bush, veterans of the Ferguson protests in 2014 after the police killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. It was the type of interview that has helped cement STLPR’s status as a key media platform for a diverse range of voices, often from organizations involved in the St. Louis area’s blossoming progressive movement.
Not everyone was feeling magical that day, though. Around the time Fenske was signing off, the station’s science and environmental reporter, Eli Chen, was tweeting news of her resignation. Chen’s tweet included a link to a Medium post from a group called STLPR Reporters & Producers of Color. Titled “Racism Exists at St. Louis Public Radio. Acknowledge It” and written like an open letter, the post accused STLPR General Manager Tim Eby and others of upholding white supremacy.
“More than a month ago, we submitted a formal letter to Tim Eby, demanding better hiring practices, new employee training, and a budget that would make the station a truly equitable and safe place to work,” the journalists wrote. “In response, the leaders of our station have made some promises to evaluate existing policies, but also told us that many of the changes we demand will require funding the station doesn’t have.”
A short time later the station’s afternoon newscaster, Marissanne Lewis-Thompson, posted an essay detailing her own experiences since joining the station in 2017. “To this day, I am still the only person of color on the air daily as a newscaster,” she wrote [emphasis in original]. “When a pair of full-time on-air positions opened up, the station hired two white men.”
Recalling several incidents where managers failed to call out racist behavior by the station’s donors and others, Lewis-Thompson, who is black, alleged that Eby “has continuously swept systemic racism at the station under the rug.” She directly addressed Eby and the head of the newsroom, Executive Editor Shula Neuman, saying they had failed her and other journalists of color. (She leveled a similar charge against the former director of programming, Robert Peterson, who resigned in July after more than two dozen staff members signed a letter calling for his departure, according to the essay.)
Supportive messages began flooding in immediately. Many of them came from Chen and Lewis-Thompson’s white colleagues. “Leadership needs to realize they’re going to keep losing immensely talented people if things don’t change,” the station’s health reporter Sarah Fentem tweeted.
The reckoning
On Aug. 10 Eby posted a statement on STLPR’s blog in which he acknowledged systemic racism at the station. He also announced that the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), which STLPR is part of, would investigate the station’s equity and inclusion practices. (It’s unclear how long the investigation will take.)
“I am very sorry that I did not recognize the depth of the problems earlier and that staff have been hurt,” Eby wrote. “Racism has no place at St. Louis Public Radio. We must – and will – do better.”
To date STLPR has not mentioned the newsroom revolt on its airwaves or the news section of its website. On the surface, things proceed as before. The soothing tones of National Public Radio newscasters continue to be heard during “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Most STLPR staff continue to work remotely due to COVID-19, using Zoom, Slack and other tools to stay in touch. Reporters and producers keep pumping out stories and interviews on arts and culture, politics, and the St. Louis region’s response to the pandemic.
But it’s clear that in this year of upheaval, sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and exacerbated by the pandemic and a presidential campaign, STLPR faces a reckoning unlike any other since it began broadcasting in 1972. All seven top leaders at the organization are white, and only one senior editor in the newsroom, David Cazares, is a person of color.
“This younger generation – rightly so – is expecting equity in the workplace, and demanding more,” said Holly Edgell, a former STLPR editor who oversaw stories about race, identity and culture as part of the multi-station Sharing America collaborative. Edgell, who calls herself “a black woman who happens to be biracial,” was one of several employees laid off by STLPR this past spring as a result of spending cuts.
“Racism has no place at St. Louis Public Radio. We must – and will – do better.”
Online, the Journalists of Color group (which has not named its members) is seeking to create an “Anti-Racist Donor Roll.” Promoting the #DoBetterSTLPR hashtag, the group is asking sustaining members how much they’d be willing to increase their monthly pledge “if the station makes necessary changes to address its racism.”
On Sunday, a local journalist Neuman had tasked to report independently on the station’s troubles withdrew from the assignment. Dick Weiss, a former editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who has written extensively about race and discrimination in recent years, said on Twitter that “my whiteness and past associations with some stakeholders…disqualify me as a credible narrator.”
A nationwide trend
There are also developments behind the scenes. At a virtual meeting on Wednesday the Friends of St. Louis Public Radio decided to form its own diversity committee, a move some members of the backers’ group have long pushed for, one longtime donor told me. Eby’s bosses at UMSL, meanwhile, have instructed him that any station-wide messages he sends to the staff must first go through the university’s communications department.
How damning UMSL’s findings will be, and whether managers like Eby will hang on to their jobs, are open questions. In the meantime, STLPR has joined the ranks of public media organizations around the country, including bigger NPR member stations such as WAMU in Washington, where managers face accusations of botched attempts at newsroom diversity and failing to address “toxic” work environments.
