Washington Versus The Sticks

This chapter explores the rapidly diverging theory and practice of the newborn National Public Radio. The early visionary of NPR, a Buffalo station manager named Bill Siemering, set out his hopes for the organization in its founding document, “National Public Radio Purposes.” This was a youthful, optimistic, full-throated statement that foresaw the development of an open, welcoming, small-d democratic, and community-minded system of radio stations that would cover and also reflect their cities and regions in all their particularistic varieties. A localist ethos was at the core of this vision, which was most emphatically not Washington-centric. National Public Radio’s earliest offerings, for instance, “All Things Considered,” sometimes strove for such an effect, but it wasn’t long before NPR lost its mildly counterculture, participatory democracy-flavored character and took on an establishment tone, becoming the radio counterpart of the New York Times and Washington Post. Politically, it made a powerful enemy in Richard Nixon, the first in a line of Republican presidents who have tried to reduce or even zero out its budget. But it was a Carter appointee, veteran Democratic operative Frank Mankiewicz, who sought to wean it off federal funds—and under whose tenure NPR nearly went off the air.