#35 The ethics of reporting on your own newsroom with the 2019 Ancil Payne Award Winners

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Damian Radcliffe (00:04):

Hello and welcome to the Demystifying Media Podcast. I'm Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S.
Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University of Oregon, and my guest today are two
journalists, winners no less, from the 2019 Payne awards. The Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in
Journalism was established in 1999 by Seattle broadcasting legend Ancil Payne. With
journalistic ethics and integrity at their heart, The Payne awards celebrate the tough decisions
made in newsrooms and in the field, but which are often invisible to the public. A $10,000
annual prize rewards media organizations and journalists who report with integrity despite
personal, political or economic pressure. Two of the winners of this year's prize are with me
today from MPR, Minnesota Public Radio news. Matt Sepic and Laura Yuen were part of the
team which took home the award for their transparent and unbiased coverage of a #MeToo
story which witnessed the fall from grace of one of its network’s biggest stars. Matt and Laura,
thanks for joining me.

Laura Yuen (00:58):

Thanks for having us.

Matt Sepic (00:59):

Glad to be here.

Damian Radcliffe (01:00):

So first of all, welcome to Oregon and thank you for bringing the sunshine with you from
Minnesota.

Matt Sepic (01:08):

We have no shortage of it in Minnesota.
Damian Radcliffe (01:09):
That's what I've heard. Laura, I've kind of alluded to the story which has brought you here to
Oregon today, but could you sort of describe a little bit in your own words, what the kind of
essence of the story was, and perhaps then we can talk a little bit about how it came about?

Laura Yuen (01:24):

Sure. So in late 2017, Minnesota Public Radio, our very own employer, decided to sever ties
with its biggest star. Its biggest star being of course Garrison Keillor, the founding host of A
Prairie Home Companion, which was loved by millions of people across the country. And
Garrison Keillor was Minnesota's biggest cultural export, probably, other than Prince. He is an
icon to the state. He's the state storyteller. He's seen as a Bard, kind of a legend of broadcasting
and of writing writ large. So when it all came about, the company actually didn't say a lot. All
we knew, if you don't mind, I could maybe jump ahead and talk about how we learned about
this. It was just the same way everyone else did, which was Twitter.

Damian Radcliffe (02:22):

That good old journalistic tool.

Laura Yuen (02:23):

Yeah, and the tweet came out from the Associated Press and all caps letters, breaking, Garrison
Keillor says he's been fired by Minnesota Public Radio over allegations of inappropriate
behavior, and that was really the beginning.

Damian Radcliffe (02:42):

And so what happened after that because obviously, so you found out at the same time as
everybody else, which is very, very interesting.

Laura Yuen (02:46):

Interesting.

Damian Radcliffe (02:48):

It's a very British way of putting that.

Laura Yuen (02:50):

That's a very Minnesotan way too. I got you. I see what you mean.

Damian Radcliffe (02:53):

Did you immediately want to start digging and try and find out a bit more going beyond that
press release, beyond those 280 characters . . . ?

Matt Sepic (03:02):

There was no press release.

Damian Radcliffe (03:04):

Right.

Matt Sepic (03:05):

This was Twitter. This was an Associated Press reporter. I believe Keillor had told Jeff Bannon at
the AP who had reported on him before about what had happened. Jeff immediately tweeted it
out and I think followed it up with a story. But to answer your question, yes. I mean, we
immediately wanted to find out what happened. The company really wasn't saying hardly
anything at all, and certainly there weren't any details about what the allegations were. So we
set to work pretty quickly trying to figure out what it was. Our colleague, Ewen Care, did kind of
just a straight ahead story saying what happened. But there were many, many questions that
we didn't have answers to at that point.

Damian Radcliffe (03:50):

And did this come out of the blue?

Laura Yuen (03:52):

Well, I was personally surprised. I never really heard anything about how he treated women
specifically. I had heard rumors that he was difficult to work with. He had very high standards as
people of that caliber often do. But the idea that he was acting inappropriately with women, it
caught me by surprise. And it was just compounded by the fact that, oh gosh, this is a major
story happening within our own shop and it was reported by another media outlet. It was
pretty humbling.

