Every once in a blue moon a miracle happens in this world that just cannot be ignored. When it happens, you must shout it from the rooftops and draw as much attention to it as possible. Which is why when government funded National Public Radio, which is liberal to the core, actually issued an apology to conservative journalist Rich Lowry I just knew it needed to be written about. So here we are.
According to NPR, an audience member wrote in to the publication and raised a stink about a digital story that took a look at whether or not a conservative magazine editor had used a “racial slur,” which this day and age could really be just about anything. Many individuals watched the tape and said no slur was used. It was just a verbal mess up and nothing more.
But that didn’t stop a reporter from the publication from taking on the story. According to Kelly McBride, the first version of the article was, by their own admission, not fair to National Review editor Rich Lowry, who did not use a racial slur. Editors for NPR, says McBride, recognized this and a few hours later they made some serious edits to the content in order for it to be more accurate to what actually happened.
” We were interested in how this happened and especially why there is no note of clarification on the story to signal that it was significantly revised. So we talked to the reporter who wrote the story, their editor, the standards editor and NPR’s media correspondent. Read on for NPR’s explanation and our analysis,” McBride noted.
Here’s the back story: National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry appeared on the Sept. 15 episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, which airs on SiriusXM, and streams on YouTube and as a podcast. As the editor of the conservative publication, Lowry is a frequent guest on the show. Kelly asked Lowry to analyze the media coverage of JD Vance’s false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. In responding, Lowry verbally stumbled between two words, “migrants” and “immigrants” and it sounded to some viewers like he called Haitians the N-word. The video clip swept through X, with accusations that he indeed said the N-word. Other news outlets ran with the story.
Two days later, NPR ran a story, recapping the accusations that Lowry used the racial slur. The story included an embedded tweet from Madeline Peltz, deputy director of rapid response at the liberal group Media Matters, suggesting that Lowry uttered a slur. It also included a tweet from Lowry explaining what happened, and a tweet from National Review contributing editor Andy McCarthy calling the verbal stumble a mispronunciation. Hearing the clip of Lowry speaking, it’s easy to see why people did a double-take. But we replayed it many times and heard what others eventually concluded: that Lowry bungled “migrants” and “immigrants” together. In fact, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik tweeted out exactly that conclusion two and half hours before the NPR story was published, although his colleague who wrote the story did not see it.
NPR then reveals that Vice President and Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez explained that reporter C. Mandler pitched the idea of doing the story after seeing some discussion about what happened on social media.
“This was a moment that was garnering intense audience focus on social media,” Rodriguez went on to say in an email. “The purpose of this story was to respond to that audience interest with the relevant facts and context for them to better understand it.”
However, Folkenflik stated that he didn’t believe there was a story there.
“I think people should be dinged for and reported on what they actually do,” Folkenflik remarked.
The original headline read: “Conservative editor-in-chief appears to use racial slur to refer to Haitian migrants.”
Later on, editors changed it to the following: “Conservative editor-in-chief says mispronunciation led to accusations of using slur.”
One of the big problems from NPR was that they did not provide a note expressing that changes had been made to the content. And it should be noted that what NPR’s reporter did was not simply “unfair.” It wasn’t accurate. What they claimed happened did not happen.
Second, after recognizing that the story was wrong, NPR should have acknowledged the changes to both the headline and the body of the story with a formal note of clarification. Because readers were much more likely to come away from the original story with the belief that Lowry actually said the racial slur, a clarification note would be a public acknowledgment that the first story fell short. Lowry himself wrote a column for National Review about the fallout he experienced due to the accusations, including the cancellation of two scheduled speaking engagements.
“Everyone in my business takes lumps for things they say. That comes with the territory,” the column kicks off. “What’s different is getting smeared for something you verifiably didn’t say.”
Lowry mentioned NPR’s story in the column, noting the headline change. We reached out to him, and he told us that the initial headline was “grossly unfair and misleading,” but said he was gratified that it was changed to something more accurate. “It was also good that the comment from your media reporter was added, concluding I didn’t say it,” Lowry said in an email. “But covering this internet nothing-story should have been beneath NPR to begin with.”
At the end of the day, NPR should be ashamed of themselves for what they allowed to be published. No story should have ever been pursued. The apology was nice and all, but it should never happened in the first place. This was a journalist wanting to push an agenda. But that probably won’t be addressed.
"*" indicates required fields
