The Scoop
National Public Radio dissuaded one of its most visible gay employees from attending a corporate LGBTQ Pride event, as the Trump administration and congressional Republicans put pressure on the public broadcaster.
“The guidance in our ethics handbook is to ‘avoid appearances at private industry or corporate functions,’” the organization’s managing editor for standards and practices, Tony Cavin, wrote to longtime anchor Ari Shapiro on Wednesday in an email, which was apparently sent by accident to many other NPR journalists.
“Because this is a closed corporate event I think it would be best to politely decline,” Cavin wrote, according to a copy of the email exchange seen by Semafor.
The All Things Considered host replied several minutes later asking Cavin why he had previously approved appearances at similar events.
“Every year I’ve spoken at corporate pride events and you’ve personally signed off on them. It has never been an issue before,” he said. “I’m curious what’s changed.”
(Shapiro also noted that Cavin had “mistakenly replied to newsdesk and international editors” so the message “went to pretty much everyone in the newsroom.”)
Later on Wednesday, after Semafor reported on Cavin’s emails with Shapiro, an NPR spokesperson said the news outlet would let Shapiro attend the event after all.
“This decision was made shortly after the original email thread,” the spokesperson said.
Shapiro has navigated how his identity impacts his job at the organization before. The host wrote in 2023 that when then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was briefly issuing same-sex marriage licenses in 2004, he asked his boss whether getting married to his partner would be a violation of NPR’s guidelines, which prohibited the organization’s journalists from participating in political acts (Shapiro said his boss told him “of course” he could get married).
Know More
As Semafor first reported last year, NPR and its member stations have become targets of an increasingly intense Republican funding squeeze, and now find themselves at the center of the new administration’s attempts to put federal pressure on media organizations it sees as ideologically opposed to its agenda.
The organization has attempted to make moves on the margins to placate the Trump White House and congressional Republicans, who want to strip federal funding from NPR, PBS, and their various member stations.
In an interview at Semafor’s summit in Washington last month, NPR CEO Katherine Maher acknowledged that the organization would not be hiring anyone to replace its outgoing head of diversity equity and inclusion. The organization has also said that it is cooperating with a recent inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission into whether it and its member stations have violated regulations in its sponsorship practices.
But some member stations believe the key to their survival is distancing themselves from NPR’s national brand. Last week, leaders of South Carolina Public Radio announced that they want to unwind their membership from NPR and focus resources on locally produced content, rather than paying to air NPR national shows.
During her interview with Semafor, Maher noted that NPR’s network of local stations offer a broad range of programming and local news, and said she did not mind if NPR member stations did not want to be closely associated with the national brand. “Many of these stations have their local identities,” Maher said. “They mean something. Texas Public Radio in San Antonio is always going to be Texas Public Radio, and that is great.”