Public radio station must be independent in covering the news

A Florida school board wants to run a local radio station’s newsroom. Why should you care? You should care because this incident is about much more than one station and a handful of local politicians looking to expand their control. This is about your ability to get straight, unbiased news reporting without a government agency looking over the reporters’ shoulders.

The Miami-Dade School Board is moving forward with a plan to take control of the newsroom of WLRN, Miami’s highly respected public radio station. The proposal would give the school board the direct authority to hire and fire journalists. This could enable the board to influence how the news — including news about the school board — gets reported on WLRN’s airwaves.

WLRN is an affiliate of National Public Radio, with 19 reporters and editors who are currently employed by an independent nonprofit organization. This arrangement ensures that neither the school board, which holds the station’s license to operate, nor donors to the station have any direct influence over journalists deciding what stories to cover and how to cover them.

This kind of firewall helps ensure that news is not driven or shaped by a political agenda, and it is a standard in the news business.

The school board argues that it wants to establish higher levels of criminal background checks for employees and greater transparency over the station’s finances. However, there is nothing in the current arrangement that prevents these goals from being implemented now.

This move raises concerns that the board’s real goal is editorial influence. For example, it has been widely reported that the board was incensed by recent stories that were critical of the quality of school lunches. Who hasn’t complained about school cafeteria food?

Public radio stations like WLRN and many other news organizations believe in the mission of journalism to serve the people by reporting the truth as closely as that can be known, to report news that has an impact on your life, and to do it in a way that is impartial, fair and accurate.

In order to carry out this mission, newsrooms must be independent from the interests of the organizations they must cover.