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Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Laura Garbez
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Laura Garbez
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Interviewer / Host
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Laura Garbez about listeners like who exclusions and resistance in the public radio industry. So welcome to the podcast.
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Laura Garbez
Thanks. It's great to be here.
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Interviewer / Host
This, I think, is an incredibly important book. You know, it couldn't have been better timed, I think, as we right across the world, you know, kind of confront the struggles and in some ways kind of, you know, failures of contemporary media to get to grips with reporting and representing contemporary society. And obviously it builds on a sort of quite rich body of scholarship to really kind of center race and racial inequality in discussion of public media. But quite unusually, the book is about radio and I can think of kind of a couple of recent titles about radio, but intriguingly seems to be doing something kind of slightly different to where, say, film or television studies is. And I'm really intrigued to hear a bit about kind of why you picked radio, and particularly actually public radio. What is it about radio that kind of inspired you to write the book?
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Laura Garbez
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that question. So I will say, too, that I came into graduate school not even necessarily thinking I was going to study media in general. So I thought I was going to study the different ways immigrants access social services based on social connections and different types of cultural and linguistic capital, because I was an immigration legal services advocate before coming into graduate school. And so I was thinking about it a lot. And as I read deeper and as I thought through what my actual theoretical questions around that were, I realized, okay, but what is shaping the way that we value who speaks in public space, you know, like in an immigration nonprofit? And I kind of decided I want to go one step back, and I want you to go to places that shape dominant linguistic ideologies. And so that brought me to media, of course, and media studies, and also to this notion of the sonic color line, which Jennifer linstover adopted from W.E.B. du Bois. And it's this idea that the way that we hear things as conditioned along racial lines, right. And along histories of segregation. And so I thought to myself, well, radio is the perfect medium to actually get at that. Right. That actually, like, takes out the visual cues of the cultural production process. And so you can see the ways people talk about race via sound pretty clearly when you're talking about putting things on air where you don't necessarily have the visual markers to go with it. And now the public part, there's two reasons. One is that it's a. Because it has a nonprofit mission, there is sort of a higher standard. There's a mission base. It's not supposed to be about who gets the most listens or clicks or anything like that. It is supposed to really be the. The most expansive, most inclusive medium, even though public radio is sort of associated with the white professional middle class. And I thought that that was a very interesting and troubling puzzle. And then on, in addition to that, there's a lot of really great archives that are available in Washington, D.C. and Maryland that could help me get at the founding story. So from that, I said, I'll give it a shot and I'll see how it goes. And, you know, I'm still working on that today. So, you know, I've been very interested. But I didn't necessarily start out thinking of the topic of public radio. It was more of a theoretical question of, like, this would be the best way to answer these theoretical Questions about inequality in how we relate to one another.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, I mean, I think the book does that really kind of perfectly, actually and partially. I mean, you've mentioned both, I guess, those kind of theoretical drives, and you flagged actually one of the starting kind of theoretical points around sound and the sonic, the other one that kind of comes up early. And again, you sort of gestured to this a little bit around radio and public radio is this idea of the industry being a white institutional space. And I was intrigued by that because it runs kind of right the way through the book, but it also links directly to what you've just been saying around kind of, I suppose, thinking about the broader structures rather than only maybe the individual experience of hearing and reacting to particular voices, or indeed not hearing and not being able to react to particular voices. So what are you talking about with that kind of theoretical framework of white institutional space?
