On Air
The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
An “engrossing and entertaining…major work of media history” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the unlikely story of one of America’s most celebrated but least understood media empires.
Founded in 1970, NPR is America’s most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural powerhouse and a trusted voice, and they have created a mode of journalism and storytelling that helps Americans understand the world in which we live.
In On Air, a book fourteen years in the making, journalist Steve Oney tells the dramatic history of this institution, tracing the comings and goings of legendary on-air talents (Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Ira Glass, Cokie Roberts, and many others) and the rise and fall and occasional rise again of brilliant and sometimes venal executives. It depicts how NPR created a medium for extraordinary journalism—in which reporters and producers use microphones as paintbrushes and the voices of people around the world as the soundtrack of stories both global and local. Featuring details on the controversial firing of Juan Williams, the sloppy dismissal of Bob Edwards, and a $235 million bequest by Joan B. Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonald’s, On Air also chronicles NPR’s daring shift into the digital world and its early embrace of podcasting formats, establishing the network as a formidable media empire.
Fascinating, revelatory, and irresistibly dishy, this is a riveting account of NPR’s chaotic ascent, cultural triumph, and imperiled future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This raucous history from journalist Oney (A Man's World) recaps National Public Radio's trajectory from countercultural bulwark (Allen Ginsberg intoned about flower power on the network's inaugural broadcast, All Things Considered, in 1971) to pillar of mainstream media. Oney credits founding programming chief Bill Siemering with innovating a more conversational and personal mode of delivering news, and he offers a wry portrait of how its most famed practitioner, This American Life host Ira Glass, produces his seemingly offhand prologues with painstaking precision. Backstage melodrama abounds as Oney covers the network's near collapse in 1983 due to wild overspending and cocaine-fueled dysfunction, as well as the tense internal reckoning with the network's overwhelming whiteness and alleged liberal bias that followed the station's 2010 firing of Black conservative commentator Juan Williams. Oney's gossipy narrative unsparingly dissects the network's prima donna egos, describing how "the troika"—journalists Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer—used their celebrity to wield de facto veto power over personnel decisions in the '70s and '80s, and how correspondent Anne Garrels, under stress while reporting from wartime Iraq, sank into depression and drink while bickering constantly with other members of NPR's Baghdad bureau. Oney's fleet-footed storytelling and immersive prose bring to life the network's colorful personalities. The result is an entertaining window into the creative but rancorous scene at one of journalism's most hallowed institutions.
