We received a rather bland and, if I’m not 100% mistaken, somewhat cutting response from NPR. I expected soemthing with a little more substance than this from the nation’s leading non-commercial news agency.

We’ll put together a follow-up. This response is not adequate.

Dear Sean,

Thank you for contacting NPR’s Office of the Ombudsman.

We appreciate your thoughts regarding NPR’s news coverage and, according to you, its inability to match the content quality of other news outlets.

Making decisions about covering the events that impact our everyday lives is never easy. We make every attempt to ensure that the segments and stories you hear on NPR programming, and the attention devoted to them, are valid and appropriate.

We welcome praise, as well as criticism, and your thoughts will be taken into consideration.

Thanks again for writing in, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.

Sincerely,

Chantal de la Rionda
Assistant to the Ombudsman
National Public Radio
635 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20001

Investigation Central is an extension of Fearless News (http://www.fearlessnews.com).

Since NPR is a non-commercial producer we expect very clean and unbiased news from them. NPR also conveys a positive image, encouraging community and global involvement. Why is it then, that NPR fails to maintain news at the high quality level of certain other producers, such as BBC and Deutsche Welle. We launched this investigation to find out.

Our message to NPR

Dear NPR,

From ‘Science Friday’ to ‘All Things Considered’ I’ve enjoyed your broadcasts for many years. This is why I made certain to include a stream of NPR headlines when recently building an online news-discussion community.

At our community site we rank news agencies based on content quality. This ranking system is relatively sophisticated and includes input from staff, the site’s community, and an artificial intelligence algorithm (used for basic sorting).

I expected NPR to exemplify quality coverage. Yet to this point NPR has remained among the middle of the pack. While NPR content sits above sources such as CNN, France 24, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and so on; it’s content quality is rated below a handful of other agencies (BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc); a fact that hasn’t escaped our visitors. Many readers have expressed frustration over the degree of damaging or otherwise negative headlines NPR has produced.

On the whole the community has declared nearly 50% of NPR content unacceptable.

As a huge fan of NPR, and a devout Science Friday listener I’ve made donations to your agency on several occasions. I ask that you please consider my following request.

Answer this single question which might afford me enough information to successfully respond to the concerns of our community members regarding NPR, I would very much enjoy a response.

The question: Why is it that NPR is not able to match the content quality of BBC, Deutsche Welle, and various other providers?

I want to thank you for being the best American news source we rate.
If you wish to see which of your headlines have been given the thumbs down in our community, we offer full disclosure of this and any other information used in ranking agencies at the web address below.

Fearless News
http://www.fearlessnews.com