Matt Sepic (04:26):

And remember too, this was at the height of the #MeToo movement. There were many people
at the very top of journalism and Hollywood at that time, falling and falling hard. You saw it at
CBS, NBC, Fox, and public media was not exempt from that. It happened at WNYC in New York,
it happened at National Public Radio in Washington. What was unique about our situation was
that those were examples in their own newsrooms. Keillor's operation--his show--had largely
been separate from MPR. He had employees who worked for him who I believe were MPR
employees still, but he worked in a different building across town right on the border between
Minneapolis and St. Paul. I think in eight years working at MPR I may have seen him twice. He
just wasn't in the building. Obviously, we had his program on the air, so he was an audible
presence with the station, but he wasn't somebody we saw on a daily basis and it was really
kind of one of these situations where out of sight, out of mind.

Matt Sepic (05:43):

And he wasn't even an employee at that point. So even when he said he was fired, [it was] not
technically accurate. He had been an independent contractor and had a business relationship
after he had ceased being a formal employee of company, I believe, since the early 2000s. So
what had happened in November of 2017 was the cutting of business ties, the ending of his
contracts with the Writer's Almanac program. And he had retired from A Prairie Home
Companion at that point. Chris Thile had taken the show over, kept the same name, but Keillor
was on the way out with that, retired. We were still running old shows in particular time slots
and the Writer's Almanac was still on the air. But he was at that point already when this all
went down, on the way out.

Damian Radcliffe (06:41):

And did that detachment, both physical in terms of as you've described, working out of a
different space and the fact that Keillor was on his way out and kind of semiretired and we're
kind of seeing other people moving into his shoes and his space and taking on that kind of
storyteller role--did that make it easier for you to explore this story because it wasn't somebody
that perhaps you had worked face to face with, and someone you hadn't seen day to day in the
newsroom, bumped into at the coffee machine and over the water cooler and so forth . . .?

Laura Yuen (07:13):

I think for Matt and me, yes, because like you said, I don't think I had even run into him ever.
And people from outside of Minnesota assume that we just run into him when we're doing our
grocery shopping, but that's just not the case. So in that case it was easier. On the other hand,
Matt and I as relative newcomers, I guess we've been there now more than a decade. But we
know that we wouldn't have jobs at Minnesota Public Radio if it were not for Garrison Keillor.
The legacy of Garrison Keillor and the legacy of MPR are very much intwined. So it's been often
said without exaggeration that if he hadn't been there, we wouldn't have MPR as we know it
today. It wouldn't be one of the largest producers of public radio in the country.

Matt Sepic (08:06):

And that's because the founder of our company, Bill Kling, was absolutely brilliant about
recognizing the marketing potential of the Prairie Home Companion. Not only did they take that
show national, sell it to other stations that brought in revenue to the company, they also had
the whole, as I call it, the tchotchkes business of selling Lake Wobegon paraphernalia through a
catalog. And that was a for profit business that was eventually sold off in 1998 that provided
somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million for our endowment. So there would be no
MPR as we know it. Public radio itself as we know it wouldn't exist without a Prairie Home
Companion and without Garrison Keillor and what he brought to the system.

Damian Radcliffe (09:03):

So given that legacy, how did you go about investigating this story?

Laura Yuen (09:08):

We decided very early on that we would have to do it just as any other journalists would. So it
didn't matter that we worked for the company, we had a firewall in place between our
company leaders and our newsroom. And we really pushed the firewall to the limits, but it did
hold up. A lot of what we did are the same things that any other journalists would do. Matt had
basically went down, I guess we all did . . .we created a list of everybody that possibly ever
worked with Garrison by using LinkedIn, by using the internet archives Way Back Machine
where you could pull up old staff lists from a Prairie Home Companion.

Matt Sepic (09:52):

Their old websites.

Laura Yuen (09:55):

Yeah, ten years ago. So that was helpful. We did a lot of cold calling. We did talk to people who
are current employees of Minnesota public radio or APM as well, but he also had his footprint
in a lot of other areas of our community. He owned a bookstore for a long time, so Matt was
calling employees who had happened to list this as one of their workplaces on LinkedIn. I mean
we were really just fishing for anything, what was he like to work with? I guess at the outset, we
knew that we might not be successful in actually determining what happened in this one
instance or the set of allegations that led to the termination between MPR and Garrison, but
we could definitely answer the question of what he was like to work for and what was the
workplace climate that he fostered as the head of these shows?

Matt Sepic (10:55):

Certainly, and it was just old school shoe leather reporting. We didn't take any special
advantage of the fact that we were in the building, nor did we want to. We wanted to be as
transparent as possible in the way we covered this. Our first big story that ran in late January of
last year. We had an extended editor's note on it explaining exactly how we went about
covering it, the firewall policy and all of that. And we didn't want to be seen, one, as
mouthpieces for the company, and we wanted sources to trust us as well, we wanted our
audiences to trust us. So being completely open and honest about how we went about this was
important to establishing that trust.

