This Is Radio (Dammit!) Transcript (036)

PETER HALL: Greetings! I’m Peter Hall, co-host of Theater Talk on WBFO, and you’re at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn. In this episode, Peter talks with Bill Siemering. Back in 1962, Siemering was hired to transform WBFO from a student-run college radio club into a professional station. Because of the experiments in radio that he led at WBFO throughout the 1960s, Siemering was invited to serve on the first board of what would become National Public Radio. He was also invited to write the original mission statement of NPR—while he was still working in Buffalo. Siemering went on to help create NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered, and also what we know today as Fresh Air. Fifty years later, Siemering is still passionate about the power of radio, now doing much of his work in the developing world. I’m looking forward to hearing what Bill and Peter discuss, so let’s enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN (voiceover): On today’s show, Bill Siemering has long been a passionate champion of the unique power of radio …

BILL SIEMERING: Somebody asked me what I did and I said I was managing WBFO. He said, “Oh, it’s just radio?” “Yes. It’s just radio. It’s just radio, dammit!” So that’s why I ended up calling the program This Is Radio, and meant this is radio, dammit, because I wanted people to pay attention to it—the radio medium and appreciate what it could do.

[VO]: At NPR he believed that radio could deliver something different, and cutting-edge …

SIEMERING: I wanted All Things Considered to be the very first broadcast record of the day’s events. I didn’t want it to be second. Because the television comes down at 6:30, PBS came on with kind of a backstory at 7, but I wanted—I wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone.

[VO]: At WHYY in Philadelphia, he helped Terry Gross create a national program …

SIEMERING: Fresh Air, which was such an excellent program. I mean, I’d see the guests leaving after the interview. As a rule, they’d go by my office and they’d say, “You know, that’s the best interview I ever had!” I’d say, “Yeah!” Anyway—

[VO]: Plus, a few secrets …

SIEMERING: This may be too much “inside radio” to know the backstory of how this happened …

[VO]: All that and more, coming right up!

[02:57]

[VO]: Bill Siemering can recall being enthralled by the power of radio as a 6-year-old kid in a two-room schoolhouse in Wisconsin, where educational programs known as “The School of the Air” brought lessons about nature, music, and art alive in his imagination. Two decades later, in the early 1960s, when the popularity of television led many to predict that radio was on its way out, Siemering found himself broadcasting in the fertile soil of Western New York via the student-run station at the University at Buffalo, WBFO. During an extremely creative period in the history of UB, he had license to experiment and a charge from the dean who hired him to grow that small bush of a radio station into a great tree. In one project, Siemering and his staff set up five lines capturing live audio from around the city, and composer Maryanne Amacher altered and mixed the sounds into a 28-hour composition called “City Links WBFO” that they broadcast non-stop. Listeners became aware of the music in their environment, and checked the sound of the city as they might check a weather report. They could hear a steel-cutting saw and workers changing shifts at the Bethlehem Steel factory, airplanes coming in, and a machine at General Mills that sounded like musical bells. Experiments like this, and others that he and I are about to mention, made Siemering only more impassioned in his advocacy for what radio could do better—there, I said it!—than television. He began to write about what he and his staff were doing, imagining the possibilities of the transition from educational radio to what was starting to be called “public” radio. After the passage of the landmark 1967 legislation that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Siemering was asked to serve on the founding Board of Directors for National Public Radio, and then to draft what became known as the NPR “mission statement” in 1970. Over 50 years later, current NPR staffers can still quote chunks of it, and several say that it’s more important now than ever. Here’s a few lines, so you have the flavor. National Public Radio:

“… will promote personal growth rather than corporate gains; it will regard individual differences with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness. … The total service should be trustworthy, enhance intellectual development, expand knowledge, deepen aural esthetic enjoyment, increase the pleasure of living in a pluralistic society, and result in a service to listeners which makes them more responsive, informed human beings and intelligent citizens of their communities and the world.”

