SUSAN, LINDA, NINA & COKIE

How four of the most important women journalists of the past five decades ended up together at the then-fledgling National Public Radio.

In this natural follow-up to Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News (2020), Napoli narrates the origin stories of NPR’s female journalistic superheroes: Susan Stamberg and Linda Wertheimer, who launched the network’s groundbreaking, signature show All Things Considered; preeminent legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, an expert on the Supreme Court; and pioneering political journalist Cokie Roberts. Though their early paths differed, they joined forces at NPR, overqualified and underpaid due to the widespread gender discrimination of the day. At the time, writes the author, “there were no jobs for women or the company already ‘had its woman.’…Even women with degrees from elite schools, it seemed, attended secretarial courses after graduation in order to equip themselves for the working world.” The quartet banded together (their area of the newsroom was nicknamed the “Fallopian Jungle”) to push for change for women and minorities. “Regarding hiring and union matters and management issues,” writes Napoli, “they did not hold back….They weren’t women in power—though, had they wished, they could likely have seized it—they were women of power.” Though they sound like journalism’s Justice League, the author doesn’t provide adequate documentation of them springing into action together, and she dwells more on their struggles than their successes. She wraps up the primary narrative with NPR’s near bankruptcy in the 1980s even though the “founding mothers” had little to do with either causing or solving the network’s financial woes. In a history filled with so many powerful moments and fascinating details about journalism, perseverance, and gender bias, Napoli could have chosen a higher note for her conclusion.

A flawed yet well-researched deep dive into the careers of the journalists who helped make NPR a household name.