NPR: Broadcasting tote bags since 1971. But can they survive a knife fight, their own risk aversion, and that they still think they’re college radio?
While Fox News and right-wing talk radio built empires of outrage, National Public Radio quietly revolutionized American broadcasting with a different model: nuance, narrative, and long-form journalism in a sea of hot takes. But has NPR’s time passed?
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with Steve Oney, who has written what may be the definitive history of NPR, On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR.
Oney tells us how this “last piece of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society” transformed from a scrappy, revolutionary outfit to a cultural institution now fighting for its survival. What began as idealistic college-radio veterans attempting to “elevate radio” has faced constant existential threats — from Ronald Reagan’s near-fatal funding cuts to Newt Gingrich’s attacks to today’s threats from Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
One of NPR’s greatest strengths — its unique ability to serve both local and national audiences through its confederacy of member stations — may be its undoing in the streaming age, as listeners now bypass stations to access content directly.
Oney reveals how NPR missed a crucial opportunity in the 1980s to privatize under visionary leader Frank Mankiewicz, whose plan to free the network from government dependence collapsed due to premature technology adoption, bringing NPR within hours of bankruptcy.
But NPR’s greatest enemy might be itself: The broadcaster’s “collectivist mentality” that prioritizes consensus over hard-hitting journalism has repeatedly hamstrung innovation. Oney explains how they rejected Ira Glass’s groundbreaking This American Life concept, as well as completely missed the podcast revolution.
They pushed aside Bob Edwards when he was neck-and-neck with Rush Limbaugh for morning radio dominance.
They’ve repeatedly mismanaged finances and leadership, with a paradoxical self-image: simultaneously believing they’re “better than everybody else” yet dismissing themselves as “just college radio.”
To survive today’s media landscape, NPR must shed its risk-averse nature and fight back with the same fierce determination that created its groundbreaking journalism in the first place. Too often, as Jon Stewart has quipped, NPR has brought a tote bag to a knife fight.
NPR’s loss would create a void in American media — not just for its in-depth reporting, but for its unique ability to bridge the local and national, providing coherence in an increasingly fragmented world.
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[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. While Limbaugh and company were building a conservative talk radio empire in the late 80s, and Fox News was still just Murdoch’s dream, NPR had already been quietly revolutionizing American broadcasting for decades. We take it for granted now, this island of long-form journalism in a sea of hot takes and partisan shouting. But in 1971, when a group of young idealists first went on the air with stories about the Vietnam War protests and Allen Ginsberg talking about Nobody could have predicted what would follow. The story of national public radio unfolds against America’s fracturing media landscape, occupying a unique position that perhaps inadvertently prevented the rise of a successful liberal counterpart to right-wing talk radio. While commercial radio chased ratings with shorter segments and more outrage, NPR doubled down on nuance and narrative, creating a completely different model of what audio journalism could be. Few journalists have spent as much time examining this uniquely American institution as my guest today, Steve Oney. After 14 years of research and countless interviews with key players, he produced what will likely stand as the defining account of NPR’s first five decades. Steve Oney is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine. His new book, On Air, The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, takes us behind the microphones to understand how public radio became such a powerful cultural force and why it may now be facing its greatest challenge in an era of podcasts, streaming, and increasingly polarized media consumption. It is my pleasure to welcome Steve Oney here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Steve, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:02:13] Steve Oney: Thank you, Jeff, and thank you for that glowing introduction.
[00:02:15] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you. Go back to the early 1970s and talk about NPR in terms of its original mission. What was the idea? What did they set out to accomplish given the tenor of those times, which were so different back in the early 70s?