Again, that’s just a taste. It is a beautiful piece of writing, replete with comments and discussion, and I have a link to it for you on the show page. Siemering went on to work at WHYY in Philadelphia, home of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which he helped move from a local to a national show. A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of numerous other awards he has asked me not to mention, Bill has focused in recent decades on applications of radio for health and civil society in the developing world.

[06:47]

HORN: I wanna begin with the particular magic and power of radio as a medium, particularly how you began to experiment with it in the 1960s at WBFO in Buffalo, the decade before you helped to create National Public Radio. Let me tell you what I think I know, and then what I’m wondering. So I think I know that The School of the Air for you as a child as young as six, a first- grader going to school in a two-room schoolhouse outside Madison, Wisconsin, possibly literally growing up in the shadow of the radio tower of WHA, now Wisconsin Public Radio, one of the oldest continuously broadcasting radio stations in the U.S. I also believe that you were 13 or so when you were helping out on a farm, and you observed that the farmers came in to check out agricultural news and the weather report there. So as a student, you had The School of the Air, which had art and music and science and nature studies. You knew that there was important information that was translated to people via radio. Radio was something that you worked on in college, as student staff at the station. So all of that makes sense to me, but how you go from that basis—then understanding that there are these particular functions that radio can serve in a community—to doing the kinds of things that you were doing in Buffalo, for example inviting members of the Tuscarora Nation to tell their story themselves in their own voice, going door to door in communities on the East Side [of Buffalo, NY], in the early ‘60s, talking with African Americans about what it’s like to be Black in the United States. These seem to be radical democratic experiments, and I don’t necessarily see a straight line between these kinds of traditional uses of radio. Where did some of those ideas come for you about what you wanted to try to do? And I’m just using Buffalo as an example, because I know some of the things specifically that you did there.

SIEMERING: That’s an interesting question. Because coming from WHA, which is quite a straight operation in Madison, to Buffalo … When I went to Buffalo, the Dean of Students, Dean [Richard] Siggelkow, who I knew from Madison—he was a teacher of mine there—he said, “This is just a small bush right now, but you can help grow it.” I took that as a license to be experimental. And he backed me up all the time on this. As a university station, it should be experimental in a way that it wasn’t at Wisconsin. And as this was a student station when I arrived there—they were off the air in the summers and went on the air in the afternoons at 5 after classes. And so it wasn’t taken seriously, I don’t think, in the community or by the university. So my curiosity was to go out and discover these things. And so I discovered the Tuscarora near Niagara Falls—

[VO]: Tuscarora is one of the six indigenous nations that comprise the world’s oldest participatory democracy. Once called “Iroquois” by the French, the confederacy of nations to which the Tuscarora belong is now known more widely by its own name, the Haudenosaunee.

SIEMERING: So I did this series with them called “A Nation Within a Nation.” Again, voices that hadn’t been heard on the radio before, basically. You mentioned I had a series called “To Be Negro.” This is in the ‘60s, but what is it like to be a Black person in our society? Now that’s something that people are doing all the time now, to hear Black voices that hadn’t been heard and to hear their story. But I was doing it back then, being aware of the racial tensions. This is coming out of the ‘60s where, you know, there were demonstrations after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and before there were other reasons to be demonstrating—the inequality. So that led to bringing the studio to the heart of the Black community where 27 hours a week originated—

[VO]: Just briefly underscoring how cool this must have been, and we’re talking about 1969, 1970 at this point. Bill ardently maintains what many networks in the U.S. tend to forget: the airwaves belong to the people, so WBFO and the local residents draw up guidelines together for this storefront broadcast studio on Buffalo’s East Side, which basically provides WBFO’s programming from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. Despite that there were at this point two local commercial stations aimed at an African American audience, a DJ at this storefront center named Ed Smith was the first in Buffalo to broadcast R&B legend Roberta Flack!

SIEMERING: We organized a Black Arts Festival, and people brought in their poetry and we published it, and the program guide with photographs. We had a live jazz concert and everything. Again, a celebration of Black culture that Caucasians were unaware of at that time. So I was keenly aware, in Buffalo, particularly, of social conflicts and the social issues that I wasn’t aware of in Madison, because there weren’t those kinds of issues that were being discussed there, but this was a different environment. And I was taking pleasure, I guess, in discovering, if you will, how radio could be used for social change.

