Alicia C. Shepard, an award-winning media critic who as NPR’s ombudsman backed the group’s refusal to label waterboarding as torture, died on April 1 at her house in Arlington, Va. She was 69.
Her husband, David Marsden, stated the trigger was problems of lung most cancers.
In a various journalistic profession, Ms. Shepard was a reporter, a college professor, the writer of a ebook in regards to the Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and, for practically 4 years, NPR’s ombudsman, the listeners’ consultant tasked with bringing transparency to the general public radio community’s news-gathering practices.
In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had obtained a “slew of emails” that took concern with NPR Information’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation ways” and “harsh interrogation methods” as an alternative of “torture” to explain what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration through the Iraq warfare had been pressured to endure.
“Some say that by not utilizing the phrase ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and different strategies of extracting info,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to name waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard steered that somewhat than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters ought to merely describe the ways — saying, for instance, that “the U.S. army poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or pressured detainees “into cramped confines crawling with bugs.”
In Salon, the columnist Glenn Greenwald harshly criticized Ms. Shepard’s protection of NPR, writing that the community was “doing nothing apart from deceptive its listeners by refusing to use the time period and as an alternative adopting Orwellian authorities euphemisms.”
Quickly after writing her weblog put up, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of the NPR program “On the Media”: “If I have been requested personally whether or not or not pouring water down somebody’s nostril and throat for 20 seconds constitutes torture, I’d say personally that I believe it does. I completely perceive, although, {that a} information group must be as impartial as potential, and placing out the information and letting the viewers determine whether or not one thing is nice or unhealthy, proper or unsuitable.”
Alicia Cobb Shepard (who was recognized extensively as Lisa) was born on April 27, 1953, in Boston and grew up in Montclair, N.J. Her father, Whiting Shepard, was a senior vp of gross sales at Allied Chemical. Her mom, Florence (Barthman) Shepard, was a homemaker who, after her husband’s demise in 1965, pursued performing and held varied jobs, together with supervisor of the store on the Montclair Artwork Museum.
Ms. Shepard attended Lake Forest Faculty in Illinois earlier than transferring to George Washington College, the place she obtained a bachelor’s diploma in English literature in 1978. She was a reporter for Scripps League Newspapers in Washington till 1982, when she moved to The San Jose Mercury Information (now The Mercury Information) in California. She spent 5 years there as a reporter earlier than leaving to take a crusing journey to the South Pacific along with her husband on the time, Robert Hodierne, which lasted virtually three years.
They purchased a 32-foot sailboat, bought every thing they owned, discovered to sail and set out on the ocean with Cutter, their nine-month-old son.
“We left California searching for the unique, locations the place man hasn’t constructed a polluting energy plant, paved the filth roads and plunked antennas down on thatched huts,” she wrote in The Tampa Bay Times after the 15,000-mile journey led to 1990.
She and Mr. Hodierne, who had married in 1983, divorced in 1998.
After educating English in Japan by means of a BBC coaching program, Ms. Shepard resumed her journalism profession. From 1993 to 2000, she wrote for The American Journalism Overview; her media criticism there earned her three awards from the Nationwide Press Membership. Later, whereas working for the Newseum, the now-closed Washington museum devoted to information and journalism, she collaborated with Cathy Trost on “Operating Towards Hazard: Tales Behind the Breaking Information of 9/11” (2002).
Quickly after that, she started work on “Woodward and Bernstein: Life within the Shadow of Watergate” (2007), a take a look at the parallel lives of the 2 reporters for The Washington Publish whose investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal helped result in the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon and elevated them to the highest rung of American journalism.
Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein bought their archive of notes and different papers for $5 million to the College of Texas at Austin in 2003. Ms. Shepard relied repeatedly on the discoveries she made within the archive, together with a handwritten word from Mr. Woodward that provided perception into the significance of a small share of the lots of of individuals he and Mr. Bernstein interviewed.
“The majority of the data,” he wrote, “got here from 65 individuals.”
The ebook revealed that Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein had angered Barry Sussman, one among The Publish editors with whom they labored most carefully on the Watergate story. Mr. Sussman held lingering resentment about not being the third writer of their ebook “All of the President’s Males.”
“I don’t have something good to say about both of them,” Mr. Sussman, who died final June, instructed Ms. Shepard.
Reviewing her ebook in The Washington Publish, Samuel G. Freedman wrote that it “effectively synthesizes a lot of the prevailing protection of Woodward and Bernstein, augmented by some energetic analysis of her personal, however it instructed me little or no I didn’t know earlier than opening the quilt.” Publishers Weekly, although, praised it for offering “an insightful, extremely readable research for followers of journalism, U.S. politics and the work of ‘Woodstein.’”
After the ebook’s publication, Ms. Shepard was employed as an adjunct professor of media ethics at Georgetown College; her three years there overlapped along with her time at NPR. She later taught journalism on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas, and media ethics on the College of Arkansas.
For a number of months in 2014, she served as digital editor of a start-up information web site in Kabul, Afghanistan, the place she educated younger journalists. After that, she spent a 12 months as a senior press liaison at america Company for Worldwide Growth, additionally in Kabul.
At her demise, she had practically completed a memoir about her prognosis of lung most cancers and the restoration of her husband, Mr. Marsden, from mind most cancers. The ebook, tentatively referred to as “The Luckiest Unfortunate Couple,” is anticipated to be revealed quickly.
Along with her husband and her son, Cutter Hodierne, a filmmaker, Ms. Shepard is survived by two stepsons, Ted and Billy Marsden; a grandson; a brother, J. Powers Shepard; and a half sister, Emily Riddel.
In her final column as NPR’s ombudsman, in 2011, Ms. Shepard described the loneliness of the job. “The general public,” she wrote, “thinks you’re a shill for NPR, and NPR workers suppose you’re an inside investigations unit.”
A typical dialog with an worker, she stated, went this manner:
“Me: ‘How are you?’
“Staffer (Lengthy pause). ‘I don’t know. It relies on why you’re calling.’”
