Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry

by Laura Garbes

Overview

How public radio has perpetuated racial inequality since its founding—and how journalists of color are challenging white dominance in the workplace and on the public airwaves

National Public Radio was established in 1970 with a mission to provide programming for all Americans, yet the gap between public radio’s pluralistic mandate and its failure to serve marginalized communities has plagued the industry from the start. Listeners Like Who? takes readers inside the public radio industry, revealing how the network’s sound and listenership are reflections of its inherent whiteness, and describing the experiences of the nonwhite journalists who are fighting for change.

Drawing on institutional archives, oral histories, and original in-depth interviews with journalists of color in public radio, Laura Garbes shows that when NPR and its affiliate stations first began its appeals for donations from “listeners like you,” it was appealing to white, well-educated donors. She discusses how this initial focus created a sustainable financial model in the face of government underfunding, but how these same factors have alienated broad swaths of nonwhite and working-class audiences and limited the creative freedoms of nonwhite public radio workers. Garbes tells the stories of the employees of color who are disrupting the aesthetic norms and narrative practices embedded in the industry.

Centering sound in how we think about the workplace and organizational life, Listeners Like Who? provides insights into the media’s role in upholding racial inequality and the complex creative labor by nonwhite journalists to expand who and what gets heard on public radio.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691275093
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Laura Garbes is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Laura Garbes makes massive—and brilliant—strides toward dismantling the sonic color line in American public radio! Incisively argued and expansively researched, Listeners Like Who? not only details how and why public radio came to sound so white, but its interview-based methodology offers a loud and clear solution: amplify the voices of people of color on air and behind the scenes.”—Jennifer Lynn Stoever, author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

“Listeners Like Who? is a bold, creative, and stunning examination of public radio’s role in creating America’s sonic color line. Garbes shows how an imagined race-neutral listener is, in practice, an average white American and she convincingly argues that by erasing the concerns and voices of people of color, public broadcasting betrays its charge to serve all Americans. Read this brilliant book, and you will forever hear the news differently.”—Victor Ray, author of On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care

“Laura Garbes makes a compelling case for why public radio needs more, not less, federal funding to truly serve the public. Without it, this nonpartisan, nonprofit, noncommercial source for news and information will remain beholden to a narrow slice of listeners who donate instead of the broad listening audience it was meant to reach.”—Shereen Marisol Meraji, head of audio at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, cocreator and former cohost of NPR’s Code Switch podcast

“Garbes offers a timely and compelling analysis of the persistence of whiteness and racial hierarchy at a much-respected liberal media institution. Listeners Like Who? is urgent, engaging, a must-read.”—Tanja Dreher, coeditor of Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era