[00:02:35] Steve Oney: Well, NPR was the last piece of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. He created both NPR and PBS with the Public Broadcasting Act. And the revolutionaries behind NPR, and they were revolutionaries, although most of them came from small Midwestern college campuses where they’d worked on college stations, their idea was to elevate radio, which they saw as the stepchild of electronic media, and to make this forgotten medium, as it was sometimes called then, into a leader in broadcasting. And it was an insanely ambitious idea, and I think only a place as underfunded and seemingly at first beside the point as NPR would have taken it on. But there was a visionary named Bill Seemering, who was the first programming director of NPR, and in fact, invented all things considered. And he heard in his mind what he thought public radio should sound like. These long stories you mentioned in your introduction, deadline documentaries on their first day of broadcast of all things considered, they put together a 20-plus minute documentary in a few hours about the nation’s biggest anti-Vietnam War demonstration, which was happening that day in Washington, D.C. So it was an attempt to transform radio into a supple and revolutionary way of conveying what it’s like to be alive in the world. And it wasn’t always good. It was often sloppy. One of the executives at National Public Radio said after their first couple of weeks of broadcast, our child has been born and it is ugly. But it almost had to be because they were pushing the limits. They did not have a lot of funding and they had very few reporters and producers to work with. So improbably and probably because it was so improbable, they ended up not knowing the height of the mountain they were going to try to climb and they set out to climb it.
[00:04:45] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about it in relationship to television, because it was really a period of time when television was also growing in importance with respect to news and information. When NPR started, we were only 10 years out from the Kennedy-Nixon debate. So the television was taking on a greater and greater role in information and news.
[00:05:07] Steve Oney: Yes, television news was still great in the 1970s and on through the 1980s. And Walter Cronkite was still hosting the CBS Evening News. And soon you would have Ted Koppel coming along with Nightline. And there were long form documentaries regularly broadcast on the commercial networks. And soon enough, you would have CNN as well. But NPR had the notion that you could build a network of stations from these college stations scattered around the country and from big independents like WGBH and Boston, and you could link them up and have a transformative delivery system for this transformative project. And again, they weren’t perfect at it. They stumbled. Then they caught themselves and made a little bit of improvement, fell back. It was a long, long haul before NPR began to sound like it does today. But even at the first, there were moments of inspiration. And luckily, they had some very, very good early employees. Susan Sandberg was on the startup staff of NPR. And initially, she was a producer and an occasional on-air reporter. And her predecessor as anchor of All Things Considered flamed out. And Susan was brought in off the cuff and became the first woman to host a national news show on any American network, radio or television. So there were some very strong people there. I mean, I think we have to think back to what the 70s was like. It was a sloppy time, but it was also a time of opportunity and optimism. And a lot of people thought they could reinvent the world. It was a creative moment. I think we’re now living through a kind of retraction of that creativity and a fearfulness. But people were bold, and radio became and probably this bold medium for these bold people.
[00:07:08] Jeff Schechtman: It seems that one of the geniuses of NPR, and whether it was intentional or not, you tell me, is that it managed to be both national and local at the same time, that because of the local stations, it managed to have a deeper connection to the communities that it was serving. But it also worked on a national level.
[00:07:29] Steve Oney: Yes, NPR is a strange operation. It is not really a network. There is a central production house in Washington, D.C., and then the stations are independently operated and they choose whether to buy the programming that NPR sends down the pike. So they are really the consumer of NPR’s broadcasting, and they produce their own pieces for local inserts on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. And many of the stations became powerhouses in their own right and started producing some of their own shows, like Marketplace, which is produced outside of NPR and is an excellent show. But the result was, and I’m going to jump forward, NPR has always been a financially risky operation, and it’s always been cheating death and running from its pursuers who have been chasing it all through its career. But in the mid-1980s, Gingrich learned a surprising lesson when he made this threat, which he thought was against this bureaucratic broadcaster, NPR, in Washington, D.C. The threat translated out to the stations as being a threat to their independent radio operations in all these middle-sized and small towns scattered across the United States. So it felt to the stations and to the communities that Newt Gingrich was going after their station, going after their community. And that move was roundly defeated, surprisingly, to Gingrich. The world has changed now, and I don’t know what NPR’s fate will be in this latest round to cut off its funding. But it does have extraordinary support out in the country, as you say, because of the unusual way it’s structured. It’s a confederacy, really. These member stations are, in some ways, as powerful as the network.