[13:52]

SIEMERING: As you know, SUNY Buffalo was regarded as the “Berkeley of the East.” There were maybe some other schools that claimed that title, but Buffalo really meant it, I think, in terms of the ferment and the excitement. There were wonderful writers, you know, Robert Creeley, Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, to name a few. There were the creative associates in music, with Lukas Foss kind of guiding that—and Allen Sapp was also the director of the Music Department where there was a lot of creativity brewing. So there was a spirit of experimentation, if you will. With radio, I took that to be an invitation. There was a festival of the arts over at the Albright-Knox art gallery, and we broadcast much of that. There was a series of culture programs at the historical museum on Sunday nights, I think it was, with different ethnic groups that represent Buffalo. And I would lug the recorder over there and record those. I think it was that spirit of experimentation, of trying stuff, that informed me in writing the [NPR] mission statement. But also, I had anger at the dismissive way radio was treated generally, especially by television, and anger at the absence of dealing with social issues in commercial radio and media. I was really angry. Television tried to push radio out of the original Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

HORN: They wanted it to be just the Corporation for Public Television.

SIEMERING: Right. Because they said radio is an embarrassment that takes money, of course, away from the “important things” like television. And I remember somebody asking me what I did and I said I was managing WBFO. He said, “Oh, it’s just radio?” “Yes. It’s just radio. It’s just radio, dammit!” So that’s why I ended up calling the program This Is Radio, and I meant this is radio, dammit, because I wanted people to pay attention to it—the radio medium and appreciate what it could do. And it grew out of covering the riots at UB, starting on February 25th, I think it was, 1970. It went on for three weeks. The police occupied the campus and there was tear-gassing and all that stuff—

[VO]: Ferment about the Vietnam War and other social issues had led to varying degrees of unrest on many college campuses by the time UB seemed to explode in late February 1970. On February 24th, Buffalo Police were summoned to a UB basketball game on account of a demonstration against allegations of racism in the athletics department. The next day, 50 students went to the office of Acting President Peter Regan, demanding an explanation for the cops. Rocks and chunks of ice were thrown at the president’s windows. Campus police responded, about 500 students eventually assembled and things deteriorated from there, with a firebomb destroying hundreds of books in a campus library, a State Supreme Court judge issuing multiple restraining orders, demonstrations of up to 2000 students and faculty at one point, sustained tension with police culminating in a public pig roast on March 10th and a March 12th confrontation resulting in the injury of 58 people, including 35 police officers. Despite that the radio station was located in a building that was at one point tear-gassed by the police, Bill and his WBFO team produced 140 hours of coverage!

HORN: So this was three weeks of active confrontation. And this was part of what you presented these differing perspectives on.

SIEMERING: Right. For example, I had on the Acting President [Peter] Regan, who was making the decisions. I asked him, “So how are your decisions—where were you when you decided to okay the police to tear-gas the union building where our studios happen to be located?” And he explained what information he had and why he okayed that. And I said, “How are your decisions affected by your being a candidate to be named permanent president?” He said, “I’ve withdrawn my name from that consideration because I wanted to be able to make those decisions independently of that.” “Good,” I thought. So then I talked to the leader of the student movement. I said, “Terry, what influenced you? You went to parochial schools, and you started at Canisius College, and so what influenced you to be a leader of this movement?” And he said, “Well, I was arrested for a civil rights demonstration and put in county jail, and I had this professor and I read these books, and that’s what made me do these things.” So I was saying, on air, “You see, there are different perceptions of reality, but different people are operating in different ways. And if you have another point of view, come on down and we’ll have that on the air.” So we broadcast the town halls that they had, and all these things. And as I said, I think it was over 140 hours. And we got praised for it in the Courier-Express [a now-defunct Buffalo newspaper]. Jack Allen said it was a “voice of reason amidst the chaos.” So that gave me some confidence in what I had written for the [NPR] “mission statement,” if you will. And I thought, “Let’s carry this on.” After this kind of wall-to-wall coverage of, I said, “Let’s do this.” And that’s where Fresh Air came from. I started This Is Radio, which was an afternoon program that had writers, musicians, sometimes news. We’d come back from a [Buffalo] City Council saying, “Here’s this really interesting exchange with, you know, Councilman Lewandowski,” and they’d play a clip and I’d say, “You can hear the whole thing on the news tonight at 6:30.” You know, that kind of thing. So I was having fun with radio, using radio as a live, vital medium. And after I left for NPR, Terry Gross became the host of This Is Radio. When they moved to Philadelphia, the producer [Danny Miller] and Terry renamed it Fresh Air. That’s the story of the history, the genetic history, if you will, of Fresh Air!

