Thread by @VaporAmerican

We need to talk about @NPR for a minute. For many months we have been trying to engage with reporters and @NPRpubliceditor over a long pattern of erroneous and slanted coverage on vaping policy – and have been stonewalled.
🧵THREAD

It’s important because NPR is a top outlet, reaching millions of Americans. Listeners trust them because NPR promises high standards. It’s even one of the very few media organizations that still has an ombudsman, Kelly McBride, from the media ethics center Poynter Institute.

But NPR’s journalism on vaping has been consistently slanted and shot through with inaccuracies. It has erroneously hyped panics like EVALI, relied on discredited academics, touted hypothetical harms, all while disregarding vaping’s crucial role in helping adults quit smoking.

So when we pointed out specific reporting errors, factual omissions, and other distortions to NPR’s health reporter @AubreyNPR and were ignored, we thought we could turn to the Public Editor. Here’s the overture we made in July to Ms. McBride:

Notice that we aren’t the only ones that took issue with NPR’s errant reporting. Lots of esteemed thinkers in the vaping policy space also pointed these problems out to Ms. Aubrey. She ignored them too. Here’s a link to some:
medium.com/@theavm/critiq…

On August 2, Ms. McBride wrote us back and seemed to indicate she’d look into the matter. She had some follow-up questions that we answered in response the next day. Here’s her letter:

And here’s our response with the additional specifics she requested:

Weeks passed w nothing more from Ms. McBride. We sent follow up notes, no reply. So on September 15, we phoned. She answered but, after we identified ourselves as AVM and the purpose for the call, McBride said she had a meeting and abruptly hung up. That was the last we heard.

In the meantime, we did more research and what we discovered about back-channel funding to both NPR and Poynter Institute is deeply troubling.

Since 2015, NPR has received at least $10.6 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation specifically to cover health topics. RWJ is a longtime proponent and, as we exposed last month, a leading funder of the war on vaping.

https://twitter.com/VaporAmerican/status/1574390551570530304

RWJ is also a major investor in and closely affiliated with Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes Nicorette and other smoking cessation products that are directly threatened in the market by vaping.

NPR also receives huge funding from the Gates Foundation -- $17.5 million since 2001. In 2020 alone, NPR got $4M from Gates who, as we also catalogued, is a hardline anti-vaping campaigner. Here’s the proof:

https://twitter.com/VaporAmerican/status/1574390548898643970

Here is some of the RWJ funding documentation. None of this is ever mentioned in print or on the air when NPR does stories on vaping, not even when they quote sources like Tobacco-Free Kids that are also bankrolled by the very same donors.

That financial arrangement is ethically appalling and it’s why the highly regarded Columbia Journalism Review did a lengthy investigation into how foundations like Gates are corroding trust in journalism.
cjr.org/criticism/gate…

Incredibly, in that same article it’s revealed that Poynter Institute itself receives big bucks from the Gates Foundation. How many other outlets is Gates bankrolling? From the piece by reporter @TimothyWSchwab:

So it is little wonder that NPR’s coverage on vaping parrots the anti-vaping viewpoints of its donors. NPR routinely hypes the hysteria pumped out by the groups in that network and does zero rowback or clarification when those angles are debunked.

There also little effort at balance in NPR’s vaping coverage despite what even the New York Times conceded recently is “the mounting consensus that nicotine vaping products are useful for helping adult smokers quit.” How many such experts or vapers has NPR ever quoted? None.

That consensus was on full display at last week’s Global Tobacco & Nicotine Forum from experts galore, bipartisan and from myriad disciplines. Even FDA’s Brian King (!) said the public was being misinformed and vaping has “markedly less risk than cigarettes.” But NPR was absent.

It was a short cab ride from NPR’s office to that conference and Ms. Aubrey might have talked to hard-working Americans like @imaracingmom whose lives have been upended by prohibition policies. That’s the very heart of the issue but NPR isn’t interested.

https://twitter.com/GregTHR/status/1575198377247051776

The funding doesn’t have to be a straight quid-pro-quo. That’s because NPR already knows the agenda and what will please its funders. Here’s Poynter’s own @RickEdmonds explaining how it works in a scorching piece on bankrolled journalism:

Let’s emphasize here that Kelly McBride is among the most highly regarded journalism ethics thinkers in the country. Her specialization is accountability, transparency, and protecting the integrity of the news reporting craft. @kellymcb is a pro’s pro.

That’s why it is so perplexing that we’ve been unable to get any meaningful engagement with her on the specific flaws in NPR’s journalism. We are not asking for favored treatment, just accurate, objective, balanced coverage and an impartial assessment from the Public Editor.

If she differs with our analysis, we’d welcome those thoughts. But to simply blow it off with no explanation? It’s baffling and, sadly, consistent with what we’ve encountered at other outlets that seem untroubled by manifest factual errors and crooked journalism on vaping. /