[00:09:24] Jeff Schechtman: In the age of streaming, the reverse danger has also happened, where people could get the national shows they want. They could listen to All Things Considered. They could listen to Fresh Air. They could listen to anything they want via streaming without having to go through their local station.
[00:09:40] Steve Oney: Yes, that’s a big issue for NPR, and they still haven’t really found a way around it. There was a move 10 years or so ago to change the name to National Public Media. That failed resoundingly within NPR because the stations rebelled. Radio is their medium. This is a radio network. And so they changed the name from National Public Radio to NPR, at least retaining the reference to radio. But now when you listen to NPR on your local station, you have to wait if you’re on the West Coast, as we happen to be, you have to wait to the end of the day to hear the breaking news that is posted in the morning on NPR, because they don’t start airing it on the website until the stations, until their clock has passed and All Things Considered has gone off the air in Pacific Standard Time. So it’s called the bypass issue, and it’s been a big conundrum for public radio, and they have yet to solve it.
[00:10:43] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about how NPR responded, reacted to either either corporately or even the individuals within NPR as the face of radio changed, particularly as we got to the mid 80s and beyond, with right wing talk radio having such a profound influence.
[00:11:01] Steve Oney: NPR is, I think, it wouldn’t admit it, but it is a fairly liberal network, and their news, if you listen to it day after day, is balanced. I’ve been listening a lot these last few weeks because there is so much news, and I think they’ve been very fair minded and have avoided easy shots at the right and at President Trump. And yet many people who listen to NPR nonetheless feel it is biased. And NPR’s one big experiment in bringing in a conservative commentator, Juan Williams, failed terribly. NPR clumsily fired Juan because Juan said some impolitic things or he made some comments that were viewed as impolitic in his dual role as a commentator on Fox News. And most infamously, he said that Muslim passengers on airliners made him nervous. Now, he said this at a time of great concern, not that long after 9-11. And most people within NPR thought he was a commentator and he had the right to say that. But the executives at NPR were offended and they clumsily fired Juan when, in fact, they’d set out to hire him because he’d been at Fox News for three years before he got to NPR. They wanted to bring some of that conservative credibility to their network. And then when they got it, they weren’t happy with what they got. So, you know, unfortunately, we live in a time where people stovepike their information and they turn on to cable channels or to social media outlets that confirm their biases and tell them what they want to hear. So it’s difficult to run a network down the middle, as I believe NPR, even though I think there’s this liberal instinct there, even though NPR tries to run a network down the middle, it’s hard because the audience is skewing left and right. And it’s one of my fears about journalism, not just in radio, but throughout all journalistic media that, you know, what happened to the audience that appreciated hearing both the right and the left and the middle? To me, that’s where good news goes. Good news often does not confirm your bias. Good story challenges you. And that, to me, is the strength of journalism. It doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you might need to hear and learn from.
[00:13:28] Jeff Schechtman: So much of the perception of NPR as being liberal comes from who its enemies have been over the years. You mentioned Gingrich a little while ago, but it also goes back to Reagan and every president and key Republican since has been really out to get NPR.
[00:13:46] Steve Oney: Yes, NPR has had several near-death experiences. The worst was with Ronald Reagan, who also wanted to end all public funding for NPR and PBS. And at that time, NPR was run by this brilliant but undisciplined man, Frank Mankiewicz, who had been the campaign secretary for Ronald F. Kennedy when he ran for president and was the campaign manager for George McGovern when he didn’t run for president. And the Mankiewicz took a flyer on some innovative online approaches to disseminate NPR’s content. The technology was not yet good enough, and Mankiewicz ended up running NPR nearly into the ground and deeply into debt. This was all because he was trying to deal with this threat from the Reagan administration. And, you know, it’s a paradox, public broadcasting. It covers politics, yet it’s paid for largely by the people it covers. So how do you do objective news when one of the big sources of your finances is the government itself? And, you know, purists would say, well, NPR gets very little money directly from the government. And that’s true. But the stations get a considerable amount of money from the government, and then they use that to buy NPR’s programming. So if the threat today does play out and Elon Musk and Donald Trump managed to badly reduce the amount of federal funding that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it will it will threaten NPR. They need that money.