Matt Sepic (11:43):

I mean we could have easily from all of our desktop computers at the headquarters in St. Paul
got onto the company audio archive system, which is still in the process of being digitized. But
we could have pulled up any bit from any old Prairie Home Companion show and used that
probably, technically, legally maybe, probably wouldn't have been a huge problem. But we
really wanted to establish our independence, plant that flag and say we're operating
independently of the company, we're walling off the news room. And for the audio production
of the first story that ran, we used YouTube clips of his shows and commercial CDs that were
available to the general public. We didn't dip into the audio archives that we could have. So we
set out early on to report this as if it were happening at another company down the street. And
we didn't really do anything that we wouldn't have done otherwise.

Damian Radcliffe (12:52):

I guess the fire walling though ...
Matt Sepic (12:54):
Right.

Damian Radcliffe (12:55):

Is different, and was there precedent for that tool, or was that something you had to establish?

Matt Sepic (12:59):

Not so much at our company. I mean the one advantage we did have is sources, we knew
people who worked in the company, we knew down the hall people we could talk to. So
developing sources that way was easier, but we didn't really have any special access that
anybody else, and we had other media covering this story as well, that our competitors didn't
have.

Damian Radcliffe (13:22):

One of the things that was interesting about when you look at the twin cities is it's a really busy
and active and vibrant new market. So how did you go about exploring this story? Keeping all of
that kind of church and state separation, but also trying to make sure that you don't get
scooped by your competitors?

Laura Yuen (13:41):

Exactly. Yeah, I think that would have been even more embarrassing, if we were to get scooped
on like the next expose ... So, that was part of the motivation too, we need to own this story.
And I remember one time when I was talking to a source who was a former employee on the
show and I asked this person . . . it was like a really great interview. I'm like, "I hate to ask this,
but if there's any way you can just, don't talk to any other media until we come out with our
story, I would really appreciate that." And this person said, "Oh, I'm only talking to you. The
reckoning must come from within MPR."

Matt Sepic (14:22):

That's great.

Laura Yuen (14:27):

And I believed that person. I think there's something to be said about that, that this behavior
went on for so long. Our mission wasn't just exposing the predation of Garrison Keillor, it was
exposing or at least questioning--did our company know about this? And if they didn't know
about it, how could they not have known about it? Because after we started reporting, we
talked to a lot of people who told us a lot of disturbing stories about the workforce culture he
fostered and about how he had romantic relationships with subordinates that wasn't even
including the one person who was a source of the most recent allegation. So yeah, I think as we
just kept reporting and reporting, we felt like the path was ...

Matt Sepic (15:24):

And The Star Tribune is a good newspaper and we knew that they had a couple of people on
this. And as I was talking to sources, they were telling me, yeah, the Star Tribune knows this
particular part of the story, too. And I was kinda like the guy in Spotlight, I forget the character's
name at that point or the reporter's name who was wanting to publish right away with the first
little bit, and thinking 'Alright, nom we've gotta step back and look at the broader picture here
because there's a lot more."

Laura Yuen (15:58):

The system.

Matt Sepic (15:58):

And well just with the allegations against him and the workplace culture and all that. But as
Laura later followed up after our first big piece, the workplace culture and what our company
leaders should have known or did know.

Damian Radcliffe (16:12):

So can you explain a little bit what you found in that piece and then in some of the subsequent
reporting and also the timescale from when this story broke on Twitter to when you started to
be able to share your findings with the audience, and indeed I guess your colleagues, because I
guess many of them were finding how your conclusions at the same time as you were going live
with them?

Laura Yuen (16:34):

Yeah, we took real care to make sure that we were kind of isolated from the rest of the
newsroom for the duration of this project, because we certainly didn't want the sources who
are trusting us to tell their stories. We didn't want those conversations to be overheard in the
newsroom. So the news broke, I think it was, what? November 20th?

Matt Sepic (16:55):

End of November.

