CapRadio Joins PM4A
Jun Reina, General Manager of CapRadio in Sacramento, California, offered the following about why they decided to commit to participating.
“At CapRadio, we aspire to be an organization that honors, respects and elevates different perspectives, backgrounds and cultures — both internally and externally. We recognize the negative effects caused by white-dominated culture in public media, as well as our own organization, and we are fully committed to taking the necessary actions to address diversity, equity and inclusion.”
WUKY Joins PM4A
Tom Godell, General Manager of WUKY in Lexington, Kentucky, offered the following about why they decided to commit to participating.
“Fifty years ago, in NPR's initial mission statement, Bill Siemering wrote, "...it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied..."
As a society -- and as public broadcasters -- we have yet to fully achieve these lofty goals. Public Media for All provides stations like WUKY with a path forward at a critical time in our nation's and our industry's history. WUKY is proud to join PM4A and make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of the fabric of our daily work as broadcasters.”
“Woke Washing” Won’t Save You
The Public Media industry, and much of corporate America, are figuring out their next moves to meet the cultural reckoning taking place in our country. More and more, words and phrases like decolonize, dismantle, white supremacy culture, microaggressions, and systemic/systematic oppression/racism are emphatically leaving the lips of white executives, the same terms that activists’ have coined and penned in playbooks after decades of doing the work to get us to today.
Meanwhile, Black, Indigenous, Latino, and BIPOC-identifying employees are cautiously optimistic and taking note of the hypocrisy taking place in their organizations. Requests for equitable pay and promotions made by employees of historically oppressed groups continue to get denied all while their organization’s communications team fine-tunes language on being an “anti-racist” organization. If your organization fits this description, you are “woke washing”, as described in this Harvard Business Review article. On the surface, to other white people, especially, it may appear you’re taking anti-racism efforts seriously. However, your Black, Indigenous, and Latino employees, members and audiences, will eventually see through these efforts, doing potentially more harm than good.
To avoid this, here are the steps equity and inclusion practitioners Erin Dowell and Marlette Jackson recommend organizations take to avoid being labeled as “woke washed,” and make transformational long-lasting changes:
Develop a Data-Driven Plan. Data is necessary for organizations to stay accountable to the goals they have developed, especially goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Organizations should work to develop a plan that takes this path:
Transparency → Justification → Compliance → Enforcement
The results should lead to two invaluable outcomes, “a data-driven progress report detailing its path toward social justice and a trust-driven employee culture of inclusion.”Leaders Must Buy-in. GMs and C-Suites have the power to enact organizational-wide changes and must be willing to look at every single aspect of operations and challenge policies and practices that hamper equity and inclusion. Do not wait until your next strategic planning cycle to start planning these changes; make them NOW.
Employees Need to Be Empowered. We’ve all heard that phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” To avoid this, employees need to be encouraged to dispute status-quo practices in a non-retaliatory environment. Develop a culture that promotes psychological safety for BIPOC employees and regularly addresses and emulates active allyship from white leaders and staff.
More guidance can be found in “Woke-Washing” Your Company Won’t Cut It. You can begin this transformation at your station or organization today by taking our pledge at Public Media For All.
KCUR and Classical KC Sign Up to Participate
Interim General Manager, Sarah Morris offered the following statement to explain why KCUR and Classical KC decided to sign up to participate with Public Media For All:
“As an organization sitting in the geographic center of the country, we have long wrestled with how to best go about our DEI work and have made great progress in 2020. We have broad agreement that diversity is a strategic imperative for public media (and society) to thrive, but the real work is in our actions and our long-term commitment of resources to this work. KCUR and Classical KC are proud to be among the first stations to join Public Media for All.”
Read KCUR and Classical KC’s full diversity policy on the Governance page of their website.
As the flagship NPR station in their region, KCUR-FM serves the greater Kansas City metro area with news, talk and music programming on air and online. In June 2020, they launched a new service, 91.9 Classical KC, so that Kansas City would once again have a full-time radio station devoted to the joy, the respite and the place of discovery that is classical music.
Public Media For All is thrilled to see stations of all sizes, markets and formats signing up to participate. It’s essential that our work reflect the full range of stations and services within our industry.
OPB Signs Up To Participate
We are pleased to announce that OPB has joined the Public Media for All initiative as a participating organization, becoming part of an effort to raise awareness of the negative impacts of the lack of diversity, equity and inclusion in public media while also sharing solutions among organizations and individuals. OPB is one of the first public media stations to join this initiative along with other industry organizations, including Greater Public, Public Media Women in Leadership, and AIR.
Steve Bass, CEO, offered the following comment when we asked why OPB decided to join us.
“I hope that our involvement will encourage other public media organizations to join Public Media for All. ‘Public’ is part of our name and it means more than free and equal access to radio and television signals across the Northwest’s landscape. ‘Public’ requires amplifying unique voices and experiences, helping people in the Northwest and beyond hear and understand the perspective and experiences of others and truthfully covering Oregon’s history of systemic racism, which is very much out in the open (but some pretend does not exist). An organizational culture that values diversity and centers equity and inclusion will help OPB live up to its promise.”
OPB began its DEI work two years ago. Among the actions they have taken to date that align with Public Media for All:
Hiring the Center for Equity and Inclusion (a Portland-based DEI consultancy)
Creating an equity team of OPB staff to steer its DEI work
Conducting and sharing the results of an anonymous cultural assessment survey
Providing DEI training to all regular staff conducted by the Center for Equity and Inclusion
Eliminating unpaid internships, paying existing interns, and creating the Joan Cirillo Emerging Journalist Fellowship and the Roger Cooke Legal Fellowship
Commissioning a pay equity study by an outside organization
In recognition of Public Media for All’s day of action and education on November 10th, OPB is offering its regular status employees an extra day off to be used on this day or anytime in the next three months. OPB is encouraging its staff to regularly make space in their lives for rest, reflection, reading, volunteering, or some other way of focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion in a way that is meaningful to them.