Putting Principles into Practice at NPR Ethics and Media
Get a behind-the-scenes look at how NPR works to ensure the public's trust in media.
Nov. 7, 2019
7-8:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Nebraska Union
UNL City Campus
The event is free and open to the public.
About the talk
NPR's Elizabeth Jensen and Mark Memmott will pull back the curtain on NPR's decision-making process to show the amount of thoughtful analysis and critical thinking that goes into the journalistic process. They will talk about actual stories and ethical dilemmas they faced while working in the newsroom and the process NPR uses to handle such dilemmas. Dennis Kellogg, NET news director, will moderate the discussion.
Speaker Bios
Elizabeth Jensen
Public Editor
Elizabeth Jensen was appointed as NPR's Public Editor in January 2015. In this role, she serves as the public's representative to NPR, responsible for bringing transparency to matters of journalism and journalism ethics. The Public Editor receives tens of thousands of listener inquiries annually and responds to significant queries, comments and criticisms.
Jensen has spent decades taking an objective look at the media industry. As a contributor to The New York Times, she covered the public broadcasting beat – PBS, NPR, local stations and programming – as well as children's media, documentaries, nonprofit journalism start-ups and cable programming. She also wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review and was a regular contributor to Current, the public broadcasting trade publication, where, among other topics, she wrote about sustainability strategies for public television stations. Over her three decades in journalism, Jensen has reported on journalistic decision-making, mergers and acquisitions, content, institutional transformations, the intersection of media and politics, advertising and more, for a variety of national news organizations. She reported on the media for The Los Angeles Times, where she broke the story of Sinclair Broadcast Group's partisan 2004 campaign activities, and was honored with an internal award for a story of the last official American Vietnam War casualty. Previously she was a senior writer for the national media watchdog consumer magazine Brill's Content, spent six years at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team of reporters honored with a Sigma Delta Chi public service award for tobacco industry coverage, and spent several years with the New York Daily News. In 2005, Jensen was the recipient of a Kiplinger Fellowship in Public Affairs Journalism at The Ohio State University, focusing her research on media politicization. She earned her M.A. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, spending her second year at Geneva's L'Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, and received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
When not covering media, Jensen, who teaches food journalism at New York University, has occasionally reported on the food world, including investigating vegetarian marshmallow fraud for a CNBC newsmagazine report.
Mark Memmott
Supervising Senior Editor, Standards & Practices
Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
As the NPR Ethics Handbook states, the Standards & Practices editor is "charged with cultivating an ethical culture throughout our news operation." This means he or she coordinates discussion on how we apply our principles and monitors our decision-making practices to ensure we're living up to our standards." Before becoming Standards & Practices editor, Memmott was one of the hosts of NPR's "The Two-Way" news blog, which he helped to launch when he came to NPR in 2009. It focused on breaking news, analysis and the most compelling stories being reported by NPR News and other news media.
Prior to joining NPR, Memmott worked for nearly 25 years as a reporter and editor at USA Today. He focused on a range of coverage, including politics, foreign affairs, economics and the media. He reported from places across the United States and the world, including half a dozen trips to Afghanistan in 2002-2003. During his time at USA Today, Memmott, helped launch and lead three USAToday.com news blogs: "On Deadline," "The Oval" and "On Politics," the site's 2008 presidential campaign blog.