“Public media has historically been a very white medium serving largely white audiences, even though it prides itself on being independent, representative, and dramatically different from traditional for-profit media,” host Tanzina Vega of “The Takeaway” said during a July episode called “Reckoning with Race in Public Media.” (The show is broadcast by STLPR on weekday mornings.)
“For people of color, and for women of color in particular, the glass ceiling is twice as thick.”
Racial bias in newsrooms “has been around for my entire career, whether it’s public media or private media,” said Linda Lockhart, who retired last year from her role as an outreach specialist and copy editor at STLPR. Lockhart’s 45-year career in journalism also includes time at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and at newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Lockhart, former national secretary for the National Association of Black Journalists and a founding member of the organization’s St. Louis chapter, told me: “For people of color, and for women of color in particular, the glass ceiling is twice as thick.”
At St. Louis Public Radio, two factors help explain what’s happening, and why it’s happening now.
The first is a generational shift in the station’s newsroom. This may be the most important force shaping STLPR’s future, and it’s not unlike the progressive forces that propelled Cori Bush to victory.
The second factor – a legacy governance structure whereby STLPR is tucked inside the folds of UMSL’s bureaucracy – may be hindering progress by failing to hold the station’s management truly accountable.
There’s a third factor as well. It’s a wild card, and it’s one public media outlets everywhere face: How can these white-dominated organizations themselves ever live up to the ideals of diversity and inclusion they routinely champion in news stories and podcasts?
The new generation
Look at the “Staff” page on STLPR’s website, and among the 27 journalists you’ll see plenty of young faces, with bios and LinkedIn profiles listing recently-minted college degrees. Lewis-Thompson is a 2015 graduate of Mizzou. Reporter Chad Davis is a 2016 graduate of Truman State. “St. Louis on the Air” producer Lara Hamdan graduated in 2017 from Webster University. The list goes on.
The presence of so many people in their 20s and early 30s reflects the natural staff turnover at any organization. But at STLPR it’s been especially pronounced in the past five years, due to the retirements of several older editors and reporters, almost all of them white. Many had joined STLPR in December 2013 when it merged with the St. Louis Beacon, an online publication run by journalists that had worked previously at the Post-Dispatch. That merger added 15 people to STLPR’s staff.
“There’s a critical mass of younger people in the newsroom now,” said Lockhart, who was one of two black journalists to join STLPR from the Beacon. “When you look at the people that are speaking out, it’s a very diverse group. White people are standing up alongside their colleagues of color. People develop relationships with other people in the newsroom, and when they see what’s happening to their friends, they can’t deny it.”
Until 2012 STLPR was an all-white newsroom. Diversity started to accelerate around the time of the Ferguson protests in 2014, but the Journalists of Color group said in its open letter that even today, “only one out of five journalists in the newsroom is a person of color.” They also noted: “Since 2013, the station has hired about 20 journalists of color to work in the newsroom and on the We Live Here podcast. More than half of them have since left the organization. We consistently have to fight our editors to get stories about race and communities of color told with nuance and accuracy.”
For this story I contacted over a dozen people connected in various ways with STLPR. Neither Lewis-Thompson nor Chen responded to interview requests. Eby referred me to his blog post, saying in an e-mail that “further comment while the university conducts an investigation would be counterproductive.”
Neuman told me she believes the generational turnover in the newsroom is “a huge factor” in the events now playing out. She said this reflects broader questions in the industry about the very nature of journalism. “I’m pretty sure there’s a sense of frustration that the white narrative is dominating things,” she said.
In at least one case, generational clashes at STLPR have resulted in abrupt changes. In March 2019 longtime “St. Louis on the Air” host Don Marsh, a presence in St. Louis media for almost 50 years, resigned suddenly. This followed objections from other staff members to remarks Marsh had made involving female visitors to the station, as well as one staff member. Fenske replaced Marsh as the show’s host a few months later.
Marsh says his wife calls what happened “a millennial ambush.” He told me he believes his age (80 at the time) was a detriment at STLPR: “Some of the younger members of the newsroom might feel they are disrespected and uncomfortable. I think I’m entitled to have those same kinds of feelings.” He added that he bears no ill will towards STLPR.
Alex Heuer, the talk show’s executive producer and Marsh’s former supervisor, told me: “I have a lot of respect for Don’s journalism experience. I always viewed his experience as an asset.”
Age differences are just one of the fault lines running through the newsroom. In the weeks leading up to her departure, Chen frequently expressed her frustration with the station on Twitter. In a June thread she tweeted: “As an Asian woman, I find myself alone a lot, at press conferences, inside my own newsroom, among my friends and the rivers in Missouri where I go paddling. I am surrounded by people who desire to be ‘woke’ but do not actually understand and often keep their distance.”
