[April 20th marks the 50th anniversary of NPR’s first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of radio histories and contexts, leading up to a Guest Post from a colleague whose upcoming book on college radio should be a must-read!]
On three
programs that illustrate the evolution and the range of National Public Radio.
1)
All Things
Considered: The afternoon drive-time news show ATC was NPR’s
first news program, debuting on May 3, 1971, just two weeks after the
network’s first broadcast. Hosted by reporter
and foreign affairs correspondent Robert Conley, that first show focused on
an anti-Vietnam War March on Washington, making clear that ATC would engage with the most immediate and controversial news
topics. Over the 50 years since, ATC
has continued to do so, modeling a multi-layered approach to presenting such
topics that strives less for the myth of pure objectivity (since news coverage
always involves choices and emphases) but rather for a genuine sense of
balance, featuring distinct voices and perspectives on these unfolding stories
that do justice to the program’s name.
2)
Car Talk: As public
radio continued to grow, countless local stations sprung up, with one of the
flashship such stations Boston’s WBUR.
Along with news coverage, such stations featured other local programming, and
an early favorite on WBUR was the automotive and humor show Car Talk, which debuted in 1977 featuring
Cambridge brothers and mechanics Tom and Ray
Magliozzi (or “Click and Clack,” their radio personas). By 1986 the show
had become so popular that NPR picked it up for the national network, and it
would remain a weekly fixture through 2012 when the brothers finally ended the
program (with reruns continuing to be broadcast nationally through 2017). Car Talk illustrated not just NPR’s
extension into more specialized topics, but also and especially the evolution
of programming to include other genres and tones (including humor), all of which
gave the network far more staying power and cultural influence than would have
been possible with straight news reporting.
3)
Code Switch: In April
2013, NPR
debuted Code Switch, an online
blog that contributed stories to a number of NPR programs; three years later,
the Code
Switch podcast was launched to
cover its own stories in more depth (both that first blog post and first
podcast episode were spearheaded by journalist Gene Demby). Just
about every detail of that sentence reveals how NPR has continued to evolve in
the 21st century, and how new media and forms have helped the
network extend, deepen, and even challenge its longstanding work and goals. I
would particularly emphasize that said evolution, growth, and challenge has
been not just through new genres such as blogs and podcasts (although duh), but
also and even more importantly the inclusion of the more genuinely
multi-cultural voices and perspectives that shows like Code Switch have featured and amplified. If NPR is to remain
relevant in the 2020s (and I very much hope it will), more and more programs
like Code Switch will have to be part
of the mix.
Next
RadioStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other radio histories or stories you’d share?
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