Laura Yuen (16:55):

End of November 2017, and we published about two months later in January. And what we
were able to report was that Keillor had a years long pattern of belittling, sexualizing, just
mistreating women who worked for his shows. We reported that one of the women who was a
subordinate and had a romantic relationship with him was given a $16,000 check by the
managing director of this show on the condition that she stay quiet. Matt was able to convince
a woman who filed a sex discrimination lawsuit in the late nineties against the company and
who had alleged sexual--was it gender?--and an age discrimination against Keillor. That was
actually a new finding. This happened in the late nineties and that lawsuit never came to light
because it was sealed at the time and it was never reported on. So I thought that was a really
nice turning point in the investigation where Matt was able to convince her to go on record and
tell her story.

Matt Sepic (18:09):

And that piece of it, too, proved that the company--people at the top--knew that there were
things going on that should not have been going on, even almost 20 years prior to these
allegations coming out. And that was really kind of fortunate that we were able to find that, the
lawsuit had been sealed when it was resolved in, I believe, 1999. And it was kept under seal
really until a routine house cleaning at the federal courthouse where a judge was going through
and unsealing stuff that should not have been sealed. And no one had reported on it. They
don't put out a news release when they unseal lawsuits that are old. But we went looking for it
and lo and behold, we got the documents from the court clerk pretty quickly and found the
plaintiff's name and found her attorney's name and started making calls and worked on it from
there. And it was kind of a difficult, awkward approach to say, "I'm from Minnesota Public
Radio, say, do you want to talk about that time you sued Minnesota Public Radio?" And it we
really had to build trust and get the point across that we are operating independently. We're
not here as a mouthpiece for the C-suite of the company.

Damian Radcliffe (19:48):

And what was the impact of the story when it dropped?

Laura Yuen (19:50):

Well yeah, I guess I could mention one story about a woman who I interviewed. She was a
former student actually at the university, of Keillor's, and Keillor had taught a writing class
there. And she actually had a really good experience in his class. He was so impressed with one
of her writing exercises that he weaved it into a ketchup commercial on a Prairie Home
Companion. And at the time she really thought, "Oh okay, I can do this. I'm a good writer,
Garrison Keillor likes my work." So she asked him, she emailed him if there's any way she could
actually intern on the show. And he wrote back saying something to the effect of 'that can be
arranged, but I will have to overcome my intense attraction to you.' So it was one line but it was
line that was from someone in a position power, a writing instructor to his students, a student
who was very much considering a career in professional writing.

Laura Yuen (20:57):

And after that it just deflated her confidence. She thought, 'Well, this is why he likes my work.
It's not really about my work. He's just interested in me, in my appearance.' So going back to
your question, I actually warned her [that] 'the story's coming out and I just want you to be
prepared.' I warned other women, 'you might want to go dark on social media' because I just
did not know what the reaction was going to be like because we had felt the brunt of the
reaction after MPR severed ties. People were calling us, calling the newsroom with angry emails
and angry calls. They were canceling their memberships by, I don't know, I can't remember the
exact numbers. It was hundreds of people [who] canceled their memberships. They were very
upset. And I didn't want these people who trusted us to tell their stories to face that and to feel
the brunt of that wrath.

Laura Yuen (21:48):

But she actually even posted the story and actually not I think about it, we found out about her
whole story because she did post this account on Twitter. I think it was maybe a short thread,
but we amplified it in a huge way and I think she got nothing but positive support. So that was
really heartening to see. And I think it's because of #MeToo, this whole movement that we
were caught up in at the time. I think that emboldened her to tell her story and it also shaped
the reaction that she got.

Matt Sepic (22:23):

And getting back to the lawsuit piece of this too, I think that is why Patricia McFadden, who was
the plaintiff in that case decided to come forward. Because thinking back on this more than a
year later really makes me see the power of a social movement like this. How one person's
confidence can lead to another, to another, to another to all speak out and tell their truths
about what happened to them in the workplace over many years. And if not for this, that
movement and many others speaking out, I don't think Patricia would have necessarily felt
comfortable talking about it publicly. It would after all, it was 20 years ago, I reached out
through her attorney who was also helpful as well in reporting the story.

Damian Radcliffe (23:18):

And then how about the internal reaction to that? You've implied that some people in the
organization must have known and some of these elements of this story in the past, those
people might not have been there, may have moved on and be doing different things. But how
does an organization like NPR react to a story like this about one of its own?

