Every work of narrative builds on those that preceded it. In the case of Steve Oney‘s On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, two books cited by the author as inspirations are illuminating as to his approach to the sprawling, decades-long story of public radio.
One of them is David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. The other is Adam Nagourney’s The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.
McCullough’s tale is “about great American projects and how Americans do things,” Oney told Deadline in an interview. Nagourney’s approach to a contemporary news organization, meanwhile, was published in 2023 but takes readers only through 2016. Similarly, Oney makes no effort to bring readers into the disorienting Donald Trump era, when social media, AI and “fake news” condemnations battered traditional news purveyors. Trump’s name is mentioned just once in the 470-page book, in a passing mention of President Obama’s infamous roast of him at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
“I decided that my book is a history and it’s not about current events,” the author explained. “News is like a river, it’s flowing very fast …. It’s impossible to judge and get perspective on the current moment.”
On Air, which hit bookstores this week, skips around chronologically to tell specific stories from over the decades. He details the launch of NPR by a young and eccentric band of news and political junkies during the turmoil of the 1970s. Rather than proceeding chronologically, he delivers deeply reported chapters about Ira Glass, who spent 17 years at NPR before creating This American Life; the ouster of longtime Morning Edition anchor Bob Edwards; and the twin scandals in 2010-11 of the firing of commentator Juan Williams and a damaging Project Veritas exposé.
Early in the 14-year period of reporting and writing, Oney said he wrestled with how to structure it. “I wound up thinking, ‘What if I did it as a quilt?’” he said. “I looked for the big set pieces that I could really develop.”
One benefit to the structure is that a handful of characters, particularly Edwards, Glass and key personalities including “the troika” of lifers Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts, emerge as flesh-and-blood figures. That color is more than readers get in most large-canvas stories set against the backdrop of bureaucratic Washington, D.C.
Oney is a former staffer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Los Angeles magazine who wrote the book And the Dead Shall Rise about the lynching of Leo Frank. Like a lot of NPR listeners, he developed an attachment to it while driving in his car. As a newspaper reporter fresh out of the University of Georgia, he would tune in while en route to city council or school board meetings.
NPR, he said, “is fairly ubiquitous. It’s everywhere.” A former editor of his suggested that the origin story of NPR had the makings of a book. While the NPR brass at the time he landed a deal with a Simon & Schuster imprint left Oney with the impression he had their blessing, the leadership teams changed over multiple times en route to publication. After Uri Berliner, a longtime senior business editor at NPR, published a scathing critique in 2023 of what he called the organization’s swerve to the political left and abandonment of even-handed newsgathering, many contemporary anchors and reporters declined to speak to Oney.
The author says Berliner’s criticism “had a lot of validity,” though he says that the work of NPR is “incredible right now,” and its coverage of Trump’s initial weeks in office “and a million other things has been superb.”
As On Air documents in detail, however, NPR has always been “risk-averse.” When the Gulf War broke out in 1990, many staffers resisted covering it at all, deeming it a jingoistic exercise unfit for media participation. Even on the morning of 9/11, Edwards had to be cajoled into breaking into pre-taped segments with live accounts of the biggest loss of life at the hands of a foreign enemy since Pearl Harbor Day.
“If I was running NPR, I would be running full bore with new forms of storytelling,” Oney says of the challenge for today’s management.
The task facing all legacy news outlets is daunting, Oney conceded. Newspapers, television and radio news once had cachet, he noted. “They were not the embattled, forlorn precincts they are today. … Everyone’s feeling the same pain.”
America writ large, he said, is “going through a societal crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution began.” The idea that an “organization can be the clearinghouse of information – that idea is now on the wane.”
Even so, NPR remains a “noble and valuable enterprise,” Oney said. “Without it we become a sort of Tower of Babel speaking in different languages … I still believe in the mission.”
