A year after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one counter-protester dead and a nation reeling, Noel King, a host of National Public Radio’s flagship news program Morning Edition, interviewed Jason Kessler, an organizer of the deadly rally, on the radio last week.
It did not, if you believe the criticism, go well.
King prefaced the interview by saying, “It’s been a year since young white men openly marched through the city, chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ A white supremacist drove a car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer. A police helicopter monitoring the rally crashed, killing two officers. Now, given all of that, it’s hard to understand why organizer Jason Kessler would want a follow-up, but he does. He’s organized another ‘Unite the Right’ rally this weekend in Washington, D.C., on the one-year anniversary of the violent Charlottesville rally. We spoke with Kessler earlier this week. And full disclosure: Some of what you’re about to hear is racist and offensive.”
King was right: Some of what Kessler said was racist and offensive. Citing conservative political scientist Charles Murray, Kessler, at one point, ranked the races by intelligence. (“There’s enormous variation by individuals,” he said, but, according to him, Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ, followed by Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks. He did not bother to rank Native Americans or other indigenous groups.)
Almost immediately after the interview aired, the complaints came rolling in. First, it was Twitter, where people quickly started calling both King and NPR racist for “giving a racist a platform” and allowing him to rank the races by IQ. Then, the next step in the outrage cycle, it was a series of think pieces (written largely by white people) complaining about how Noel King failed. After reading these tweets and think pieces, I started wondering, did we even listen to the same thing?
In the interview that I heard, Noel King pushed back. If you read the transcript alone, it’s hard to tell just how heated the conversation got, but King was clearly pissed off. And for good reason: She wasn’t just a reporter doing her job, she was also a black, mixed-race woman speaking to an avowed racist who said that black people are the least intelligent people on Earth. And yet, she maintained her professionalism, didn’t resort to yelling or name-calling, and if anyone looked foolish by the end of the segment, it was Jason Kessler, not Noel King. I can only imagine it was an incredibly difficult interview for King, but it was one she and her producers (many of whom, including Morning Edition’s executive producer, are also people of color) obviously thought was worth airing.
Of course, this was radio, not TV, and I have a feeling that many of the armchair critics assumed Noel King was white. I mean, it’s NPR. The only thing whiter than NPR (at least in the popular imagination) is a Romney family reunion, and by “platforming” a racist, the argument went, both NPR and King were complicit in spreading Jason Kessler’s message. This whole messy episode reminded me of last summer, when KUOW’s Bill Radke was widely reamed (and not in a good way) for interviewing a Nazi who had been punched by a stranger downtown. Then, as of now, the argument is that racists and others with atrocious ideas should never be given a platform to speak. But when people were yelling at Bill Radke last year, “Would you interview a member of ISIS,” my feeling was, “why not?” Terrorists, racists, rapists, murderers, all the people we think of as monsters are entirely human, and if we’re ever going to understand why they do and believe awful things, the first step is to actually talk to them. Besides, the job of the reporter isn’t to shield the audience from horrific perspectives; it’s to tell all kinds of stories—whether good or bad, evil or kind—regardless of who gets mad when you tell them.
I’m not sure about everyone else who listened to that Noel King interview, but my personal view that humans are fundamentally equal and deserve equal rights is not so fragile that listening to an interview with a racist on NPR is going to make me a racist myself. The Jason Kesslers of the world exist and pretending they don’t will not make them disappear. So if you’re disgusted by Jason Kessler, yell at him, not the reporters trying to understand how we got here.
NPR, for their part, is thus far supporting King. “Interviewing the people in the news is part of NPR’s mission to inform the American public. It does not mean NPR is endorsing one view over another,” the organization said in a statement. “Our job is to present the facts and the voices that provide context on the day’s events, not to protect our audience from views that might offend them.”
This is the promise of journalism, and at a time when audience complaints and social media mobs can easily derail media organizations from that fundamental mission, I’m exceedingly grateful to NPR, and to Noel King, for sticking with it.
