Tensions Build In NPR Newsroom

NPR’s employees unleashed their fury at the organization’s top executive on Friday over his handling of a sexual harassment scandal that appears to have spread, reports The Washington Post.

At a packed staff meeting at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, they criticized chief executive Jarl Mohn, who kept top editor Michael Oreskes on the job for months despite knowing about three harassment complaints against Oreskes.

Jarl Mohn

Mohn forced Oreskes to resign this week after The Washington Post reported on the accusations that date back to the editor’s tenure at the New York Times in the late 1990s.

Since then, the scandal appears to have metastasized. Five women at NPR have filed formal harassment complaints against Oreskes, bringing the number who have accused him of misconduct to eight, according to Mohn and people familiar with the allegations. The new claims cover Oreskes’s tenure at NPR over the past three years.

Mohn has repeatedly admitted since the story broke on Tuesday that his response to earlier allegations about Oreskes was inadequate. During Friday’s meeting, he was on the defensive as employees took turns blistering him for moving too slowly to address what appears to have been a widely discussed problem within the organization’s newsroom. The speakers included some of NPR’s most renowned and veteran journalists, including Susan Stamberg, Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg.

Michael Oreskes

According to attendees, Mohn said he and the network's chief counsel, Jonathan Hart, sat down with Oreskes last month to discuss the two older allegations from his tenure at The New York Times. Because many of the internal warnings centered around rumor, rather than specific incidents, NPR's leadership did not feel it could act more severely, Mohn said. It had no concrete proof he had overstepped the boundaries articulated after the rebuke stemming from the internal complaint filed in October 2015.

In that way, Mohn said, he hewed too closely to legal guidelines and did not adequately take into account the human repercussions.

"Our intention was honorable," Mohn said. "The execution was poor. It didn't work."

According to an NPR story, Mohn pledged to work to rebuild the trust of his employees, and asked for their aid in repairing its culture.