This week’s episode started with a Twitter quarrel between Jeff Jarvis, a media critic, and David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, over whether Kamala Harris should face the institutional press. Jeff had said, “Happy to discuss in substance”, which I invited them both to do — in front of microphones of course.

In the episode, we focus on one thread of their conversation: the coverage of Springfield, Ohio, this election cycle. But Jeff and David covered much other ground — the recent presidential debates; the breakdown of mass media; what David learned the time he reviewed every interview given by one presidential candidate; the thing Jeff is most ashamed of from his time as a reporter in Chicago.

I felt like I was a fly on the wall for two very smart people who care a ton about journalism but don’t agree on what’s best for it. 

Check out the whole unedited conversation here:

The name of this episode is “When To Call A Thing What It Is”. In the course of making it, I learned some interesting backstory about NPR’s internal debates over a single word. The word “lie”. In the episode, David brought up the time, in 2018, when he produced a column about then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen denying that the Trump administration had a policy of separating children from their families at the border. David said he wasn’t positive from memory, but believed he was the first NPR journalist to say on NPR’s air that the Trump administration had lied. 

DAVID: …I was, I believe, the first on the air to call…to say the Trump administration had lied.

BRIAN: Really? You were the first one?

DAVID: I think so.

At the time, NPR had a policy not to use the words “lie” or “liar”. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly — after being criticized for being too soft on her characterization of one of Donald Trump’s statements — explained on air, “So this has prompted me to go actually look up the word lie in the Oxford English Dictionary. And here's the definition. I'll read it — (reading) a false statement made with intent to deceive. Intent being the key word there — without the ability to peer into Donald Trump's head, I can't tell you what his intent was.”

She was joined on the radio explaining this reasoning by the senior vice president who was in charge of news at NPR at the time, Michael Oreskes, who added: “To me, there's a second reason — and maybe more important. Our job as journalists is to report — to find facts, establish their authenticity, and share them with everybody. And I think that when you use words like lie, it gets in the way of that….I think the minute you start branding things with a word like lie, you push people away from you.”

So that was the policy when David set out to say this about Kirstjen Nielsen, on NPR: “Call it a deception, an evasion, a technical nicety. NPR will not call it a lie because it cannot gauge Nielsen's intent. I don't speak for the network. I'd say the word lie fits.”

This week, my team set out to confirm that David’s choosing to use the word lie, on air, was indeed the first time an NPR journalist stated on air that the Trump administration had lied, and in doing so, we ended up down our own funny little rabbit hole of truth. Which I will now happily escort you down because it’s interesting!

Our fact-checker asked NPR’s communications department if they could search transcripts to make sure we were characterizing this correctly. A representative responded and said: 

“Looking through transcripts from that time (npr broadcast and podcasts) we were able to find instances in which an npr journalist or host called out what appeared to be specific lies by Donald Trump. However the spirit of what David is saying is somewhat true but perhaps not literally?”

Somewhat true but maybe not literally? We followed up; the comms department shared this example, in 2017, of Lulu Garcia-Navarro responding to a statement about the crowd size for Trump’s inauguration:

SEAN SPICER (WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY): This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: We should say here, Mara, that was a lie essentially. President Trump's first full day in office, he made an important stop to the CIA. Tell us why he went and what he did there.

Here, Lulu Garcia-Navarro did refer to the statement by the then-White House Press Secretary as a “lie essentially”. But it was a more passing thing, in the midst of a host interview. Is that the literal calling out of a lie, if you qualify it with a word like “essentially”?

What’s clear is that David’s 2018 column was a really big deal inside the NPR newsroom. David told me: “It spurred an intense debate at the highest levels of the news division for 48 hours." 

My sense, from talking to people at NPR, is that David’s was probably the first produced, reported segment to come out and declare that the Trump administration was lying. From David:

It’s worth remembering it was at a different time in the press’s understanding of what it took to cover President Trump. Our acting news chief, Chris Turpin, and others such as our then standards chief, Mark Memmott, wanted to make sure we had constructed an iron-clad case before we broadcast and published anything so clear. I know a few of my colleagues who covered politics took issue with it.

I felt then, as did my editors, and still feel now, that we had constructed the story clearly and convincingly on the basis of publicly available evidence. 

You can see some of the misgivings of others surface in the way I ended up drafting the story – I explicitly state that I’m speaking on authority in my role as NPR’s media critic, not on behalf of the network, and my sign off is a bit different, without the “NPR NEWS” at the end – as though I’m an outside contributor.

All of that said, the network’s news leadership gave me close to four minutes on one of our marquee shows, All Things Considered, and featured the story prominently on the home page and in social media – so that’s it’s own vote of support.

As Chris later told me, the story proved to have been right at the time, and also right to do. It very much became part of the public discourse. The delay of a few days ultimately didn’t matter. And I’m proud NPR broadcast and published it.

Last thing this week: in addition to pointing you to the Haitian Times, I want to share this other coverage I thought was excellent of the Springfield, Ohio, episode, from Jason Koebler at 404 Media, who FOIA’d for emails from the Springfield government. We quote from some of the emails in our episode.

Brian