This just in from NPR…

“Today at the UNITY 2012 Convention, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced it will award NPR a $1.5 million grant to launch a major journalism initiative to deepen coverage of race, ethnicity and culture, and to capture the issues that define an increasingly diverse America. With this expansive effort, NPR will produce compelling stories and present new voices and conversations online and on-air, staffed by a six-person team.”

“We want to dive beneath the surface and capture real conversations that people are having about race and ethnicity,” said Margaret Low Smith, NPR’s Senior Vice President for News. “America is a fascinating and complex place – we want to shed light on that with original and nuanced coverage.”

Undoubtedly the initiative comes in the reverberating negative reaction the station endured after the firing of Juan Williams in October 2010. Williams is a political analyst at FNC.