[00:15:24] Jeff Schechtman: Would NPR have been better off at a certain point in time to become commercial? Because certainly in terms of its sponsorships, its corporate sponsorships, it has become almost commercial without entirely the benefit of that.
[00:15:38] Steve Oney: Right. I think it would have been. Now, how do you it’d be the opposite of nationalizing a company. How do you privatize a government entity like NPR? And that was Mankiewicz’s brilliant idea. Mankiewicz said, and we’re going back to the 1980s, but he would say off the fix by 86. And he meant that he was going to divorce NPR from any federal support. He had these ideas about online distribution and data storage. And really, he saw the Internet and handheld devices before the technology was ready. And he had his salespeople going out to the stations holding little prototype iPads and iPods and saying, you know, we’ll be able to put your news right on there. And in truth, that happened, but it didn’t happen for another 20 years. And so Mankiewicz, his dream was to make NPR private, and it failed because the technology wasn’t ready. And it’s too bad somebody didn’t try it 20 years later. But by that point, the dynamic had changed politically. And the lesson of Mankiewicz’s failed attempt was so sobering for NPR. NPR came within hours of going out of business because of Mankiewicz’s ill-considered attempt to leap into new technologies. And it was only because NPR got a multimillion dollar bailout at the 11th hour that it survived. It was in bad, bad shape in 1983.
[00:17:11] Jeff Schechtman: How much of the problems that NPR has faced over the years has come from the failure of leadership? You talk about the fact that it has been less a business and more of a dysfunctional family.
[00:17:23] Steve Oney: Well, the received wisdom among people who work at NPR is there are an awful lot of brilliant reporters, producers, editors at the network, but there have never been many good CEOs or managers. And in part, that’s because there haven’t been that many good ones. There have been some good ones. There was a brilliant guy named Kevin Close who single handedly secured Joan Proctor’s two hundred and thirty five million dollar bequest to NPR, for which NPR will be eternally grateful. But, you know, it’s hard to get a manager of a public radio network who can crack the whip because public radio is like college radio and everyone is there not because they’re trying to make a fortune, although people now get paid pretty well in public radio. They’re there because they believe in the mission. They’re there with the same sort of earnestness and optimism that people go to graduate school. And so it’s very difficult to have a integrated command, an integrated system of you do what I tell you to do because I’m the boss. NPR has never worked like that. NPR is more collectivist and that’s difficult. And there have been some brilliant editors and reporters who’ve left NPR precisely because of that, because they believed the mission is good journalism. The mission is not community building. The mission is not keeping one another happy or making a safe space, all of which is important within NPR.
[00:18:59] Jeff Schechtman: I want to come back to something I mentioned before and talk a little more about that. How NPR felt about existing essentially side by side with conservative talk radio, which it was really competing against on the radio for many, many years, particularly as we got to the mid 80s through the mid 90s, really into the late 90s.
