The following is an email I sent to NPR regarding their Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen’s response to their reporting of the AP’s claim that Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination before the primaries took place on Tuesday, June 7, 2016. It is presented here, warts and all, as originally sent.
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This email is long (thus, I apologize for any typos I may have missed). I ask that you take the time to read what I’ve written because I want your reporting to be excellent. Here, I attempt to provide an in depth analysis of the ombudsman’s reponse to criticism regarding the AP and, subsequently, NPR reports saying that Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination before the primaries on 6-7-2016 had taken place.
I was one of many, many people that emailed a complaint to NPR regarding this irresponsible report. To be clear, I have never publicly stated, nor did I state in my complaint, that I was a Sanders supporter. I will not say whom I support now. While it can be safely assumed that most of the complaints you received, both via email and social media, were from Sanders supporters, I sent my complaint in from a neutral point of view, criticizing the lack of discrimination on both the AP’s and NPR’s part. And I send the criticism below with the same neutrality.
1. Trump was called the presumptive nominee before he gained the required number of delegates, but all Republican candidates had dropped out/suspended their campaigns. Comparing the labeling of Trump as presumptive nominee to calling Clinton the presumptive nominee is a false analogy. The circumstances are different. With no one left to run against Trump, calling him the presumptive nominee made much more sense as it was highly unlikely that Trump would lose to non-existant opponents. Yes, voters could still vote for another candidate, but without an opposing campaign, those opponents were removed from the public eye and all attention would be focused on Trump. This was a different circumstance than the Clinton/Sanders race: the AP and NPR reports were released before the 6-7-2016 primaries, and before the superdelegate vote in July, while both candidates were still in the race.
2. NPR and the AP have claimed they were calling Clinton the “presumptive” nominee… except in many of the headlines. With words like “clinch”, phrases like, “clinches the nomination”, and headlines such as, “How Hillary Clinton Locked Up The Democratic Nomination In 10 Steps”, “Clinton Has Enough Delegates To Claim Democratic Nomination”, and “AP count: Clinton has delegates to win Democratic nomination” – all released before the 6-7-2016 primaries – you can see how the public would come to a hasty conclusion regarding reports made by NPR and the AP. Mass communication models show that it is exponentially difficult to create a clear message as the number of recipients of said message grows. In this case, no effort was made to put the count of delegates, super or otherwise, in context so that the message to the masses was as clear as possible. A more proper headline would have been: “Current Count of Superdelegates Show Clinton Likely To Win Democratic Nomination.” A little longer, yes, but since the written reports are disseminated largely over the web (namely in NPR’s case), you shouldn’t have space restrictions.
Does your policy dictate a maximum headline length? Then try: “Clinton Likely to Win Democratic Nomination, Pending Tuesday Results”; “Clinton Leads In Superdelegates, May Win Democratic Nomination”; “Clinton Has Majority of Superdelegate Support. May Win Nomination”.
3. The phrase “presumptive nominee” was not used when I first heard the on-air report during Morning Edition (unfortunately, I cannot recall if it was 6-6 or 6-7-2016, and I cannot find the report online at this time). On 6-7-2016, on my way home, I listened to the 5:00 PM programming covering the primaries on 6-7-2016 until at least 5:30 PM. The first mention of the Clinton’s “clinch” left out the word “presumptive”; all phrasing indicated that she had won, and the results of the primaries weren’t in yet. As I didn’t get to listen to the primary coverage past 5:30 PM, nor did I get to listen to NPR after 8:30 AM that same day, I will assume that your on-air reporters did use the phrase at least once throughout the day’s reporting, given that much criticism about the report was abound and “presumptive” would have been the correct label. If the proper label was used at some point during the day’s reporting, I conclude that the on-air reporting was inconsistent. While there is always room for human error, consistency in reporting is essential, especially in radio reporting where listeners are probably not listening all day and are catching reports here and there during different times of the day.
4. Delegates and superdelegates are the not the same. Unless the numbers are wrong, which I just looked up on your website, Clinton didn’t have enough delegates to win before the 6-7-2016 primaries, but she was in the lead. She did have enough superdelegate support to win, so to use “delegates” in place of “superdelegates” is confusing, especially since the election process, with the use of delegates and superdelegates, can already be confusing to the general public. The headlines I have seen, including yours, use the word “delegates”. This is false. The AP was reporting on their survey of superdelegates.
5. Timing: Just because a story comes out, it doesn’t mean you have to report it if the timing is bad. As stated in the response: “I think the AP’s count was unfortunate timing, coming just ahead of the Tuesday contests, given that a number of analysts, including commentator Cokie Roberts, worried that it would affect turnout.” If the timing was bad, NPR could have chosen to refrain from reporting it, until after the primaries, or at the very least found a way to report it more accurately and neutrally. NPR did not have to mimic the AP’s messaging. Furthermore, the potential to affect turnout wasn’t the only consideration. Potential to affect votes should have been another. While there may be no evidence that the reports affected either, the concern is that there was the potential to do so. NPR had a choice: to err on the side of fairness and caution, or to simply go along with the report. No data was provided as to what might result from either action, so NPR needed to take its own assumptions into account. NPR decided to not only go along with the report, but to also report without refining the rhetoric of the headlines and overall messaging.
6. “Voters in six states are heading to the polls today even though the Associated Press announced last night that Hillary Clinton has obtained the delegate commitment she needs to clinch the Democratic nomination.” Listener Cheryl McDonald pointed out that it dismissed the other issues in the election. You’ve already admitted that this messaging could have been made better. My question is: why would you also not consider that the rhetoric used in your headlines and on-air reporting regarding Clinton’s “clinch” to be just as important?
With social media, your headlines are more important than ever. People do not take as much time to sit down and “read the paper” anymore. The Internet encourages fast, fleeting usage. Headlines are very, very brief summaries of the article. And while I admit that this is truly unfortunate, because it means people, in general, are not as interested in details as they should be. The reality is that, because of the aforementioned mass communication model, NPR and all other responsible news outlets need to think very hard about every single word, every single phrase, and every single sentence that gets written and posted online. You cannot force users to read your full articles. You cannot control their behavior. What you can control is your messaging and the likelihood of your messaging’s influence on users as per their behavior.
As far as radio reporting goes, your writers, hosts, and producers need to make doubly sure that the reporting is consistent. If “presumptive nominee” is what Clinton was to be labeled as, then phrases such as, “Hillary Clinton has clinched the Democratic nomination”, should not be uttered on air. It is inaccurate. It is irresponsible, and it is inconsistent with your written articles and any time “presumptive nominee” is used on-air. The same goes with the use of the terms “delegates” and “superdelegates”. News outlets such as NPR and the AP have a great deal of power because you deal in information. Be responsible with that power.
It is not my call whether or not you should report something, obviously. Your job is to decide what to report, when to report it, and how to report it. If NPR thought it had good reason to report the AP superdelegate survey, that is NPR’s prerogative. My complaint is about the bad timing and the bad rhetoric. I look to NPR for as neutral reporting as possible, no matter if I find the report upsetting or not. This is not what happened here, and that is why I felt the need to criticize – not because Hillary Clinton was named the presumptive nominee, but because of how you did it.
Phillip Ginn