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Laura Garbez
Yes. So in a nutshell, most American industries are not racially neutral because we live under a long history of slavery, colonialism and racial segregation in the U.S. so this is based off of organizational sociology and sociology of race. That space, rather than being this neutral concept, is politically and historically constructed. So even if a place is racially diverse, there are not only white people in the space, it can still be a space dominated by white dominant cultural frameworks. And so these frameworks can reproduce ideologies of white dominance of white supremacy over non white communities, even if there are places, plenty of people of color in the space. So this was what I was reading about in theory, but it showed up for me really empirically in public radio as an industry, because it's been diversifying a lot in over the past 20 years, let's say. But it really is still grappling with assumptions around its aesthetic, around its audience, and who usually counts as a good expert or a good interviewee for air. So, you know, I always like to give an example of Darren, this black broadcaster who told me when they need good talker, they mean somebody who works at think tanks. You end up with the same institutional white voices. And I thought that was so brilliant because Darren's playing here is not just, oh, they're all white voices, it's institutional white voices. Voices that come from white dominant institutions. Right. So this conception of the good talker, again, as you're saying, it's not about the individual speaker and hearer, and it's more that it's this prioritization of these, of these organizations and institutions as having legitimacy automatically and training in these spaces as conferring you legitimacy and that sort of increases the level of exclusion around people that are not taking part or not trained within these institutions. So I always say my methods are not counting the number of people of color in the room or even the number of non liked sources. It's more about how, how authority and expertise and even whose voice is good for the radio ends up getting linked with the white professional class and their dominant cultural expectations. So that's sort of the institutional part of white institutional space.
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Interviewer / Host
I mean, you mentioned at the start that answer the sense of there being kind of, you know, long history of racial inequality that shapes the contemporary United States. And part of the story, I guess, in the book is the kind of institutional history of radio in the States itself. And there's probably kind of like two questions really, that shape the start of the book and maybe to kind of contextualize the analysis for listeners. The first thing for people who maybe aren't in the US Is kind of npr. So what is npr? But that's quite a big question. And it's probably something that runs throughout the book as NPR has changed over time. So the thing connected to that, which is maybe a routine, is the sense of kind of where does the story start? Why, I guess have you got a bit of a kind of history of the roots of nonprofit radio to frame the start of the book?
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Laura Garbez
Absolutely. And so I started out thinking, oh, this is a contemporary book. This will be 2000 onward done. But as I started thinking about contemporary issues and contemporary issues around who has a good voice, I decided I really needed to trace it back. And you know, there's a very clear start point to public radio, National Public Radio, because it was an act of legislation. So it's the National Public broadcasting act of 1967. And even when President Lyndon B. Johnson at the time was signing it into law, he said congress created a new institution. And the first employee of NPR said, oh, no expectations existed and the slate was blank. So that was sort of the conventional history of it, like it appeared in 1967. But in reality, it wasn't really this blank slate at all because it was based off of its precursor, educational radio. So public radio's surround iteration was created during the civil rights era, but they leaned on the infrastructure of what we call in the US the educational radio fields. Now the educational radio field started in the first half of the 20th century, and it was, of course, in an era of Jim Crow. So it was white controlled. It was centered in universities that excluded people of color. And it was certainly structured by white professional norms. Fundings and networks. Right. So non white ownership and participation in this field were vanishingly small. So just to give you a sense, by 1970, only 16 US radio outlets in general, both non commercial and commercial, were black owned. And the vast majority of non commercial stations were run by white institutions. So what ended up happening, what I ended up finding through archives is there was a lot of great optimism of saying, okay, we are embarking on this project during the civil rights movement. This is going to be a really pluralistic network, a really idealistic network, and let's forge ahead. And it was mostly a lot of very idealistic white men who were conceiving of pluralism moving forward without reckoning with this, with this legacy of educational radio having been created in an age of legalized racial segregation.
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Interviewer / Host
I was really fascinated by the second chapter, which really sort of, I suppose overturned my kind of expectations a bit about the history. You know, you talked about both, I guess, kind of the dominance of kind of key white men in shaping the birth of npr. But one thing that was, was really kind of clear was the kind of sense of institutional whiteness was also gendered as well, particularly around the kind of voices that were, I suppose, associated with npr and, and in some ways of the kind of like classic tropes or kind of expectations for what an NPR voice was and perhaps still is. And I'm intrigued by this kind of gender story, you know, this sort of perhaps unexpected role for women in the early sort of, and maybe mid NPR years. So, so where I guess kind of are the women? And, and how does that kind of manifest in a, a kind of signature voice for npr?
