Alicia C. Shepard, an award-winning media critic who, as NPR’s ombudsman, supported the organization’s refusal to label waterboarding as torture, died April 1 at her home in Arlington, Virginia. She was 69.
Her husband, David Marsden, said the cause was complications from lung cancer.
In a diverse journalism career, Ms. Shepard has been a reporter, a college professor, the author of a book about the Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and for nearly four years NPR’s ombudsman, the listeners’ representative charged with bringing of transparency to the newsgathering practices of the public radio network.
In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “large number of e-mails” that disagreed with NPR News’ use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects. held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq War.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that instead of labeling improved measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics—saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water into a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees to “crawling in tight spaces with insects.”
In Salon, columnist Glenn Greenwald sharply criticized NPR’s Mrs. Shepard’s defense, writing that the network “did nothing but mislead its listeners by refusing to adopt the term and instead adopting Orwellian euphemisms from the government.”
Shortly after writing her blog post, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of NPR’s “On the Media” program, “If I were personally asked whether or not pouring water down someone’s nose and throat for 20 seconds torture is, I personally would say I think so. However, I totally understand that a news organization should be as neutral as possible, get the facts out and let the public decide whether something is right or wrong, right or wrong.”
Alicia Cobb Shepard (who was commonly known as Lisa) was born on April 27, 1953 in Boston and grew up in Montclair, NJ. Her father, Whiting Shepard, was a senior vice president of sales at Allied Chemical. Her mother, Florence (Barthman) Shepard, was a homemaker who, after her husband’s death in 1965, pursued acting and held several jobs, including manager of the store at the Montclair Art Museum.
Ms. Shepard attended Lake Forest College in Illinois before transferring to George Washington University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1978. She was a reporter for Scripps League Newspapers in Washington until 1982, when she moved to The San Jose Mercury News (now The Mercury News) in California. She spent five years there as a reporter before leaving to embark on a sailing trip to the South Pacific with her then-husband, Robert Hodierne, which lasted nearly three years.
They bought a 32-foot sailboat, sold everything they owned, learned to sail, and took to the ocean with Cutter, their nine-month-old son.
“We left California in search of the exotic, places where man hasn’t built a polluting power plant, paved the dirt roads, and put antennas on thatched huts,” she wrote in The Tampa Bay Times after the 15,000-mile journey ended in 1990 .
She and Mr. Hodierne, who had married in 1983, divorced in 1998.
After teaching English in Japan through a BBC training program, Ms. Shepard resumed her journalism career. From 1993 to 2000 she wrote for The American Journalism Review; her media criticism there earned her three awards from the National Press Club. Later, while working for the Newseum, Washington’s now-closed museum dedicated to news and journalism, she collaborated with Cathy Trost on “Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11” (2002).
Soon after, she began work on “Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate” (2007), a look at the parallel lives of the two Washington Post reporters whose investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal helped lead to the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon and elevated them to the pinnacle of American journalism.
Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein sold their archive of notes and other papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $5 million in 2003. Ms. Shepard regularly relied on the discoveries she made in the archive, including a handwritten note from Mr. Woodward, that offered insight into the interest of a small percentage of the hundreds of people he and Mr. Bernstein interviewed.
“Most of the information,” he wrote, “came from 65 people.”
The book revealed that Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein had angered Barry Sussman, one of the Post editors with whom they worked most closely on the Watergate story. Mr. Sussman harbored a lingering grudge for not being the third author of their book “All the President’s Men.”
“I have nothing good to say about either,” Mr Sussman, who died last June, told Ms Shepard.
Reviewing her book in The Washington Post, Samuel G. Freedman wrote that it “efficiently summarizes much of the existing coverage of Woodward and Bernstein, supplemented by its own energetic research, but it told me very little that I didn’t know before reading the book.” opened. the cover.” However, Publishers Weekly praised it for providing “an insightful, highly readable study for fans of journalism, American politics, and the work of ‘Woodstein’.”
After the publication of the book, Ms. Shepard was hired as an adjunct professor of media ethics at Georgetown University; her three years there coincided with her time at NPR. She later taught journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and media ethics at the University of Arkansas.
In 2014, she worked for several months as a digital editor of a start-up news website in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she trained young journalists. She then worked for a year as a senior press liaison at the United States Agency for International Development, also in Kabul.
At her death, she had nearly finished a memoir about her lung cancer diagnosis and her husband, Mr. Marsden’s, recovery from brain cancer. The book, tentatively dubbed “The Luckiest Unlucky Couple,” is expected to be released soon.
In addition to her husband and her son, Cutter Hodierne, a filmmaker, Mrs. 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 last column as NPR ombudsman in 2011, Ms. Shepard described the loneliness of the job. “The public,” she wrote, “thinks you’re a shill to NPR, and NPR employees think you’re an internal investigation unit.”
A typical conversation with an employee, she said, went like this:
“Me: ‘How are you?’
“Staff (Long pause). ‘Don’t know. It depends on why you’re calling.’”
