Air mail: NPR sees "community" in letters from listeners.

[RQ.sub.2]: What are the goals NPR producers have for the letters segments? All three noted that their staffs find letters useful. One producer noted that the mail is "a method of evaluating listener response to the program." Another stated: "We often talk about comments during editorial meetings, and when we get a flood of mail criticizing the balance or approach to a particular story--particularly a political one--we sometimes tailor upcoming coverage or story assignments accordingly." The third stated:

Informally, we will sometimes judge a segment as successful if it

receives a large number of complimentary e-mails. Of course, the

opposite is true.... And we are all aware that the amount of mail

that comes in does not necessarily reflect the opinion of all our

listeners.

The themes of "including" and "connecting" were repeated often by the producers, in both the questionnaires and the telephone interviews, and without any prompting. One producer stated: "Radio is an intimate medium, and many listeners feel a personal bond with a show or its host ... airing their letters is a way to strengthen that bond." Another responded:

Broadcasting these e-mails on a regular basis is one of the most

important dialogues we can have with our listeners. It is, quite

literally, the "public" in public radio. When people write, it

means we have reached them in one way or another, and that is

important to me and to the show.

The third offered: "It lets listeners know we're listening to them, not just broadcasting at them.... It keeps us honest." That producer added:

In every producer's mind, there's an "idealized" listener who may

or may not reflect the real people who hear their work. Keeping

tabs on the listener mail reminds me I'm not producing this show

for myself or people "like" me. Listener comments are a constant

reality check, which I believe helps me do my job.

Stated another: "Listeners get a sense that in addition to them listening to us, we listen to them." That producer gave an example: When a popular host of one show was reassigned (and, in short order, resigned from NPR), "We were 'blizzarded' with very emotional responses, and we had a mass mailing of comments about what had happened." The producers noted other instances that attracted considerable e-mail--specifically the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, and the explosion of the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003. "When that happens, I really think, 'Y'know, I'm proud of this place,'" one noted, adding, "It just shows that NPR is a part of people's lives, and that's really great." Another producer volunteered, "Making our listeners feel part of a community is perhaps the greatest benefit of airing comments" (emphasis added).

Overall, this part of the study suggests two general findings. First, consistent with findings of past gatekeeping studies, the process of selecting and editing letters is one in which the producers apply their own journalistic principles (here "balance," "accountability," and "accuracy") to the process of "making" the letters segments. Second, the producers' statements about the goals for the segments clearly (and, sometimes, literally) suggest that the producers want the segments to facilitate the community of NPR listeners by "including" them, via their letters, in both behind-the-scenes and on-air aspects of the news-making process. Thus imagining community is not just a goal, but a deliberate process used by these producers. And in that process, the producers largely rely on their own professional values and preferences as they "create" an image of that community, rather than truly attempting to understand the values and preferences of that community.

On its own, however, the above analysis can only present the procedures and goals NPR producers apply to their on-air letters segments. The next part of the study explores the extent to which those procedures and goals become evident in the content of the segments that get aired.

Textual Analysis

The analysis began with a tabulation (from transcripts obtained via LexisNexis) of the letters and segments for each show in 2003. In that year, the three news programs presented 542 letters, with a median of four letters per segment. The hosts made 233 announcements that "multiple writers" had responded, with a median of two such references per segment. Letters addressed 376 discrete topics (median of three topics per segment). Of the total letters, 104 agreed with comments made during the reports, 191 disagreed, and 231 added information that could not be classified as agreeing or disagreeing. Regarding NPR itself, 101 letters praised NPR and 133 criticized NPR. Seventy-eight letters offered corrections or clarifications to information in reports. In four letters segments, the announcers did not read or identify any individual letters, but only issued corrections attributed to "many listeners." Twenty people were allowed to read their own letters on the air.

Table 1 compares frequencies (and means) across the three shows in regard to the concepts of "balance," "accountability," and "accuracy." The data show considerable differences among the three programs, supporting the idea that there is an idiosyncratic nature to letters selection even within a single news operation such as NPR.

The dominance of "disagree" letters (n = 191) over "agree" letters (n = 104) suggests that the NPR producers might have applied their value of "balance" as providing more time for negative comments about news reports than for positive comments, although the largest group of letters (n = 231) simply added information in the form of personal observations or historical perspectives from listeners. Likewise, the dominance of "bad NPR" letters (n = 133) over "good NPR" letters (n = 101) suggests that NPR producers might express "accountability" by providing more opportunities for comment to NPR's critics than to NPR's supporters. "Accuracy" was represented in the 78 individual letters of correction, as well as in the four segments devoted entirely to corrections attributed only to "many listeners."

In response to [RQ.sub.3], the above first-level analysis shows that all three programs had letters segments that were constructed to strongly reflect the producers' own values for accountability, balance, and accuracy, even though those values were expressed somewhat differently by each producer. Much like White (1950) found with his study of "Mr. Gates," the selection of letters for NPR's news programs was perhaps more a reflection of the values of the individual gatekeepers at each show than on the values of NPR as a whole.

In response to [RQ.sub.4] (use of inclusive language), the three NPR programs regularly used "multiple writer" statements to indicate that they received more letters than they could acknowledge on the air (n = 233, with a mean of 2.04 such references per segment). (It should be noted that a relatively small number of letters (n = 20) were read on-air by the individual writers themselves, and such a presentation could be viewed as highly inclusive.) But in terms of "multiple writer" statements, the largest category (69%) was "low inclusiveness" statements, mostly third-person (n = 104, or 45%, were akin to "Many listeners wrote ... ") and "non-personal" (n = 56, or 24%, were akin to "We received many letters regarding ... ") The remainder represented highly inclusive language: 46 (20%) were generic second-person ("Many of you wrote regarding ..."); and 27 (11%) were representative second-person ("John Smith wrote for many of you, stating ...").

Because the largest group of "multiple writer" statements were third-person, and the second largest group were non-personal, one might argue that when constructing these segments, NPR's producers were more prone to use out-group rhetoric toward listeners than in-group rhetoric (i.e., "we" the journalists are getting feedback from "them" the listeners), perhaps contradicting their stated goals of using the letters segments to, in the words of one producer, include "the public in public radio." This finding could be explained by the commonly understood divisions that exist between large media organizations and their audiences.

This study stopped short of a more in-depth study of the rhetoric of the individual letters that were selected to be on air to assess other "values" identified by the producers, such as the quality of the writing or the tone of comments (i.e., some letters were presented as "humorous" or "hostile" or "somber"). Such an inquiry would be worthwhile for future research, but is beyond the intended goals of this study.

Discussion