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Laura Garbez
Yes, this really surprised me as well. So what. Whereas chapter one is all about these founding decisions of mostly white men, I get into chapter two a lot about how did public radio develop a signature aesthetic? And that's where the story of white women serving prominent roles kind of comes into play. Because in the 70s and 80s there were prominent women on air at NPR that are known as the founding mothers at this point. And they were on air hosts, on air reporters. They were doing both White House reporting, you know, sort of an audio news magazine coverage. They were doing really pack breaking, impressive work in a way that could not be possible on the mainstream commercial broadcast outlets at the time, like commercial counterpoints. And you know, Mr. Rain, Jason Laviglio talks a lot about this, about how public radio developed a voice of authority assuming, associated with femininity, which was really remarkable. And it was also really successful because it did this thing where it distinguished public radio from other broadcasts at the time to speak calmly and a softer voice of authority. And it certainly made it different than conservative talk radio in nearly every way when that kind of stuff on the scene in the 80s and 90s. But at the same time, something that's been pointed out more recently is that these iconic voices of public radio had also been majority white for a very long time. Right. So when we're thinking about the founding mothers, we're thinking about white women from the professional class. And so they set a new standard which was, which was completely different from what had already existed, and yet it was also still white and still from the professional middle class. And that meant that when I asked people of color about the iconic public radio voice, I got different answers about what sets it apart. And they emphasize much more the whiteness that is not explicitly stated, but is absolutely present in the more typical voice of public radio. So there's of course, more and more shifts in the past decade, but you know, even prominent voices that do not conform to the standard are still very notable in that people point out, sometimes even positively, how great it is to hear so and so on air as a fresh or different take. And that's where you see, oh wow, this is a really sticky iconic voice. It's the fact that they notice the voice at all shows how pervasive this calm, soft voice of feminized authority is. Which, yeah, it's really interesting because on one hand it's like really a welcomed approach departure from having one type of mal baritone voice as the voice of authority. And also it reinscribes inequality along the color line in an unexpected way, perhaps.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, and that really kind of pays off in the second half of the book where you tease out the experiences of workers in contemporary radio. But before we get into that, the kind of third, I don't know, leg of the stool for the kind of third part of the tripod of the analysis that underpins the kind of broad context for the book is money. And one of the things that I think the book does incredibly well is in quite a lot of contemporary media studies we might expect, here's a bit of history, here is a bit of theory, and then here are contemporary experiences. But the book also has this kind of financial, almost like political economy elements to it, tracking, I guess, kind of the way whiteness flows through, how not only how NPR is funded now, but also kind of how NPR's like long standing assumptions about who are the key players in funding and in financial terms and how that has kind of shaped things today. So what is going on with funding and how does, I guess the kind of funding model, funding approach relate to that kind of broad institutional whiteness?
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Laura Garbez
Yeah. So public radio in the U.S. first of all for non U.S. listeners and for U.S. listeners, it has always been vastly underfunded, always. So it has always operated on survival mode and at a poultry fraction of any of its European counterparts. So much different financial landscape in terms of terms of how public radio has been funded. So in the early 80s this got much worse, right? So think 1970 to 1978. Things are just trying to survive, just getting by, but you know, being able to pay their on air personalities, paying them perhaps less than their male counterparts at the time who were in the commercial realm, but you know, still paying them and kind of having this status quo of this very small network. In the early 80s, this underfunding was then coupled with overspending by leadership and some financial mismanagement. And then public radio went bankrupt. And it went bankrupt under the Reagan administration and it faced an over $9 million budget shortfall. So it then turned to its first member fundraiser, the Drive to Survive, to get people who are listening to donate individuals individually. And then it got a loan from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was the funding mechanism of public media for many years. And so this kind of helped them slowly chip away and slowly pay off the this debt. But you know, you got to that point then in the ease and NPR decided, okay, we have to figure out a way to be financially sustainable. So they hired audience research firms to gain some insights on, okay, who is listening. The Drive to Survive was pretty successful. And it became clear that the quote, unquote, core 40% of public radio listeners were middle aged, college educated and interested in social issues broadly construed. So the question for local stations with that data then became, oh, so they're the really hardcore listeners, they're the people that started donating. How do we serve this audience extremely well and ensure that they will continue to donate. It wasn't a question of how do we get everyone else who isn't listening to start listening as much as they do. So it was a narrowing