“Tim runs the show”
Eby joined STLPR as general manager in 2009, coming from public station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. He is on the NPR board of directors and served as its chair from 2004 to 2007 during a previous board term. According to his staff bio Eby and his wife Kathi live in the city’s Central West End neighborhood. His annual salary at STLPR is listed as $157,560 in the most recent public records.
“Tim runs the show,” said a longtime donor to the station, who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. “He took St. Louis Public Radio from a troubled organization to a very professional one. UMSL does not provide any [direct] financial support, and they really have kind of ignored him, because everything has appeared to operate smoothly.”
Roughly half the public radio stations around the country are operated by universities. The University of Missouri’s board of curators holds the federal broadcasting licenses for KWMU (as well as for KMST in Rolla, Mo. and WQUB in Quincy, Ill., which are part of STLPR). The curators are the only board formally empowered to govern the station.
On the UMSL organization chart, STLPR is in the University Advancement division. Headed by Eby’s boss, Vice Chancellor Paul Herring, the division also oversees UMSL’s fundraising, alumni engagement and relations with businesses and foundations. STLPR employees attend the advancement division’s quarterly staff meetings and receive the same benefits as other university employees.
Even so, a university’s core purpose is education, not public media. Neuman sums up UMSL’s relationship to STLPR this way: “They basically just let us do our thing.”
But what about times when things don’t go smoothly, such as when STLPR faces a public mutiny by some of its own journalists?
This is where STLPR is different from other donor-supported organizations such as the Nine Network of Public Media, operator of St. Louis’s public television station. (It is also STLPR’s next-door neighbor in the Grand Center arts & entertainment district.) Like other 501(c)(3) nonprofits, the Nine Network has a board of directors formally empowered to oversee the TV station’s management team.
The Friends of St. Louis Public Radio, however, are just that: friends. They write checks, help organize fundraising events, and act as public radio’s ambassadors. But they exercise no formal control.
“The board has no input in personnel or management decisions,” the longtime donor told me.
The donor said Herring, who joined UMSL in 2018 from Texas Tech University, still spends a significant amount of time in Texas and that until the past week Herring has had minimal contact with the Friends board. The donor noted that UMSL Chancellor Kristin Sobolik often shows up at fundraising events and has attended a retreat for the board. As for Herring, the donor describes things this way: “An empty chair.”
Herring did not respond to my inquiry about his involvement with STLPR. Bob Samples, Sobolik’s chief of staff, confirmed Eby’s reporting line to Herring in an e-mail. Samples did not respond to my follow-up message asking detailed questions about Herring’s interactions with STLPR, and whether UMSL’s administration had previously been aware of employee concerns about racism at the station.
“Entangled with UMSL”
Governance models for public radio stations vary. Several universities have established station oversight boards that can exercise considerable authority, according to Tom Thomas, co-CEO of the Station Resource Group, which consults with NPR member stations on priorities like strategy and operating effectiveness. (Eby sits on the SRG board.) Thomas, who grew up in the St. Louis area, is familiar with STLPR and its Friends group.
“A leading example of this approach would be the University of Pennsylvania, which has a “Policy Board” for its WXPN that includes representatives of the university trustees, administration, faculty, and students and community members,” Thomas said in an e-mail.
A more prevalent model is known as a public service operating agreement, which exists at stations including Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles and Puget Sound Public Radio in Seattle, Thomas said. Under these arrangements the university maintains its station license, but formally assigns most operating responsibilities to a separate organization.
In St. Louis, there has been no discussion about changing STLPR’s governance model. “The station is too entangled with UMSL,” the anonymous donor said. The donor credited Eby with emphasizing diversity and inclusion with the Friends board, and helping the board recruit people of color as new members.
Eby can point to a solid list of accomplishments since taking over STLPR in 2009. The merger with the Beacon vastly expanded the station’s news footprint and online audience, and was hailed at the time as a model for combining nonprofit, public-service media organizations. In a radio market where for-profit stations like Entercom Communications Corp.’s KMOX-AM dominate, STLPR claims a loyal audience of 500,000 people on air and online each month.
The station’s donor base has also grown strongly. In recent years STLPR has taken in around $5.1 million annually from individuals and foundations, and another $2 million or so from corporate sponsorships. (The University of Missouri provided “indirect” administrative support worth $1.4 million in fiscal 2019, the station’s most recent financial report shows.)
Yet even before COVID-19 arrived, budgets were squeezed. As Neuman told me, “We grew faster than the money was coming in.”
