National Public Radio (NPR) aired its first broadcast on May 3, 1971, marking the debut of its flagship news program “All Things Considered.” The format was a radical departure from commercial radio at the time, and featured immersive audio design and a narrative-driven, conversational approach. The program opened with a 24-minute audio portrait of a massive anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C., and was followed by an eclectic mix of segments — including a conversation between Allen Ginsberg and his father about LSD and youth counterculture. Thus, the first NPR program was born.
In a new book about NPR’s 50-year history, called “On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,” journalist Steve Oney traces pivotal moments in the organization’s history. The book, which took Oney 14 years to research and write, examines how NPR’s leadership shaped the organization, from founding program director Bill Siemering, creator of “All Things Considered,” to NPR president Frank Mankiewicz, who was at the helm for both the network’s expansion and its brush with near financial ruin. Oney details the network’s near-collapse in 1983, recounting how journalists Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer — often referred to by colleagues as “the troika” — helped secure a multi-million dollar bailout from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The book chronicles NPR’s impact on the industry, from its pioneering of the distribution of longform podcasting, to its efforts to adapt to a changing digital news landscape. It also features stories of behind-the-mic drama and newsroom tensions, like the controversial removal of NPR host Bob Edwards from anchoring “Morning Edition,” to a long-standing rumor about an engineer on staff dealing cocaine to colleagues.
Oney, a 1982 Nieman Fellow, has written for Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. He spoke with Nieman Reports about the making of “On Air”, the evolution of NPR through the decades, and the network’s lasting impact on American journalism.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I thought National Public Radio was a great subject hiding in plain sight. No one had ever written a “full-dress” history of National Public Radio. Many talented people at National Public Radio have written their memoirs, and there have been a couple of academic studies. But a story about the people, the atmosphere, and how the radio is actually made — that hadn’t been told.
I’m a big admirer of David McCullough, the historian who wrote the “The Creation of the Panama Canal,” [and] “The [Epic Story of Building] the Brooklyn Bridge.” He’s a student of American institutions — sadly, now dead — but a very, very famous, great writer, and he would take on these big American institutions, dive in, and show how they came to be. And I thought no one had tried that with National Public Radio, and it’s such a big part of American life that I thought it was worth the investment of time and effort.
It seemed like a big responsibility, but also an opportunity. I found in life that the two usually go together — that no opportunity is without some responsibility,
I was just trying to make the people at NPR come alive. … My job in writing this book was to try to put flesh on the bone, and my hope is that when you finish the book, you’ll think, “Oh, I saw them. I now have a sense of who they are and what it takes for them to do what they do.”
There are a lot of people who go under that category. Bill Siemering, who is the founding programming director of NPR, and who invented “All Things Considered,” is really the wizard behind it all. He heard it in his head, and then he went about and made it happen.
You have to understand that in 1971 when “All Things Considered” launched, the only radio news in America was clipped short and kind of “in your face.” It was, “give us five minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” Siemering’s idea was to do something more ambitious. He wanted to bring storytelling, human voices, context, into the telling of the news. And that was revolutionary at the time. No one had really tried it in any organized fashion. I give him a tremendous amount of credit.
Leaping forward 10 years, I give Frank Mankiewicz, who was the president of NPR from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s a tremendous amount of credit as well. Until Mankiewicz took over, NPR was a struggling second source of news. They did great work from time to time, but they didn’t have consistency or coherence. Mankiewicz walked through the halls and like a character in “West Side Story,” he said, “We’re going to be big, we’re going to be strong, we’re going to create a nationwide news service.” To pull that off, he [oversaw the creation of] “Morning Edition,” which didn’t exist until his tenure. “All Things Considered” was the only show on NPR until Frank Mankiewicz took over. … He wanted to make what Siemering had started far more far reaching, more professional, and more engaged in every facet of the world [with] government coverage and foreign coverage. He had this bigger vision to take it someplace else.
It really surprised me how close NPR came to going out of business. In 1983, they were down to hours from being out of business. And it surprised me that three powerful members of the reporting staff, Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts, took it upon themselves to intervene and to try to persuade the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund to work out a deal to save NPR — that surprised me.
Frank Mankiewicz was, in many ways, a visionary. He saw the future, but the technology didn’t exist to deliver the future yet. He bet on it anyway, and it was a tremendous bet that he lost. I was astonished by watching and reading and talking to people who were involved about how fast it all fell apart and how close NPR came to ceasing to exist.
I knew they had a crisis, like a lot of people knew … but I didn’t know how severe it was and how it got out of hand, and I hope that comes through in the book. That tension, it’s a riveting story. How are they going to get out of this? They’re in a sinking ship. How are they going to save the ship and continue on their journalistic adventure?
The hardest interview was with Anne Garrels, a great, great foreign reporter at NPR who covered Russia, Bosnia and most famously, the Iraq War. She was the only American [broadcast] journalist who stayed in Baghdad during the “shock and all” bombing campaign, [when nearly] every other reporter from every organization left Baghdad. She and a reporter from the New York Times and a reporter from the New Yorker. … exposed themselves to the danger of living in a city that was under live fire from United States missiles. She did superlative work.
After the United States occupied Iraq, she remained, covering the messy, long aftermath of the war, and she paid an emotional price for that. I was very wary [and] respectful of what she’d gone through, and I courted her. I didn’t expect her to speak to me. Right off the bat, I wanted to tell her that I hoped to do a very sincere and honest job, and to tell her story, difficult though it was, and after several months of preliminary emails and phone calls, she invited me to Norfolk, Connecticut, which is where she lived.
I spent three very intense days with her, going through the entire story of her time in Baghdad, both the triumphs of her reporting and the challenges she overcame to do the stories that made her so great and her slow decline into psychological problems [and] alcoholism. It was a very, very difficult story to tell, and whether she really wanted to tell it, I don’t know, but I had shown up and I was sincere. I’ve often found that just by asking people and listening, they will tell you eventually what they choose to tell you.
At the very end of my book, I address Uri Berliner’s famous piece [for The Free Press,] in which he said that NPR had lost its conservative listeners and its audience was skewing hard to the left.
I give him his say, and then I give a couple of executives at NPR the chance to counter it, and I just leave it there, because I think that’s an insoluble riddle. I’m a reporter. I don’t work at NPR. I don’t make those determinations.
The place I most directly address that story is in the chapter on Ira Glass titled, ‘This American Ira,’ and Ira did me the tremendous privilege of letting me sit in for a week as he was putting together an episode, and I watched how scrupulously Ira tries to balance their coverage.
Journalism’s job is to enlighten and inform, it’s not to inflame. But you know, sadly, we live in a time of echo chambers. We live in a time in which many people receive their news in a “stovepiped” form. There are cable networks for the left, cable networks for the right. … The fancy term for it is “confirmation bias.” People turn on those particular outlets to have their opinions confirmed. Great news, like the best at NPR, doesn’t do that. It tells you the story as best and as fairly as the reporters, editors, producers, can convey it. And I think at its very best, NPR does that most of the time. … To me, that’s sort of the epitome of the great gift that public radio has given to American journalism and to listeners. It’s a fair-minded portrait of our world, and it’s also imaginative. It has the freedom to be light on its feet, to tell a joke, to elbow you in the ribs every once in a while and say, “Wow, that’s kind of strange,” and I think journalism should be light from time to time. Not everything is somber, and we should keep that in mind.