process. And then on top of that, small businesses saw who the audience was, they saw that it was a lucrative audience. And so it was appealing to sponsor programming on it because these businesses sponsoring local public radio stations were said to have a halo effect, which means, oh, people thought really well of the businesses that sponsored public radio because they kind of associated them with some sort of social goodness and social responsibility. So then it really narrowed us into thinking about this as from publics to this narrower market. Right. And who will be financially supporting programming as the support from government funding is not enough. And so at this point, there are three main sources for local public radio stations. Its grants and institutional giving. Voluntary donations from these listeners and then corporate underwriters or people that are paying for sponsor spots on public radio programming. And what does this all mean? It means that when you're thinking about how to serve your audience, it's become normalized, very normalized to be thinking about this quiver for E. And when I asked people in the contemporary context what this means, they, they say, oh, I mean white centrist to liberal boomers, but period, you know, that is what is never said, but is always thought. And I think that this is very much coupled with the financial reliance on, on this group of very dedicated listeners. And I just want to add one more thing because as you probably heard, the Corporations for public Broadcasting, which has been the funding mechanism for public media in the US will be shutting down in January 2026 due to legislation passed in the House and Senate that totally shut off funding from the federal budget and in fact took back already allocated funding for the next three years. And it's awful. It's an unprecedented low in public media. But now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting won't be provided and funding this listener dependence, right, this dependence on this core 40% is, has only become more and more essential for the financial survival of the network, which is a huge problem for making it part of our democratic public sphere, right? Because as soon as this money comes into play, and it's sort of a privilege dependent organization, you're kind of blocking out voices from outside of this core 40 from having meaningful representation on these stations.
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Interviewer / Host
And also it plays out in the assumptions and you sort of capture that really well, I think, of who the kind of core 40 are. Obviously we live in an era where there are kind of unprecedented forms of marketing data of, you know, listener profiles and stuff like that. But that kind of, you know, gut reaction at the sort of decision making level is something that can be hard to shift even as profiles might be shifting over time. And I think actually that plays out in the second half of the book. And I guess that context where that dependency is accelerating is only going to exacerbate some of the trends that the final three chapters really kind of get to grips with. If we've talked about, I guess, the kind of history, the sense of kind of dominant voice, and then also the funding model, the question that follows on that is, so how do marginalized voices both actually like literally marginalized voices in terms of voice, but also employees of color, you know, people working around NPR who don't fit, I guess, that kind of dominant structural norm. How do they experience public radio? What were some of the kind of stories, narratives, workplace experiences that you captured in the book?
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Laura Garbez
Yes. Okay. So I will say it does really depend on what the person's voice is and whether their voice does conform with the typical public radio voice. But what's interesting to me is either way, whether you conformed with the public radio voice or you did not, you still had to contend with it and you had to contend with its whiteness. Okay, so I'm going to start with what happens when you sounds different, like you absolutely break that mold of that calm, slow, soft voice of authority that I talked about in chapter two. So that's like this black reporter I spoke to, Gillian, she was brilliant about this because she noted she was like, I didn't have much of a relationship with my voice until I got on radio and she was in other forms of broadcast. She was outside of Pufflef radio before she entered public radio. And she said, I got a relationship with it quickly. I never really thought about my voice or what it sounds like. And she also said, I really thought that I was code switching. She A little bit said, like, I thought I was using my white voice, my white professional class voice. But then she kept on getting feedback from both from listeners and from her colleagues that you made it very clear that she did not conform to the typical public radio voice. You know, so then you have to deal with that as a mode of thinking about career advancement and also just exhaustion of receiving that feedback day in and day out. So I will say most people's colleagues never said, like, why do you sound like that? You know, you need to sound correct, and all of this different stuff. It was mostly coming from listeners that have that reaction. But there is this interesting process sometimes in the newsroom where people would be like, oh, I think our audience is going to feel this way, like, this voice is outside of the normal of this stuff. So it's this weird policing process internally, even. Even as the colleagues aren't saying something direct. So that is often a big challenge for folks that don't conform to the standard. There's also people I spoke to that said, okay, there was an intern from another country that reported the story, edited it, did everything, and then somebody else voiced the track after they voiced the track, because the final editor of the piece said, no, this is not going to be comprehensible to our audience. It's