The challenge of oil companies as NPR sponsors

A long-standing practice in journalism is trying to avoid jarring juxtapositions between ads and news stories. For example, historically, advertisements for airlines were moved away from stories about plane crashes. At NPR, oil and gas company sponsorships are kept away from stories about climate change.

At least, they are supposed to be. Two audience members alerted us to a slip in this practice. We investigated to find out how that happened.

There's a deeper issue here about how much longer NPR and other public media will accept sponsorship money from oil companies. As the pressure increases to address the myriad threats posed by a warming planet, the number of news stories will increase as well. That raises the question of whether it will be possible or practical for NPR to keep oil