NPR Public Editor by Poynter's Kelly McBride

A few hours after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, Gregory Bovino, then the U.S. Border Patrol Commander, held a short press conference. Bovino told the public and the press that the agents responsible for the killing were justified because Pretti “approached law enforcement with a weapon,” that he “violently resisted” and that he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”

Over the next two days, Bovino and others in the Trump administration posted similar statements to social media and repeated them in interviews with CNN and other newsrooms. NPR quoted Bovino several times in stories that aired on the radio and in digital stories that ran on NPR’s website.

Each time NPR quoted Bovino about the shooting, journalists added more context, rooted in the most recent reporting. In the first report, a correspondent said “it’s not clear” from the videos if Pretti brandished or reached for a gun. The next day a reporter followed up on a similar audio clip from Bovino by saying that the videos “refute that assertion.”

Many audience members wrote in to say they were angry to hear Bovino’s misleading statements on NPR’s news programs, because they felt like NPR was amplifying the false narrative.

I reviewed NPR’s coverage with a deputy managing editor who was guiding the language choices that weekend, as well as the executive responsible for NPR’s shows. Read on for my analysis. — Kelly McBride

Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina

Here are a few quotes from the Public Editor's inbox that resonated with us. Letters are edited for length and clarity. You can share your questions and concerns with us through the NPR Contact page.

Reactions to hearing government officials smear a shooting victim on air

James Vaughn wrote on Jan. 25: This evening on Weekend All Things Considered, NPR played audio of Greg Bovino making false claims about a United States citizen who was executed this morning in Minneapolis. The video is clear: Mr. Pretti was on the ground and subdued by multiple agents when he was killed.

Why would you play a clip of Bovino lying without forcefully contextualizing his statement with an analysis of the video? In some kind of misguided effort to achieve perfect neutrality, you’re no longer meeting the moment. … It’s very difficult to understand your position. Other mainstream news outlets are considerably less circumspect in naming what’s going on in the world.

Fred Kelemen wrote on Jan. 25: Please stop reporting what officials from the Department of Homeland Security say as if they are facts. They no longer are. They have gone way beyond spin, into outright LIES. They won’t allow Minnesota officials to have access to any evidence of the ICE murders, which should tell you all you need to know about their respect for the Truth. Check out every news release from DHS and ICE, compared to what the visual evidence shows, and stop falling for their BS!

Scott Fitzgerald wrote on Jan. 25: Today on All Things Considered, NPR adopts a pose in which the “official” account from the federal government is implicitly posited as factual when video and eyewitness accounts have established that narrative to be false.

Why would you play a clip of anyone lying about extrajudicial murder without forcefully contextualizing the statement with an analysis of what actually transpired? After Ms. Good’s killing, NPR ran headlines about her death using passive voice. “A woman was shot and killed…” Do better journalism. You are underfunded but vital. The media controls the narrative — do not abdicate that responsibility to anyone, under any government or institution.

Diana Long wrote on Jan. 25: Long-time listener and supporter of NPR (KERA, WAMU, and now OPB). I was extremely disappointed to hear several NPR journalists use confusing, vague, equivocating language this morning to describe the ICE’s murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday. In particular, journalists leaned heavily on the word “appear” in two segments. (My caps below for highlight.)

MPR reporter Peter Cox in his interview with Ayesha Rascoe: “what APPEAR to be federal agents shoving a person who is filming to the ground. ... but video doesn’t APPEAR to show that [Pretti] brandished a weapon or even reach for one. … video does APPEAR to show at least one of the agents grasped Petti’s weapon and take it away. …”

Mara Liasson: “One thing that strikes me is how the Trump Administration tried to get out immediately after these incidents with a narrative THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE TRUE.”

… Experienced senior correspondent Liasson was unable to make a declarative statement about the Administration’s narrative approach despite having had weeks to determine whether the Admin has a pattern of immediately issuing inaccurate statements. Rascoe saying “there’s a lot we don’t know,” despite numerous videos of the scene, told listeners that our eyes deceive us.

Since NPR lost federal funding, I felt like I heard new directness in NPR's journalists' reporting — less passive voice, less both-sides, more direct sentences. That may have been wishful thinking.

So my question to you is, why did Cox, Rascoe, and Liasson use such vague phrasing when there’s clear, credible video evidence of the incident? Is NPR afraid of being sued by the Administration? Is NPR hoping to get federal funding again some day so trying to walk a careful line?

Several questions are embedded in these observations. I’ve synthesized them into these three central inquiries:

Why put Bovino’s statements on the air, once it becomes clear they are misleading?
What duty do journalists have to make it clear that public officials are wrong?
Why do journalists qualify their descriptions of what happened with words like “appear”?

NPR audience members often object when NPR airs false and misleading statements from government officials. We are in an era now where President Donald Trump and his administration routinely share disinformation. Official statements after U.S. Border Patrol agents shot Pretti were no different.

Bovino held two press conferences that weekend, a short one on Saturday and a longer one on Sunday. The agents shot Pretti shortly after 9 a.m. CT on Saturday in Minneapolis. The first video was posted online almost immediately. Pretti’s killing was the lead story on Weekend All Things Considered that day.

The first story that Saturday was crafted to convey basic facts, that federal agents had killed a second Minneapolis resident and how people in the city and beyond were responding. Host Sarah McCammon interviewed correspondent Jennifer Ludden, who explained what her reporting showed and mixed in several audio clips, including statements from Bovino, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and a resident of Minneapolis.