going to be hard for them to hear this voice. And so we need this other guy to track it, which, you know that that is a hindrance to career advancement, and that's like, very straightforwardly exclusionary. And then you have the other side. What happens when your voice is really in line with the quote, unquote, public radio voice? So there's a few experiences that stick out to me. There's a few times people said, oh, wow, I would just be doing my broadcasting, and I would be reporting on this particular immigrant community that I also belong to. And then I got feedback from listeners saying, like, oh, what gives you the right to speak on this issue? All of this stuff. And so it's this weird thing that there's this presumed whiteness that these people have to contend with, these folks that whose voices do conform to the public radio voice, even though they are from a community of color and immigrant community. So there's this authenticity conversation that opens up. And then there is also the question of making sure that their colleagues who don't conform to the public radio voice don't get penalized because they are being held up as the standard. So I'll take, for example, another black broadcaster who is Jillian's colleague, said, yes, when I came and I started speaking. People said, oh, why doesn't this other person speak more like you? So sort of like a tokenization process and being, placing, pitting people against each other in that space. So it was awfully pernicious in the sense that if no matter where you fit in this racial linguistic hierarchy, you still have to contend for it, contend with it, and reckon with your own experience as somebody that is from the outside of this white professional class. And I think that it's tiring. It puts the work and the burden of all of this on these professionals of color. But a lot of people I spoke to said, you know, I'm here because I'm going to be able to push it through. I figured out strategies to push it through. I figured out ways to resist and also to kind of support my other colleagues of color through this. Because on the other hand, this is an opportunity to do community based stories that does not exist in the commercial sector.
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Interviewer / Host
I guess that's, I suppose, the story of like the kind of sound of NPR alongside the experiences of employees of color. What about the stories themselves? What actually gets on in terms of, I guess we might think of it as kind of like content rather than just voice, because the kind of racialized inequalities that shape the kind of sound of NPR also play out in not just what's kind of considered a good story. I think the, the term that stood out was this idea of a kind of like driveway moment that would keep people kind of hooked or listening, but also, and going right the way back to where you started, the kind of experts that are deemed kind of worthy of taking part in these driveway moments. So, yeah, how does the racial inequality play out in terms of content?
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Laura Garbez
Yes. And even to go back to the idea of a white institutional space, I think is, is really good to bring this into the through line. Because the thing about driveway moments, though, is really interesting to me. And you described it perfectly. It's like imagine you're sitting in your driveway and you don't want to turn off the story because it's so compelling to you as the listener. Like, you cannot go back inside. You have to wait until the segment finishes. This is the driveway moment they're seeking. Of course, you have to think about and imagine a listener and you are imagining that core 40% that I talked about earlier and that ends up shaping what stories get greenlit, but then also how those stories are framed. So there were a group of participants that said to me, oh, in my particular region, because the thing of, oh, I Can't have two, quote unquote, Hispanic stories back to back, or I can't have two sad stories back to back because it's going to be too much. And there just seemed to be a sense of, like, trying to comfort this imagined listener and make sure that they keep tuning in because they're delighted enough by it, so they don't want to, you know, bum out this audience too much. But then there were other regions that were more. And this is where it's not just white space, it's white institutional space because it's about. It's. There are plenty of stories about communities of color that make it on the air, but there's this framing that is catered towards that core 40% that they imagine sitting in their driveways. And so Benjamin talks about it as. He's this Asian American, a public radio worker, and he talked about it as this framing happening beside, behind the museum glass of this. This sort of other. This constructed other about a community of color and always sort of bringing it back to, well, why would a person in a wealthy county, in the suburb care about this? Why would this other person care about it? So I'll be about framing and again, bringing in an expert that could be relatable and approachable to the imagined public radio listener. And to that point, it's, you know, I just some. Some quotes on, okay, who. Who is the expert? Who's the ideal expert that's like, you know, a really good talker who can toe the line between being a friend and an academic or your smart friend who can tell you about a crisis in another country. There's this element of distance from the actual struggle itself. And therefore, there is a presumed class and race component to expertise where it says, okay, we will present stories about this particular marginalized community, and we'll have voices on the air from that community, but then we'll go ahead and talk about it in a more distanced way with the experts who are usually in white institutional spaces or dominant spaces. So I think that this relationship with the listeners absolutely shapes what folks are thinking of when they think of a driveway moment. Producing a driveway moment.