[21:31]

[VO]: Bill’s WBFO program called This Is Radio directly inspired at least two other shows. Fresh Air was one—and we talk more about its host, UB alumna Terry Gross, later on. But All Things Considered also owed lots to the experiments first conducted on This Is Radio, especially in its first year. Here’s a clip from the very first broadcast of All Things Considered, May 3rd, 1971. It’s a brilliant audio document of the anti-war protest that took place in DC earlier that day. The clip is four minutes in length, which will probably feel long by today’s standards, but consider this: the full report on that first broadcast was a sound collage lasting 23 minutes! Buckle up. This is radio!

[Excerpt from ATC story by Jeff Kamen, May 3, 1971. Edited by Susan Stamberg and Linda Wertheimer, inter alia, by the way.]

[26:47]

[VO]: Now how could I make an episode about the roots of public radio without including a pledge drive? True story: WBFO was the first station I pledged to, back in the fall of 1987, when I was in seventh grade. I liked what I heard when I listened to my local NPR station, and WBFO was mom-and-pop enough in those days to actually read the names of new and renewing members on the air. As a result, when I rolled into school the next morning, my health teacher, Mr. Jack Anthony, greeted me with his hand outstretched. He’d heard my name on the radio. “Congratulations,” he boomed. “You did a good thing.” Membership feels good, as I’m guessing you already know. If you don’t currently contribute to public radio, please consider supporting your local NPR station. I don’t need to tell you that fact-based reporting is an endangered species, and nobody does it better than NPR. And while I’ve got you, if you’re not yet a member of this podcast community, I invite you to join today. If you can swing it, get in how you fit in, with a small monthly donation or a one-time gift. It all helps to support this passion project of mine to share great ideas about what and how and why we learn, subsidizing, for example, audio equipment and batteries and gas money for a trip to Philly to interview a radio visionary. Details for how to donate are on the show page, and thank you! Back to the show. 

[28:21]

HORN: To your mind, is there a way that radio, or audio, is particularly suited to do this sort of thing well—letting people hear people, or understand people, in their own voice?

SIEMERING: Well, the voice is so expressive. The human voice is so expressive, and that comes through because you’re focusing just on that. You don’t have distracting pictures, if you will. And I think if you brought in lights and cameras and so on, it would change the environment in which somebody is talking. And for the listener, they can focus on this— People talk about how they love radio. “I just love radio”: I often hear this from listeners. I don’t hear them say, “I just love television”—somehow. Because they’re making a connection, because they create the image of who is talking, so they have an investment in what’s being said, in a way. I mean, they own the picture of the scene that’s being set for them. The voice is so important. You can just focus on that and it gets to your heart. It goes through your mind into your heart.

HORN: The voice is every bit, I believe, as unique as a fingerprint.

SIEMERING: Exactly!

