Source Throws Yellow Card, Sees Gender Bias In Soccer Story
On June 30, NPR's Weekend All Things Considered aired a lighthearted World Cup piece discussing why the Brits use "football" and the Americans use "soccer" to refer to the same game. The subsequent debate this piece sparked has nothing to do with soccer and is not remotely lighthearted.
In the piece, one of the interviewees, a man, was referred to as the author of a book that deals with the subject. As a correction on the piece now notes, the book had two authors, one of whom is a woman. It was a shockingly bad error.
Recent corrections have put a spotlight on issues of representation, in the newsroom and in NPR's content. Listeners and readers have questioned how these errors came about and, by extension, what they say about NPR's commitment to hiring and source diversity.
Those issues are monumentally important. They are why I ask NPR to give me the statistics on the every year so I can post them, and why I have written a number of times about the issue of . My office has been working on two more columns on the topic of source diversity for several weeks now — begun well before the recent controversies — and they will be
