National Public Radio

Origins

NPR originated out of a view of radio as having an educational and cultural purpose. Following the early 1967 recommendations of the Carnegie Commission, which was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) to examine the future of educational broadcasting, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act in October 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The term public was coined by the Carnegie group and the new law to stress the role of public participation in the developing noncommercial broadcasting system. Over the next year or so, CPB would, in turn, create and oversee both NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Although the radio did not appear in the original Carnegie recommendations, the concerted efforts of advocates of noncommercial radio helped get radio included in the act.

NPR was formed in 1970 to improve the quality of public radio by improving programming and strengthening local public radio stations known as affiliates. A mission statement written by William Siemering, NPR's first head of programming operations, said that NPR would “serve the individual” and celebrate the varied nature of the human experience, thus offering an alternative to what was available on commercial radio.

The first NPR news program to air was All Things Considered (ATC), a 90-minute news magazine that was heard on over 80 member stations around the country at 5 p.m. (EST) May 3, 1971.   This first broadcast included a lengthy report on the May Day protests against the ongoing Vietnam War by college students and veterans, a piece on a heroin-addicted nurse, and a story from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that combined antiwar poetry with songs and sounds of battle from World War I.

In its early days, ATC exhibited little structure and varied from day to day depending on what staff members offered to fill the time slot. When Jack Mitchell became the show's producer in 1972, he imposed a more conventional journalistic [Page 928]format on the program, placing a newscast at the top of each hour, with stories ordered based on their newsworthiness. He also added a co-host when he hired Susan Stamberg, who would become the voice of ATC for the next 15 years.

The 1970s were a period of dramatic growth and program development at NPR. The opening of a London bureau was a signal that the network was serious about covering international news. Because NPR had limited resources, the program emphasized analysis and interpretation over breaking news coverage. Jack Mitchell says, “the reports gave listeners background, viewpoints and perspectives” from a variety of sources—academics, journalists and the common man (Mitchell 2005, 72). Over the years this was to change as the network added more reporters like Robert Zelnick, Linda Wertheimer, Cokie Roberts, and Nina Totenberg to cover the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Supreme Court, beats that were essential to a mainstream news organization.

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