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all things considered
A top radio host on what makes her show work
By Gabriel Spitzer
"All Things Considered," National Public Radio’s flagship newscast, celebrated its 30th anniversary last week. One of its first staffers was Linda Wertheimer, who became the program’s first director in the early 1970s. "All Things Considered’s" signature mix of hard news and quirky features has become part of America’s cultural landscape, broadcast on 534 stations nationwide, with a weekly audience approaching 10 million people. Wertheimer became a full-time host of "All Things Considered" in 1989, joining her longtime co-hosts Robert Siegel and Noah Adams to form a triumvirate of what may be the most recognizable voices in radio.
What appeals to you about a radio newscast? What can it do that other media can’t?
One of the great things about radio is that it is so easy to deal with. You can put a radio in your pocket. There’s a radio in your car. It’s not a big investment to have a radio in every room of your house. And they’re cheap—it’s just an inexpensive little box that gets the world into you, in spite of all the things we always hear about what the next medium will be that will send everything else to its death.
Radio has an intimacy to it that works really well in small spaces like cars. You can have a conversation with your listeners.
We hear all the time from people who say they talk back to their radios. I’ve had young people tell me they remember from when they were little-bitty that they could sing the theme from "All Things Considered."
People send us pictures of their babies and tell us how their first words were, "I’m Robert Siegel."
The great secret weapon of radio is that everybody visualizes everything, and often the pictures are much more vivid than anything they might see on TV. It doesn’t quite pin you down like television does.
We can also convey a lot of information by the way a news source sounds. There’s a lot of import in the sound of a voice that doesn’t exist in a quote on the page.
Can you describe the beginning of your working relationship with Robert and Noah?
I came to NPR in 1971, Noah in 1975 and Robert in 1976. We’ve all known each other for a very long time.
I worked with Robert when he was news director of the program, and I started hosting the show as a substitute.
So when I finally sat down in that chair, it was amazing for me but it wasn’t in any way strange. There was no feeling of adjusting to the two of them.
We rigged this setup that we have now, which works wonderfully well for us, which is to have three hosts on "All Things Considered" and any two can play. Or in an emergency any one can play. But it gives us a lot of liberty to run around the country to do some reporting as well as sitting in the studio doing interviews.
There is a perception that during the mid-'90s public radio was basically running for its life as Congress was threatening to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. In retrospect, how serious was that threat? How did it affect the culture of NPR?
It never got serious enough to change the culture of the place, though I think it was quite serious.
What happened was, there were certain folks, Congressman Gingrich chief among them, who came in and started talking about various kinds of programs they thought ought to be eliminated.
National Public Radio had switched gears over the years so that the bulk of our money comes from stations. We don’t get the kind of gargantuan grants, the sort of budget-killing grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that we did in the early years. So we sort of tried to deal with that kind of vulnerability.
Really what happened was that these guys came in and they started talking about what they’d like to do. They heard from their constituents who said: "Don’t lay your hand on the big bird. ‘All Things Considered’ is very important to me. What are you doing?"
And they sort of realized that this wasn’t going to be as much fun as they originally thought.
I think also they were surprised to find that they had as many conservative constituents as they did who rely on these programs for news. They got a lot of letters that said "what am I supposed to do on my commute?"
They began to feel that this was not going to be as entertaining as they imagined it would be.
So it never really developed into a full-blown, you-are-two-days-from-extinction kind of threat. Therefore we didn’t get as excited about it as we might have done.
Another public radio personality, Garrison Keillor, has remarked that he believes "All Things Considered" has grown "soft" over the years, that it’s lost its emphasis on hard news and lost some of its relevancy with the rise of cable television. How do you respond to that?
Our audience has been going steadily up and up, so we’re doing something right.
We’ve always had a mix of hard news and features, longer pieces and shorter pieces. We always have newscasts, which kind of backstop us whenever we’re wandering around, with all of the day’s news firmly located in six minutes, in case you missed something.
It was never intended to hit you over the head for two hours with everything that happened in the Balkans. It was always intended to be something that would give you the same kind of feeling that you’d covered the waterfront as you would get if you leafed through a good daily paper, from front to back, news to style to sports. Or as my husband would go, from sports to news to style.
What’s changed most since you began "All Things Considered" in the mid-'70s?
We’re much bigger.
"All Things Considered" is also two hours long now instead of 90 minutes. On a reasonably good news day, there’s a lot of competition for space in those two hours.
In the very early days, we were always threatening to call up [former host] Susan Stamberg for her interpretive dance.
We have many more reporters, we have bureaus all over the country and all over the world. We also have a lot of editors who are attempting to keep us on the straight-and-narrow in terms of getting it right. That’s not only different, it’s better.
What has changed is that we can get people into any part of the world we need to within a relatively short period of time.
The most recent bureau we opened was in South America. Before that it was Mexico, before that Delhi.
We’re spending a lot of time trying to put people around the world in useful places, and around the country too.
I think the basic philosophy has changed remarkably little, in that this should be a calm and rational conversation with our listeners. We should learn along with them, we should not be the voice of God from the mountain top, but the voice of a curious, intelligent, inquiring person, of the same sort as our listeners are. That part of it hasn’t changed.
May 10, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.
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