When Brendan Carr, President Trump’s appointee to head the Federal Communications Commission, opened an investigation into National Public Radio’s use of commercial sponsorships in January, he struck an ominous note. “For my own part,” he wrote, “I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR.”
Only a minuscule fraction of NPR’s budget comes directly from the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But the indirect support is critical: Member stations get roughly one-tenth of their revenue from the government, and station fees in turn account for one-third of NPR’s budget.
So Carr’s threat is serious. It’s also familiar, as readers of “On Air,” Steve Oney’s engrossing and entertaining new history of NPR, will discover.
The book opens in 1983, when profligate spending by a visionary but undisciplined NPR president, Frank Mankiewicz, drove the network to the brink of insolvency. Only the intervention of congressional Democrats, who had resisted the Reagan administration’s sweeping cuts to public broadcasting, saved it. It was out of that financial crisis that NPR, under pressure to wean itself from government funding, was permitted to name corporate donors in on-air spots — the practice now attacked by Carr.
Oney, a veteran journalist, deftly captures the exuberant, often countercultural ethos that defined NPR’s creation in 1970. Its staffers were mostly in their 20s, and their optimistic and internationalist orientation was a product of the moment. Rare among postwar news organizations, NPR was known for its talented women journalists. Its “founding mothers” — Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer — forever disrupted the male-dominated world of Washington journalism.
Unlike the formal staccato of early radio broadcasts in the 1920s and ’30s, NPR “established a sound that imaginatively conveyed the times,” Oney writes. “With its emphasis on well-produced, character-driven dispatches that brought issues to life and highlighted the human voice, NPR was at the forefront of new ideas about broadcasting.”
Reviving radio as a storytelling medium, the network captured the voices of Vietnam War protesters with startling immediacy; provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1973 Watergate hearings and the 1978 debates over ratification of the Panama Canal treaty; and produced landmark radio documentaries like “Father Cares,” about the mass murder-suicide at Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in 1978.
NPR’s shows, which reached a national audience through member stations, were yet another innovation. For millions of people, listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” became a daily ritual, turning hosts like Stamberg and Bob Edwards into household names.
But even before NPR’s first decade was over, its lack of political, socioeconomic and racial diversity was apparent. “Young, brainy, upper-middle-class, politically liberal, artistically adventurous and typically white, the NPR archetype was taking shape,” Oney writes. In cramped edit booths, staffers cut lines of cocaine and engaged in trysts.
Oney celebrates the culture of free-spiritedness, but as NPR matured, that culture’s blind spots became painfully evident. Most prominent is race. “On Air” devotes many pages to recounting the resentment Black and Hispanic journalists faced from white colleagues who considered them incompetent, unlikable or a poor fit — notably Adam Clayton Powell III, who was hired as director of NPR News in 1987 and fired less than three years later, and Juan Williams, an iconoclastic Black commentator whose ouster from NPR in 2010 precipitated another crisis.
Williams had told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he felt “nervous” seeing airplane passengers in traditional Muslim attire while flying, remarks that stoked liberal outrage. But his haphazard dismissal only fanned the flames. An investigation by an outside law firm found that Williams was given little rationale for being let go, and prompted the resignation of NPR’s top news executive at the time, Ellen Weiss. Then, as the scandal seemed to be blowing over, the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe released hidden-camera video showing NPR’s chief fund-raiser slamming conservatives. The C.E.O., Vivian Schiller, formerly a digital executive at The New York Times, was forced out.
The Juan Williams debacle, Oney writes, was “arguably the opening battle of the conflict that would define America during the early decades of the 21st century — the culture wars.” By 2011, NPR was being roasted even by allies like Barack Obama — at a now notorious White House Correspondents’ Dinner where he also mocked Trump.
A second blind spot is age. Although the word “boomer” appears only once in the book, NPR’s ongoing struggles stem in part from its singular identification with its founding cohort. A “collectivist mentality” and college radio sensibility, as Oney describes it, have made the network particularly difficult to manage, “less a business than a dysfunctional family,” plagued by leadership turnover. Oney likens NPR in its early days to a “troubled kid” with “a chip on its shoulder.” That may once have been charming, but now the kid is a senior citizen who won’t get out of the way.
“On Air” is a major work of media history, building on ground covered in “Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR” (2021), by Lisa Napoli, and “This Is NPR: The First Forty Years” (2010), by a group of NPR veterans. Oney’s subtitle, “The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,” is on point; he balances victories, like Anne Garrels’s genre-defining coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, against the various institutional crises and more personal trials, such as Garrels’s agonizing struggle with alcoholism. (Oddly, he does not mention Nina Totenberg’s scoop about Anita Hill’s sexual harassment complaints against Clarence Thomas, or the controversy surrounding her friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Still, a book this size would have benefited from less gossip and more critical analysis. The final chapter centers on the radio producer Ira Glass, who struggled to find his place as a young NPR staffer in the 1980s, only to create the blockbuster series “This American Life” after moving to Chicago and partnering with WBEZ. Without more context, this episode feels out of place.
In a three-page epilogue Oney claims that NPR is “a beacon of not just news but, in a divided nation, of fair-mindedness.” Readers of this newspaper will likely agree — as I do — but a large plurality of Americans may not. Today, the network faces declining listenership and sponsorship, and that was before Trump was elected to a second term. Whether NPR diversifies and innovates will determine whether it survives for another half century.
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