HORN: In terms of how it registers, and how hear it. And as you were talking—I know that you have spoken elsewhere, or perhaps written elsewhere as well, about a kind of greater affinity between print media and radio, perhaps, than between than radio and television, in some ways—in terms of how one works, and so forth. And I was thinking about one way I would talk with students—because I felt like part of my job as an English teacher was to sell books, you know, like the idea of reading a book, you know, and to say that one of my goals was to find one book for you. If you’ve never found one, if you’ve never actually finished a book, how can we do this? And one of the ways to talk about it, a way that actually registered quite a bit with kids, was to say it’s one of the few media available, a.) without advertising. You’re not gonna have a pop-up ad, you know? But also, once you get into it, you can construct the scene. You can construct the people, the characters, with the unlimited production budget of your own mind.

SIEMERING: Right!

HORN: And you get to know them in a way that that really feels quite different than Okay, this is Scarlett Johansson playing this part, so I see see her when I think of this character. Another thing that your comment reminded me of is this profound feeling of intimacy. I think one of my first—speaking of the power of radio in the Midwest!—one of the first things that prompted me to fall in love with radio was Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, listening to the monologues and just like tuning into—you know, it was listening with my father, and so that was an association—with both parents, but my dad was a Presbyterian minister. I feel like anybody who’s got a connection to Prairie Home Companion either has a relationship to the Midwest or to mainline Protestantism—I think you have to have one or both of those for it to click, especially if you’re not in Minnesota, for example! Listening to those stories, I was just taken away as a kid—you know, I was not in his target audience! I was like a seven- or eight-year-old, you know, just getting all involved with the goings-on at the Chatterbox Cafe, but it was captivating to me. I was just gonna contrast—I enjoyed it so much that I went to see him, I think maybe even twice, when he came to Town Hall. He would do that frequently in New York City, he’d come in the winter time especially, he would do shows there. And I liked seeing “how the sausage was made,” if you will, you know, to see a radio show on stage and to see the prop table, you know, and all the [sound] effects and stuff like that. And to see what he looks like, because you know, I constructed my whole picture— (I mean that happens in radio all the time. You say, “What does this person look like?” And you’re just always wrong!) But there was also something about it that was just visually distracting. You know, I didn’t enjoy the monologue as much, because I was looking at everything. It was very different from the experience of just like even while I’m doing dishes, not giving it my full attention, but still it’s filling up my mind. So there’s an intimacy about it. There’s an immersion, you know, that’s pretty different from television.

SIEMERING: We’re living in the age of audio. With podcasts like this one—there are, I think, probably a million of them, I don’t know.

HORN: I think that’s true.

SIEMERING: And when you have the editor of The New Yorker—

HORN: David Remnick.

SIEMERING: Yes, the prototype of print, I guess, or, you know, what’s traditionally thought of as print doing radio, and the New York Times also having audio—

HORN: The Daily.

SIEMRING: The Daily, and so on. And NPR is the largest, or second-largest publisher of podcasts, which says a lot about the quality of NPR programming, that out of a million options, they would rise to that. So, just as John Opera was saying in your last program about photographs now being ubiquitous, audio is everywhere. And as you pointed out earlier, people are streaming. They’re not listening to the box of the radio so much, except in the car. And I think radio has much more in common with print than they do with television, first because—this is a generalization, but we tend to be on the introvert side—because we can be in public without being seen. And we’re working with ideas without showing pictures, so we’re describing scenes and so on. It works for us that way. And Terry Gross has talked about this. She is a shy person by nature and talks about the microphone as her way of talking to people. I mean, she’s learned to make wonderful presentations to a large audience, but by nature, she is shy.

HORN: I’ve seen some of those too. And I think she remarked at one point that she actually— you know, as long as it’s good audio quality—she prefers sometimes to do a telephone interview, or as opposed to being, you know, in the same room with somebody.

SIEMERING: Oh yes. Right. Because she can spread out her notes and doesn’t have to worry about eye contact.

[35:45]

HORN: I found a detail in Jack Mitchell’s book about public radio called Listener Supported that I didn’t read anywhere else about you, which is that while you were a student at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the WHA Radio student staff, you were also training for a career as a high school guidance counselor. This immediately made a great deal of sense to me, because of your belief that qualities like empathy and curiosity are essential for a good interviewer. Of course, they’re also critical for a good counselor. Do you believe that your interest in psychology, in connecting with people, informed your different approach to the possibilities of radio and what radio could reveal about people?

