Don’t bother telling Vivian Schiller, the president and chief executive of NPR, that the media entity has a liberal bias — or any kind political beliefs. She has heard the argument before.
“No, we don’t have a particular political persuasion,” Schiller said during a recent episode of “Media Matters with Jon Friedman” on The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
Jon Friedman at wsj.com's Speakeasy Media blog suggested that a lot of people would disagree with her assertion.
“That’s absolutely true, and I get many, many letters and I get many emails a week from the left and the right accusing us of bias in the opposite direction,” Schiller said. “It speaks to the popularity of media that takes a particular point of view…and we don’t do that, and that upsets some people and that’s fine. They don’t have to listen if they don’t want to.”
Schiller has more pressing issues at hand. She is pleased with NPR’s growth rate and intends to keep the pressure on. “Just under 34-million people tune into their local NPR member station every week,” she said. “In the last 10 years, public-radio listening has grown 60% while, unfortunately, many other news media have declined (by) double digits. We have incredible engagement.”
Schiller noted that its devotees tend to listen to NPR an average of six hours a week.
NPR has ambitious growth objectives. Schiller expects to have at least 50 million listeners a week by 2020.
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