This problem, exacerbated by the economic effects of the pandemic, led to the layoffs in April that claimed Holly Edgell’s job. Her Sharing America role had originally been funded by a two-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and when Edgell joined STLPR in late 2017 Neuman had committed to keeping her on after the grant expired. Edgell, a GenXer born a couple of decades before many of her former colleagues, learned she was being let go on April 28. That same day she found out her 96-year-old father had contracted COVID-19 in his St. Louis nursing home.
A need to do more
It’s impossible to know if an empowered board of directors could have exercised the oversight needed to help STLPR do a better job addressing the concerns of its journalists. But one thing is clear: When diversity issues have come up over the years, the station’s public responses have stayed remarkably unchanged.
In 2017, as Sharing America was being launched, a critical article in the public-media trade journal Current reported on concerns about the station’s track record in training and keeping journalists of color. At that time Neuman and other staffers characterized STLPR “as a newsroom in transition.”
In 2015, in response to a question from the Columbia Journalism Review, Eby said: “There’s still more we need to be doing to increase the diversity in our staffing, sourcing and audience.”
Going back even further, Lockhart recalls stumbling across a “diversity initiative memo” from Eby in a digital folder while she was familiarizing herself with STLPR’s internal communications tools. This was shortly after the Beacon staff moved in late 2013 to STLPR’s offices.
The memo was dated October 2012. Eby had distributed it to staff after a visit to St. Louis by NPR executives including Keith Woods, who is now NPR’s chief diversity officer.
According to Lockhart, the memo contained a list of ideas for diversity initiatives. Among them: Making changes to on-air content; prioritizing diverse staffing; improving the work environment; and increasing diversity on the Friends board.
Lockhart said she was surprised not to have been told about the initiative, and that she quizzed Eby about its progress. His response was that they had done some things, but that they were “not enough.”
“If people did raise those concerns so many years ago, why do we keep saying over and over again that we need to do better?” Lockhart told me. “That’s where the disconnect is.”
Bastions of liberalism
STLPR, boasting the biggest news operation in the St. Louis area after the Post-Dispatch, is serious-minded. The station offers steady, nonpartisan election coverage. It pursues interviews with local, state and federal officeholders across the political spectrum. In 2018 it teamed with the Nine Network and the local NBC affiliate to moderate a debate between Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill and Republican challenger Josh Hawley during one of the country’s most closely-watched Senate races.
But if the station has a heart, it beats strongest when STLPR’s reporters are unearthing stories related to racial and social justice. These often echo the themes that politicians like Bush talk about.
“My personal philosophy around what we should be doing as a newsroom is to cast the broadest net possible, to include the most voices,” Neuman said. “Some of those stories would never happen if we didn’t have people of color in the newsroom.”
“There’s this notion that to be a liberal is enough. To be a good person is enough. And that we don’t have to examine our biases if we are a good person.”
Last year, for example, the station produced “#LivingFerguson,” a special featuring the voices of residents who lived through the events of 2014. The “We Live Here” podcast bills itself as a program that “keeps it real about race and class…for people somewhere on the woke spectrum.” The podcast’s co-host, Lauren Brown, recently completed an hour-long audio documentary called “Black at Mizzou” based on her experiences as a student there. And Chen’s final two stories for STLPR examined the barriers that people of color face when they try to engage with environmental groups in the St. Louis area.
The stream of these items from STLPR is constant – perhaps to the point of being relentless.
The past two weeks have shown, however, that it’s not enough.
“Public media in particular, and many news organizations like the Post-Dispatch, are considered bastions of liberal thought. I know a lot of good white people in those organizations,” Lockhart said. “But they get caught up in thinking they know what’s best for the people of color in those organizations. They say one thing, and they do another.”
Edgell put it this way: “There’s this notion that to be a liberal is enough. To be a good person is enough. And that we don’t have to examine our biases if we are a good person. That is very much the public-radio ethos. There’s lots of very nice-nice things people say, but there’s not necessarily truth-speaking until things come down to the wire.”
Like millions of others in 2020, Edgell has had a rough year. Her father, Al Edgell, lived for only one week after his COVID-19 diagnosis. He died in early May.
Fortunately, Edgell landed a job in July at WFYI Public Media in Indianapolis. Her new station allows her to work remotely from St. Louis, which is important to Edgell for family reasons.
Edgell misses STLPR. On the phone, she tells me about the help Neuman and others provided when she was searching for work. Her voice breaks as she recalls the bonds she formed in the newsroom: “I really did feel like these reporters cared about each other.”
And if Edgell were still unemployed, and St. Louis Public Radio offered her a job?
The answer comes back sharp and clear: “I’d take it.” –McP–
Editor’s note: This story was updated on Aug. 31 with additional links to external source material and minor edits to improve readability and style.
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