Laura Yuen (23:42):

I don't know if there's actually been . . . it's not like our executive leaders would stop us in the
hall and give us any direct feedback on the stories. I'm sure they weren't happy with what we
wrote. But out of this whole situation and another personnel issue that came up after this that
didn't involve Keillor, but it definitely has gotten the attention of company leaders. So it did
start this company wide discussion about culture and respect, and I think that's important
because how often are you going to have a Garrison Keillor on your hands? But if you can
change the culture and make it a safe place for people so that everyone feels respected,
hopefully there won't be such an abuse of power like that.

Matt Sepic (24:26):

It will stop the next situation before it happens, and yeah, that gets to the workplace culture
part of it. If you have a toxic culture, this sort of thing will just metastasize.

Damian Radcliffe (24:40):

And looking back at it a year on or so, what are the lessons that you would want to impart to
other newsrooms who might be reporting on themselves and kind of investigating things that
have happened in their own workplaces or amongst their own organization? What did you take
away from this experience that are transferable for them?

Matt Sepic (24:58):

Make sure your editor has your back. And ours did, Meg Martin and Eric Righam, worked
directly on the team, but also above them our executive editor, Nancy Cassatt, was I really think
the one who was absorbing the brunt of any criticism and blow back from downstairs in the
executive suite. We were largely insulated from that and free to work. We weren't getting
phone calls telling us back off or else, our jobs weren't threatened. And also we had recently
unionized too, the newsroom are members of SAG AFTRA. And that's I think something that
helped me sleep better at night knowing that they have to have cause to fire us. It would have
been not a good PR move on their part, certainly, to get rid of reporters who are investigating
the company. But having that other layer of protection, too, in a union contract, is an important
thing.

Laura Yuen (26:05):

Yeah. And it's certainly a unique circumstance. I don't think we'll repeat it in exactly the same
fashion. I mean it's just such a rare thing that happened.

Matt Sepic (26:12):

I hope not.

Laura Yuen (26:14):

It's okay to stumble I think, but you just need to be transparent. And with that editor's note, I
think that went a long way in at least helping try to explain what we were doing in terms of
setting up boundaries for where we would go, where we wouldn't go. I mean, we didn't attend
any staff meetings where they were discussing how they handled the Keillor allegations or the
investigation because we didn't want to take advantage of that. But we put that in writing so
that people knew that we weren't going to show any fear or favor as we pursued the story.

Matt Sepic (26:50):

And we stayed away from the staff holiday party that--

Laura Yuen (26:53):

We did.

Matt Sepic (26:54):

We all kind of made a group decision, nobody's going. One, it's just too awkward, but we were
trying to keep our distance from a lot of the company-wide things going on just so we could
assure our independence.
Damian Radcliffe (27:09):
And now obviously that's behind you so you can go to the Christmas party and do other things.

Matt Sepic (27:15):

I did this last one.

Laura Yuen (27:17):

Did you?

Matt Sepic (27:17):

Yeah.

Damian Radcliffe (27:18):

And obviously you're also starting to receive recognition for the work that you have done. So I
just wanted to conclude really by understanding what does something like the Payne Award
mean to you guys?

Laura Yuen (27:29):

It's a huge honor.

Matt Sepic (27:30):

Absolutely.

Laura Yuen (27:31):

We never thought we would be recognized at all for this work. I mean it was in some ways like
the assignment from hell. So the fact that people within our industry recognized the difficult
spot we were in. And I don't know if we felt courageous at the time, but yeah, I guess it did
require a little bit of intestinal fortitude. And to also remark on all the other finalists work, and
we're talking about life changing journalism, to be in their company is just, it's awesome.

Matt Sepic (28:08):

Absolutely. Yeah, it's an incredible honor for all of us on the team to have this feather in our
cap. And thanks to everybody here at the journalism school for recognizing that, kind of
slogging through those two months before our first story, we were just kind of almost laboring
away in obscurity hoping people will call us back and to have our work recognized in this way is
really an incredible honor.

Damian Radcliffe (28:41):

Well, thank you both very much for taking the time to share with me and our listeners the story
behind the story, and I think some of the transferrable lessons from that has clearly been an
incredibly impactful piece of reporting and one that I guess you hope you don't have to ever do
again.

Matt Sepic (28:57):

Well thanks for having us. It's been great.

Laura Yuen (28:58):

Thank you so much.

Damian Radcliffe (28:59):

Thanks for joining us. And until next time, if you enjoyed this podcast don't forget to check out
the archive, which you can find wherever you found this podcast, and on our website:
demystifying.uoregon.edu.

Damian Radcliffe (29:18):

If you've enjoyed this podcast, why not check out another from the University of Oregon School
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