What makes people question journalists?
Behind every NPR news story is a style guide, and a code of ethics. These tools codify an ever-growing list of standards meant to steer a journalist's choices toward clarity and fairness.
Today, we respond to two audience members who detected a lack of consistency in NPR's work. In the first, a reader noticed the term "fetal heartbeat" in a story about women crossing from Texas into Mexico to obtain abortion pills. While that term is often in the news, because it's associated with state laws, it is also misleading. And NPR has issued guidance to its journalists about how and when to use those words. That guidance was not followed in this story, and we contacted the reporter to find out why.
A Twitter user pointed out a different type of inconsistency in posts from the NPR Politics account. A tweet from this month about former Vice President Mike Pence referred to him as "Vice President Pence." A tweet from late last year about
