Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2006
Informed Citizens of the World
Funding accounted for, public radio now needed format. Soon after the Public Broadcasting Act became law, CPB and the Ford Foundation sponsored the “Public Radio Study.” The report, released in 1969, was written by broadcaster Samuel Holt, who later would direct NPR’s programming division (1977–1983). It called for a formalized national public radio network and production center.
In 1970, Bill Siemering, NPR’s first program director, wrote the “National Public Radio Purposes” mission statement, which established NPR’s organizational infrastructure and bolstered its funding requests from CPB. Siemering conceived of public radio as serving the individual: “it 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.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had set strict criteria for those stations aspiring to NPR membership, regarding broadcasting power, programming hours and depth of staff. Of the 457 noncommercial stations then in existence, 91 qualified to become member stations when NPR incorporated in March of 1970. On average they broadcast 84 hours a week, approximately 90 percent educational, information or cultural programming and the remainder entertainment. The new NPR board appointed as president Donald Quayle, a former general manager of Boston’s WGBH public radio station and a consultant to CPB. Quayle hired Siemering as NPR’s first programming director, and he began coordinating work on the program that would become All Things Considered.
NPR, unlike its television counterpart PBS, was structured to produce national programming in addition to picking up programming from member stations across the country and international programming such as rebroadcasts from the BBC. All Things Considered made its debut on May 3, 1971, broadcasting in 32 states. The inaugural broadcast included a report on a 26-year-old woman’s attempts to deal with heroin addiction; a report from Ames, Iowa, on a novel means of supplementing business at a barbershop (shaving women’s legs); a discussion with two NPR reporters and a correspondent from the Christian Science Monitor regarding that day’s massive protest in Washington, D.C., against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War; the reading of three antiwar poems; and a conversation between the poet Allen Ginsberg and his father about the legality of drugs.
The show began, though, with a remarkable and dramatic 20-minute sound montage of the demonstration in Washington introduced by All Things Considered’s first host, former New York Times staff member and NBC correspondent Robert Conley. Bill Siemering says, “Considering it was the largest protest in Washington ever—5,000 people arrested—all in all, with two weeks of rehearsal, it is a good documentary of that day, bringing multiple points of view to the story, a sense of being there.”
Clearly, from the very start All Things Considered had a distinctive style—characterized by longish pieces, vivid descriptions, musical interludes between segments, immediacy and in-depth analysis of events—still recognizable today. Yet, some things have changed between then and now, most noticeably the addition of underwriter announcements and the absence of editorializing. (“Today in the nation’s capitol,” said a reporter in the montage, “it is a crime to be young and have long hair.”)