On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR

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. (Mar.)