SIEMERING: People open up if you treat them with respect. If you’re on the attack, you just get a defense and they shut down and they’re not gonna open up. I think one of the secrets of Terry Gross as an interviewer is that she listens intently, as a therapist might. And she also does her homework. She reads the book and she does the research necessary to have a good interview, so that people sense that she respects them—by her research. And by the way, she’s asking questions and listening—she may have her list of questions, but she will go down a new path as they open it up for her. And I think that’s why they feel connected to her in a way, and show so much respect to her: because she shows the respect to them. I think it’s the basis of it. You approach them with respect as a person, not as an adversary, or somebody that you can keep attacking and get at something.

HORN: Well, and I think it’s your idea of talking with—

SIEMERING: Yes. Not about—

HORN: —talking with, and not about the people that you’re “covering,” you know, and allowing them to speak as well and handing them the microphone. That’s one of the real differences. I don’t know that you were baiting me with this, you know, Terry Gross’s [questioning technique], so I’m gonna see how this works! Because when Terry interviewed you and Susan Stamberg— in, this was late April, but it was in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of All Things Considered, which was—

SIEMERING: May 3rd.

TERRY GROSS: This is Fresh Air and I’m Terry Gross. Next month, May 3rd, will mark the 50th anniversary of NPR and All Things Considered.

HORN: May 3rd, 1971-2021, 50 years. She noted:

GROSS: Bill holds a special place in my life and the life of our show. From 1978 to ‘87, he was the station manager at WHYY, where our show is produced. Fresh Air began as a local show, and it would never have become a national show without him. But that’s a story for another time …

HORN: Again, there was a big anniversary of NPR to talk about. Now because one of the items on my podcast bucket list is to scoop Fresh Air, I wonder if you’d be willing to say something about the process.

SIEMERING: This may be too much “inside radio” to know the backstory of how this happened … I knew that stations were agitating to have All Things Considered, which started at 5 then to start an hour earlier, at 4. And reporters thought, It’s hard enough to get a 5 o’clock deadline! I wanted All Things Considered to be the very first broadcast record of the day’s events. I didn’t want it to be second. Because the television comes down at 6:30, PBS came on with kind of a backstory at 7, but I wanted—I wasn’t taking a backseat to anyone. I wanted radio to be upfront about it. So I thought Fresh Air, which was such an excellent program. I mean, I’d see the guests leaving after the interview. As a rule, they’d go by my office and they’d say, “You know, that’s the best interview I ever had!” I’d say, “Yeah!” Anyway, I so believed in Fresh Air and its staff. Yes, it’s Terry, but it’s Danny Miller who is the executive producer. He’s been there ever since I’ve been here—43 years—and the staff are the ones that come up with the story ideas and so on. Anyway, so I said, “Let’s envision this so that Terry’s interviews are longer in the first hour and then they get shorter, so they’re the same pace, the same length of All Things Considered pieces at the end, so it’ll be seamless.” And to further make it seamless, we had a live promo with Robert Siegel, who was hosting All Things Considered. So Terry would say about 10 minutes in, “So Robert, what do you have tonight?” And he would say what the rundown was. So it was seamless. It would be like presenting kind of the art section of a newspaper or the style section, whatever, you know, as a lead-in to All Things Considered. It would be the same high quality, great, interesting interviews, and it would be a perfect way for stations to have something starting at 4 that would be totally complementary to All Things Considered.

[42:23]

HORN: Wikipedia credits you with incorporating music and sound and compelling storytelling into radio programming since your days at WBFO. They also say you played a key role in crafting NPR’s distinctive sound. And I know I’ve read about this—you wanted to have it be an identifiable—

SIEMERING: —daily product.

HORN: Daily product. Right? So that you’d listen to it and you’d know that you were hearing

NPR.

