Elizabeth Jensen

On Wednesday, Morning Edition ran a story about advocates in Kentucky adopting a county-by-county strategy to pass right-to-work legislation, after statewide efforts to pass such legislation failed for several years running. The story was by Lisa Autry, an award-winning reporter at member station WKU Public Radio, in Bowling Green, ...

Last week, All Things Considered aired a piece by NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reporting on investigations into the work of so-called "climate skeptics" — scientists who doubt that climate change is a serious problem or that humans are causing it. The piece raised the broader issue of whether advocates on ...

Back in 2012, the Ombudsman's web page posted a document titled NPR Underwriting Credit Guidelines. It was the first document that came up in a Google search on the topic of the policies, adopted by NPR's board of directors, that govern how NPR gives on-air recognition to its underwriters, ...

After the end of March, Diane Rehm, the host of the NPR-distributed The Diane Rehm Show, will no longer participate in fundraising dinners for Compassion & Choices, a non-profit organization that, among other activities, lobbies for changes to state laws to permit medically assisted death.

The decision came ...

A case of unfortunate timing this past weekend had some listeners seeing a plot where none existed.

A heavy schedule of underwriting messages for the new Fox comedy series The Last Man on Earth was running on NPR last week leading up to the show's debut Sunday evening. Independently, Weekend ...

For late Friday, a couple items from the mailbag. I'm not going to weigh in except to say that in my first month here I've found NPR's journalists to be very open to discussing questions about their work. I find it's often helpful to see how journalistic decisions are made; ...

A story in the Washington Post, posted online on Feb. 14 and on the Feb. 15 front page, detailed how Diane Rehm "is becoming one of the country's most prominent figures in the right-to-die debate." Rehm is the longtime, well-respected host of the midday talk and call-in program, The ...

Reader Richard Sloatberg of San Diego, Calif. wrote to ask why Ann Powers, a NPR Music correspondent, was "allowed to plug her husband's book," without a note explaining their relationship, on NPR's music news blog, The Record. Sloatberg was referring to this Feb. 7 bylined post ...

After considerable discussion, we have decided to end the practice of posting an Open Forum each month. They were started at a time when my predecessor wasn't posting often, while he was working on a lengthy project. My intention is to get back to having more frequent posts, which will ...

I'm a little over two weeks into my tenure as NPR's ombudsman. That's about 200 emails to the ombudsman, a couple dozen tweets from listeners and one anonymous letter that complained in part about PBS (a separate organization.) For those of you who have sent words of welcome, thank ...