[00:19:19] Steve Oney: 2000, when Bob Edwards, after nearly 25 years as host of Morning Edition, was about to be pushed aside, Bob Edwards and Rush Limbaugh were neck and neck for the biggest audience in morning radio. And Morning Edition was a juggernaut. It still is to a lesser degree. But under Bob Edwards, it was as competitive as anything on the air in the morning. And NPR pushed Bob aside very clumsily without sufficiently stating its case to the public, in part because of this naivete that I mentioned a second ago, NPR still had trouble conceiving of itself as a major competitive force in news. They thought that they could dismiss Bob Edwards, push him into a correspondence role, and nobody would notice. But everyone noticed because Bob Edwards, Morning Edition was nearly as big as Rush Limbaugh. So NPR didn’t appreciate when it fired Bob Edwards that it was shoving aside the second most popular on-air personality in all of America in morning news, in morning broadcasting of any sort, really. And this goes to the weaknesses I spoke of a moment ago about NPR, this collectivist mentality where they don’t take themselves quite as seriously as they should because they think it’s still just college radio. And early in my book, I described this paradox of NPR that if you work at NPR, you simultaneously think you’re better than and worse than everybody else. You’re better than because you’re there for the mission and you’re doing this very high wire act of great journalism and storytelling. But you also shrug your shoulders and say, well, it’s college radio. It’s public radio. It’s not commercial radio. So there’s a paradox within NPR and it’s a hard thing for them to get over, to take themselves as seriously as they should take themselves with pride.
[00:21:28] Jeff Schechtman: As radio has changed, as radio has become something that is a bit of a dinosaur in many quarters, talk a little bit about how NPR has responded to that. Have they acknowledged it? Have they realized that they needed to pivot or that they would become very stale, very
[00:21:46] Steve Oney: old news? NPR has had difficulty creating new programming. Now, they have their great music service, All Songs Considered and NPRmusic.org, which is very successful and features these tiny desk concerts. But simultaneously, they’ve rejected shows like This American Life. Ira Glass worked at NPR for 17 years and he went off to WBEZ in Chicago and created This American Life. And as he was getting it off the ground, he and Tori Malatia, the producer of the show at WBEZ, pitched it to NPR and NPR rejected it. The executives at NPR didn’t understand what Ira Glass was trying to do. Ira Glass was trying to create a narrative storytelling medium. Excuse me. Ira was trying to advance these one hour documentaries every week and NPR didn’t quite get it. So NPR has a reputation of being risk averse. And some of this is because of the economics. They’re under tight budgetary constraints now. So it’s expensive to make long format radio shows. Podcasts are, if you do a produced podcast, they’re as expensive as a small indie documentary. And the economics of NPR mitigate against that right now. But if I was running NPR, I would push hard into that area because that seems to be where the future is going. And I think they missed out when they, not think, they missed out when they did not sign Ira Glass. And the example that proves that is that the new New York Times half hour news summary show, The Daily, is really just This American Life in a half hour format. It’s produced by people who used to work for Ira Glass, and it’s trying to use the narrative techniques of This American Life to tell one big story a day that the New York Times is covering. So I think that’s a part of where the electronic media is headed toward this long form storytelling. And in my chapter on Ira Glass, which I conclude my book with, Ira’s got some fascinating ideas about how narrative storytelling helps get you out of this confirmation bind, where when you turn on the news, you want to hear either the right wing or the left wing. Ira says, if I can tell you a story and take you someplace new and introduce you to some characters whose humanity you might like to get interested in, I can transcend that back and forth. And it can be a fresh presentation of events that you think you already know all about. And that’s Ira’s genius. And that’s why This American Life is so good. Ira’s really thought about how stories are constructed and how we consume stories and what they mean to us as listeners and as a culture. And NPR has shied away from that. NPR has stayed with its steak and potatoes approach of all things considered in Morning
[00:24:56] Jeff Schechtman: Edition. In many ways, it has passed them by once and may pass them by again. That NPR could have been at the cutting edge of the movement in podcasts. The work that companies like Gimlet and Wondery did, NPR could have been at the cutting edge of. And now everything is starting to move towards video where they’re even further
[00:25:17] Steve Oney: behind. I think they’re behind. I think they’ve got a real race they need to run to catch up. And I hope they’re running a big media empire is a dicey business. And NPR is a big media empire. And to be a chief executive at a company like that, you have to be willing to take risks, take chances and have ideas about the way the medium works, about how stories are told. And this is what Ira Glass is so great at. And NPR has often said no to innovators through the years. Why? It’s a risk averse network. It’s a many things. I have some sections in the book where talented journalists who worked at NPR briefly left. And one of the reasons they left is they said that NPR is governed by community, by consensus, and that journalism is not really about community and consensus. Journalism is about great stories that you take on and do aggressively and without fear of favor, as The New York Times would say, solely because they’re great stories. And NPR has had trouble rising to that standard.