Here’s the Bovino quote that appeared in that first story: “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. Then about 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement.”

Ludden let the audience know that statement was in doubt by saying, “But there is a bystander video that shows multiple federal agents — it looks like at least six — wrestling someone on the ground, striking him and then you hear multiple shots fired. It sounds like at least 10 rounds in just a few seconds. And it is not clear from the video if the man killed had brandished or reached for any weapon.” Ludden added that she arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting and did not witness any rioting.

NPR posted a story to its website that evening by investigative correspondent Cheryl W. Thompson with a similar approach, quoting Bovino and then stating that the bystander’s video “appears to contradict” Bovino’s account.

On Sunday morning, the story continued to dominate the news coverage and the team took a similar approach, with host Ayesha Rascoe interviewing Minneapolis Public Radio’s Peter Cox and then NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.

Most of the stories quoted Bovino. All of the stories pointed out that bystander videos show that Pretti did not pull out a weapon. And throughout the first 24 hours, every host and reporter qualified their descriptions with words like “appeared” and “seemed.”

This is annoying to some, but unavoidable in the early hours when a key piece of information comes from bystander videos. Why? Because sometimes additional, longer videos surface that change our understanding of the truth. Journalists have to provide time and space for other videos to surface, and they have to verify those videos before they can make definitive claims.

Assuming that the video tells the complete story without knowing what happened earlier can contribute to a misleading narrative. In 2019, news media widely reported on a viral video from the National Mall that showed an interaction between several high school students wearing MAGA hats and a Native American man with a drum. The first reports of a truncated video described the teenagers as taunting the Native American and blocking his path. Longer videos showed that wasn’t the case, that in fact the students had been chanting and jeering another group, when the man with the drum approached them. Several newsrooms, including CNN and The Washington Post, eventually settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits filed by one of the teenagers, though suits against other news outlets were dismissed.

“Just because someone started to press record, that doesn’t mean that’s the beginning of the incident, the confrontation. So we are really aggressive in making sure we had a complete timeline” in Minneapolis, Vice President for News Programming Eric Marrapodi told me. “As more people were posting different angles, it became really clear that we did have the beginning of the confrontation and could make a more definitive repudiation of what the administration was saying.”

Twelve hours after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal published a frame-by-frame analysis of the bystander videos. (Later, The New York Times and The Minnesota Star Tribune posted similar forensic reporting that arrived at the same conclusion.)

During a noon meeting on Sunday, Jan. 25, a group of NPR editors and correspondents discussed the coverage and agreed that their language wasn’t strong enough. The video analysis from other newsrooms was journalistically solid and made the qualifying language unnecessary.

It wasn’t a hard call to make, Deputy Managing Editor Jim Kane told me. Everyone in the meeting agreed that stronger language was appropriate. “It was a really good, healthy journalistic process,” he said. “And then drafting our best understanding of the truth.”

At 1 p.m., Kane issued guidance giving NPR journalists permission to drop the qualifiers.

His email read:

GUIDANCE: Here is the language we should use in stories that include what the Department of Homeland Security and other federal officials have said about the killing of Alex Pretti:

The video evidence and eyewitness accounts that have surfaced so far refute* that assertion. There has been no evidence that NPR has verified of Pretti brandishing his handgun at any time during the encounter with federal agents.

*You may substitute “contradict” for “refute, as needed.”

It had been just over 24 hours since NPR first reported the story. After that, hosts and correspondents employed more forceful language and the misleading quotes from government officials became paraphrases.

That’s a reasonable amount of time to arrive at the decision, settle on the best language and implement the guidance.

Even though it was clear within a short time that officials were misleading the public with their statements, that doesn’t mean the public should be shielded from the government’s distortions.

No one wants to be lied to. But Americans need to know just how coordinated and sustained the government effort was to blame Pretti. In addition to the two press conferences that Bovino held, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press conference that Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and “reacted violently” when law enforcement tried to disarm him. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called him an assassin. FBI Director Kash Patel said “you cannot bring a loaded weapon to a protest,” suggesting it’s against the law, even though it’s perfectly legal.

Over the next several days, NPR resurfaced those statements as they asked former officials and police experts to analyze the practices of the federal law enforcement troops in Minnesota.

“It’s important for people to actually hear that audio,” Marrapodi said of the official government narrative. “The fact that they were so strident about it, I thought it was important to the story.”

NPR has asked officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for interviews. “They have repeatedly declined or ignored those invitations. They remain open,” Marrapodi said.

It’s always difficult for journalists to get at the truth when law enforcement officers kill people. The public wants answers and accountability, which takes both time and transparency. With the federal government blocking independent investigations, resisting other legal jurisdictions and refusing to even identify the names of the officers who pulled the trigger, journalists are creating what might be the most complete public record of these killings. It could possibly be the only public record.

Creating that record is an ongoing process of gathering information, verifying that information is accurate and complete, adding context and choosing the words that convey the truth. It’s better that NPR’s journalists be deliberate rather than brash, complete rather than consolatory. The stakes are too high for this process to falter. — Kelly McBride

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.

Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute

Kelly McBride
Public Editor

Amaris Castillo
Poynter Institute

Nicole Slaughter Graham
Poynter Institute

The Public Editor stands as a source of independent accountability. Created by NPR's board of directors, the Public Editor serves as a bridge between the newsroom and the audience, striving to both listen to the audience's concerns and explain the newsroom's work and ambitions. The office ensures NPR remains steadfast in its mission to present fair, accurate and comprehensive information in service of democracy.

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