ON AIR

A sprawling history of an American institution that gets plenty of love, if too little money.

“It was an odd assortment of folks,” said one of the first reporters to join National Public Radio when it went live in 1971, adding that he was hired “as a safety in case these crazies went off the deep end.” Some of the “crazies,” Oney’s comprehensive history reveals, were pretty crazy indeed, especially when cocaine became commonplace in the 1980s: “There was nothing like snorting lines while wrestling with a complex story that required dozens of precise cuts and aural nuances,” observes the longtime journalist and author. For some, “it was like ingesting a focusing device that enhanced one’s powers of calibration.” That such antics raised managerial hackles was another matter. NPR was famously packed with a talented staff that included Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Scott Simon, and Noah Adams, each of whom brought tremendous skills to the job of reporting. Some of those skills were perhaps not the stuff of other media hotshots: there was the nerdiness—quite successful, eventually—of Ira Glass, while, as Oney notes, Stamberg’s standout strength was “a willingness to pose the obvious question,” the answer to which “everyone wanted to know.” Talent and superb journalism notwithstanding, by Oney’s account NPR was always strapped for money and sometimes held hostage by a hostile, politically much more conservative Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its management and internal politics were sometimes messy as well: One boneheaded executive decision that fortunately didn’t endure was to “de-emphasize distinctive personalities” and hire “interchangeable and replaceable hosts.” And like so many institutions, it seems, NPR sometimes talked a good game when it came to equity but still was slow to promote women and hire minority staff; as one Black executive noted drily, “NPR news was not friendly to outsiders.”

A warts-and-all account that’s full of surprises, and with plenty of insight into the world of nonprofit media.