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Interviewer / Host
You've also talked there about, I guess, the kind of. Who is considered worthy of talking about. About driveway moments. Throughout the conversation, you've kind of mentioned the kind of current context. And one of the things that is true about all academic books is usually they take at least a couple of years to write. And it really can be a sort of, like, minor miracle if they land with immediate kind of relevance. And I Guess in the case of your book, it's quite a depressing kind of context for immediate relevance for listeners like who to be speaking to where we are now. And it strikes me that the book has just come out and listeners will be kind of hearing this just as this kind of fresh copies hitting the shelves. So it's probably strange to be asked, would a second edition be good or a new introduction? That as actually things are possibly a lot worse than when I was doing the empirical data collection and kind of writing up. But that strikes me as kind of an important project for maybe a kind of a follow up as we see whether, or much more likely when some of the issues you've outlined in the book kind of accelerate as a result of funding changes. At the same time, though, writing a book takes a long time. And you've talked about being inspired really in graduate studies to use public radio as a case study. And sometimes that can be a good moment to move on and do something different. So what are you working on now next in the wake of publishing this great book?
- [38:49]
Laura Garbez
Thank you for that. Yeah. So I will say just a note on, you know, as I've been every day waking up in the year 2025 and being like, what, what new thing, what new attack on an American institution has come to pass, it has been a thing of, wow, if only I was able to write this additional chapter or that additional chapter. But, you know, I, I went back and I read my conclusion in light of all that has happened in the past year, you know, fully clawing back any federal funding for public media. And now the FCC is investigating local stations over their underwriting practices and their sponsorships, all of this different stuff. And, you know, my conclusion still spans in the sense of we need to publicly fund public media. And it may seem further away now, but I'm hoping that people take it up as saying, okay, they had a project 2025, we need a project 2027, 2029 to start thinking about public media as public infrastructure. The same way we think of roads, the postal service, all of this, like healthcare, we need to really think robustly about the fact that information is a public good. So that's just one general note on that. But what's been capturing my attention now that the book is out in the world and I just have like, more brain space to think about what's next. In the same vein of audio workers, I'm gonna launch a project that explores the lives of audiobook narrators in the digital age. And so this is because the audiobook industry is booming. And so between 2010 to 2020, digital audiobook sales went from 2% to over 8% of total trade revenue in the book industry. So that must be a good thing for the workers, right? But sort of an empirical question. And there's these dual threats of AI, voice narration and also celebrity actors that have taken up to audiobook narration even in times of like say, for example, the Hollywood strike was a time of unprecedented numbers of actors getting involved in audiobook narration because that's an allowed work activity under their contract in their actors union. So I'm very much interested in just generally the life of audiobook narrators. Long term audiobook narrators, what do they consider a good audiobook narration? And also how like what's the internal logics of the profession? But then beyond that, how are their unions, how are their agents, how are they together, you know, in different collectives organizing against AI? And so very early days, very early phases. I'm in research design phase, but I'm really looking forward to digging in because I think that the question of AI and who owns their own voice will only become more prominent, not just in audiobook industry, but in the cultural industries more generally.
- [42:21]
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Laura Garbez
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Laura Garbez
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings.
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