[00:26:29] Jeff Schechtman: Given all of this and given all the years you have watched, you’ve looked at, studied NPR, looked at where it’s come from, where it is and where it’s going. What is your sense of what the future might be for NPR at this point?
[00:26:43] Steve Oney: I think Trump is serious and I think NPR is going to have to fight. And there’s a famous moment in NPR’s history where following the firing of Juan Williams, Fox News responded by giving Juan Williams a two million dollar contract. And that was a stick in the eye of budget conscious, consensus minded NPR. And NPR was unable to fight back. And Jon Stewart on his show on Comedy Central did a devastating bit about it. He said, NPR, you’re in a fight and you brought a tote bag of David Sedaris books to a knife fight. And David Sedaris is the brilliant essayist and commentator who got his start on Morning Edition. He was a regular on Bob Edwards Morning Edition with his famous inaugural piece about the Christmas elves at Macy’s. And David had worked there as a Christmas elf and wrote and then performed this fabulous sketch about the absurdities of being a Christmas elf at a big department store. And yet that’s a kind of sweet, benign quality that David Sedaris projects in both that piece and in all his work that has too often defined NPR in a rough and brutal world that that’s all wonderful to hear. And we love David Sedaris and I could listen to him and read him all every day. But in a fight like the fight being had right now, you can’t present that way if you’re NPR. You have to bring a knife to the knife fight. So that would be my advice to the executives at NPR to hire a crisis public relations expert and fight this at the local and national level. Whether they will do that, I don’t know.
[00:28:32] Jeff Schechtman: Is the leadership there to do it, do you think?
[00:28:34] Steve Oney: I’m not sure. You know, I’ve not met Catherine Mare, the new CEO. I was a little surprised that NPR hired her considering some of her impolitic tweets that preceded her when she was at Withipedia and attacked Donald Trump, attacked Governor Abbott in Texas. I mean, that’s all fine and good if you’re a private citizen. But if you’re an executive of a big media company that is balancing the left and the right and trying to go down the middle, to me, that is ill considered. But whether she’s got the brains and the vision to push past that, time will tell. I hope she does. I hope that was just a blemish on her resume and has nothing to do with how she performs going forward.
[00:29:20] Jeff Schechtman: And I guess the final and broader question is that given some of the work that is being done at places like The New York Times that you mentioned before, and in so many podcasts and in independent media around, whether NPR’s time has simply passed.
[00:29:36] Steve Oney: It’s a fair question, and I don’t know. All I know is the world would be lonelier without NPR. And I would miss, if I was driving someplace, hearing all things considered covering the day’s events. I would miss the five hour news inserts where they bring you up to date on headlines occurring around the country. There’s nothing like that on commercial radio. So NPR still provides continuity and information in ways that are smart. And we can absorb and help bind us together as a society. I remember reading a great piece in The New Yorker during a baseball strike several decades ago. And Roger Angel was writing about how riding through Central Park on a weeknight in summer was so lonely because there was no longer any baseball play by play on the radio. You miss that chatter. You miss the background noise of the crowd. It provides coherence to a scattered world. And I think NPR, whether it’s failing or not to keep up with the times, still does provide coherence in a scattered world.
[00:30:44] Jeff Schechtman: Steve Oney, his book is On Air, The Triumph and Tumult of NPR. Steve, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the Who, What, Why
[00:30:52] Steve Oney: podcast. Jeff, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Your questions were great. I appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:30:58] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
