Entertainment
NPR Has Always Been Fighting for Its Life
A new book by Steve Oney traces the public radio network’s turbulent history as it once again becomes a political target.
ON AIR: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, by Steve Oney
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.