SIEMERING: I think, in all fairness, I outlined an intention, but I am given too much credit for the actual—what you hear on the radio. I think I would rather be regarded as like a recruiter for an orchestra. I recruited the talent and maybe like the oboe player playing so [musicians] can tune their instruments to that [i.e.,] the mission statement. Because they’re the ones that create the music. So that said, what I intended was that All Things Considered would treat the arts as an equal part of daily life and of importance as what’s going on in Washington or wherever, as the news. And so that listening to a poet would be as natural as listening to an academic talking about the Supreme Court or something. It also provided the listener with a respite from the intensity of hard news, because they can think more reflectively when they hear a poet taking them in a very different place in their minds. So the different textures, if you will, is what I was looking for. And the sound I wanted happened to be materialized in Susan Stamberg, who has this very expressive voice. And it exudes curiosity and compassion and caring. And she, to me, had the best voice sound for what I wanted NPR to sound like.

[VO]: Before I share a clip to illustrate Susan Stamberg’s singular voice and on-air presence, it’s worth noting the basic fact that she is a woman. Fifty years ago, when Bill installed her as co-host of All Things Considered, Stamberg was the first woman in the United States to host a nightly news program. Here’s a clip from her 1977 interview with the writer Joan Didion, itself a great example of Siemering’s vision for NPR that the hard news of the day should be tempered with forays into the arts and ideas more durable than a single news cycle. (Susan Stamberg later ranked this conversation among her favorite of the more than 15,000 interviews she conducted during her years as co-host of All Things Considered.) The clip runs just under two minutes, and starts with Stamberg speaking about Didion’s writing.

[46:05]

SUSAN STAMBERG: Her best nonfiction essays are collected in the 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Here’s a quote from her introduction to that book: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.”

JOAN DIDION: That’s an odd quote. When I go to colleges to talk, people are always asking me about “writers are always selling somebody out.” And all I meant by it was that it is impossible to describe anybody—a friend, or somebody you know very well—and please them, because your image of them, no matter how flattering, never corresponds with their self-image, it’s a—

STAMBERG: So you’re either “short” or “long,” right?

DIDION: Right. Yes.  

STAMBERG: Now I hear it a different way. For my work, I hear it as, right now sitting here, wanting to talk to you about the things that most concern you in your life, and feeling I could never do that, because there’s no reason I should rip off your emotions and privacy to make my living. That’s how I hear this line.

DIDION: Really?

STAMBERG: Yes.

DIDION: I meant something so specific by it.

STAMBERG: But I’m saying the same thing you are, in a different way.

DIDION: Yes.

STAMBERG: You know, give me my great story. You know, tell me about your nervous breakdown, how awful it was. Give me my great radio tape, you know, and knowing I could never dare, never dare to ask that—or whatever it was, you know, or whatever—because it simply would invade a kind of privacy that’s nobody’s damn business.

[VO]: I know, right? So back to this question of the distinctive NPR sound with Bill, where I had the exciting experience of him shaking up what I thought I was asking about. I thought I was asking really about sound design, like you know how when you’re driving in a strange part of the country and you scan around the bottom end of the FM dial, you can tell when you’ve hit an NPR station—regardless of who’s talking or what music might be playing—it just sounds different? Some of it is clarity, some of it is vocal quality and how voices are miked. But Bill was reminding me that the NPR difference really starts with substance—the right mix of content ...

HORN: It starts with saying, Let’s say that “the news” is not just what happened, or that what is going to be of interest to people on a given date is not just the political goings-on, you know, that there are also cultural goings-on. In fact, those things are necessary for us as full human beings who are not just, you know, interested in the next kind of budget or political crisis—

SIEMERING: And to hear from the Midwest, a farmer from the Midwest.

HORN: Yes.

SIEMERING: And to hear from a fisherman in California, or whatever, to take people to those places. That was part of wanting the country to hear itself. That’s what the national program can do.

HORN: Yeah. And so, there was certainly the device, or the trope of the so-called “man on the street” that predated National Public Radio. Is that the case?

SIEMERING: Yes.

HORN: But it was generally kind of, I don’t know, tokenism or artificial, or kind of just like as much to say, Look at all this guy doesn’t know, or whatever, as opposed to saying, Here’s somebody who’s intimately involved with this situation, the fishing crisis or what have you, or just what life is like here. Okay. Wow.

