Reviewing NPR's Expanding Coverage Of Native American Communities

Late last year, many listeners and readers rightly objected when NPR released statistics tracking the diversity of its on-air sources and didn't include a category for Native or Indigenous sources, because the numbers were so low.

As Keith Woods, now NPR's chief diversity officer, acknowledged at the time, the figures should have been included anyway. He said that among the five radio shows whose 2018 sources were tracked (using sample weeks), "Native sources were 1% or below on all but Weekend All Things Considered, where 3% of sources were Native American."

The questions raised by the controversy prompted us to go back and look a bit deeper at NPR's coverage of Native issues, including the number of stories in recent years and how NPR did on some "best practices" metrics. These include quoting Native sources when reporting on Native issues. (That's a best practice for all reporting; reporters should make every effort to have people who are involved in or affected by issues speak for themselves, rather than talk them or quote others talking about them.) Another metric we looked at is how often Native sources were identified by their specific tribal identification, following the Associated Press Stylebook guidance. The Native American Journalists Association.