Book Review: ‘On Air,’ by Steve Oney

But even before NPR’s first decade was over, its lack of political, socioeconomic and racial diversity was apparent. “Young, brainy, upper-middle-class, politically liberal, artistically adventurous and typically white, the NPR archetype was taking shape,” Oney writes. In cramped edit booths, staffers cut lines of cocaine and engaged in trysts.

Oney celebrates the culture of free-spiritedness, but as NPR matured, that culture’s blind spots became painfully evident. Most prominent is race. “On Air” devotes many pages to recounting the resentment Black and Hispanic journalists faced from white colleagues who considered them incompetent, unlikable or a poor fit — notably Adam Clayton Powell III, who was hired as director of NPR News in 1987 and fired less than three years later, and Juan Williams, an iconoclastic Black commentator whose ouster from NPR in 2010 precipitated another crisis.

Williams had told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he felt “nervous” seeing airplane passengers in traditional Muslim attire while flying, remarks that stoked liberal outrage. But his haphazard dismissal only fanned the flames. An investigation by an outside law firm found that Williams was given little rationale for being let go, and prompted the resignation of NPR’s top news executive at the time, Ellen Weiss. Then, as the scandal seemed to be blowing over, the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe released hidden-camera video showing NPR’s chief fund-raiser slamming conservatives. The C.E.O., Vivian Schiller, formerly a digital executive at The New York Times, was forced out.

The Juan Williams debacle, Oney writes, was “arguably the opening battle of the conflict that would define America during the early decades of the 21st century — the culture wars.” By 2011, NPR was being roasted even by allies like Barack Obama — at a now notorious White House Correspondents’ Dinner where he also mocked Trump.

A second blind spot is age. Although the word “boomer” appears only once in the book, NPR’s ongoing struggles stem in part from its singular identification with its founding cohort. A “collectivist mentality” and college radio sensibility, as Oney describes it, have made the network particularly difficult to manage, “less a business than a dysfunctional family,” plagued by leadership turnover. Oney likens NPR in its early days to a “troubled kid” with “a chip on its shoulder.” That may once have been charming, but now the kid is a senior citizen who won’t get out of the way.