[49:54]

[VO]: Once you’re attuned to Bill’s conviction that people should tell their own story in their own voice, you hear it everywhere in NPR programming, starting with the very first minute of the very first broadcast of All Things Considered, from May 3rd, 1971. After host Robert Conley, the first voice you hear is a nurse telling about her own struggle with heroin addiction.

[Excerpt from top of first ATC broadcast, May 3, 1971. In conversation with Terry Gross last year, Bill and Susan Stamberg revealed that the featured story involving the nurse and mother identified as “Janice” was not actually ready by the time they started the broadcast. Fortunately, it was completed by the time it was scheduled to air!]

[51:32]

[VO]: Since 1993 Bill has worked internationally, assisting community radio stations and supporting initiatives for civil society in Eastern Europe and Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

HORN: Even as traditional radio has morphed for many U.S. citizens into the audio experience of podcasts or streaming services, in many parts of the world, radio remains an indispensable daily feature of life. I’d love for you to share anything that’s top of mind about your international work.

SIEMERING: What we would generally do with Developing Radio Partners, which was the NGO I started in 2004, is we would have a workshop where we would have a presenter on a topic—it could be health services for teens, or it could be climate change information for farmers, things like that. Then we would give the participants a digital recorder and microphone, and they’d go out and record things and come back and critique them, and then we would have our mentor go out after that and be at the stations to work with them—Martha Zulu, who spoke all the local languages, and so on. So it wasn’t a Caucasian coming in from America teaching. It was people knowledgeable there doing the teaching. As an example, in Malawi, there was a great increase in the number of young people that went to the clinic to get information about reproductive health, or HIV testing. And the parents were on board with this, and the religious leaders and so on, so that the kids could prevent getting pregnant or being shipped off to marry somebody. There was one case where Florence, who was a child bride to a man 10 years older than she was when she was 16, and she found it to be physically and emotionally abusive. And then when she listened to the youth-friendly health services program, which was called Let’s Shine, she said, “It gave me the courage to get out of the mess I was in.” And her mother was also listening. And she said, “I wanted her to feel welcome and loved when she got home. I also wanted to make sure to keep the reproductive health conversation going between us so she doesn’t have an early pregnancy.” That’s the kind of very practical things that go on. Then in Sierra Leone, we helped facilitate creating an independent radio network there, where prior to an election, they presented people talking about their concerns. They were divided kind of north-south, like we are [in the U.S.]. And they said, “You know, we’re not as divided as we thought we were. It’s the politicians that are dividing us. We care about the same things.” So then when they had Ebola there, the radio stations took a lead in informing people about what they needed to do. Again, with COVID, they were able to present the information about wearing masks and so on, getting vaccinated, because they could speak in local languages. There are three languages, maybe, in that community. And it’s the most trusted source of information in many of these countries, the local radio station. In Mozambique if they had trouble with a nurse at the clinic, they would come to the radio station. If they had a problem with the police, they would come there. And they would investigate and get back to them, and make this public if it was necessary.

HORN: Wow.

SIEMERING: So that’s the power of radio in development. So it’s really inspiring to see how it works.

[55:47]

[VO]: Agreed! And that’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Bill Siemering for welcoming me into his beautiful home just outside Philly, just before omicron went nuts last month. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. Within the episode, I sampled some variations on the All Things Considered theme music by Don Voegli, and the cut “Compared to What?” from Roberta Flack’s 1969 debut album First Take. The Fresh Air theme was composed by Joel Forrester. A Prairie Home Companion’s theme, “The Tishomingo Blues” by Spencer Williams, was covered by the incomparable Mark Wright. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me here in Sunny Buffalo. I’m Peter Horn, and I’m so glad you’re here. If you can think of just one other person who would dig this episode—perhaps you know an NPR superfan like me?—please go ahead and share it with them—it will mean most coming from you. I’ll be back just as soon as I can with another show all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!