All things considerate: how NPR makes Tavis Smiley sound like Linda Wertheimer

LAST MAY, I HAD THE CHANCE TO PARTICIPATE in an NPR fellowship for young journalists interested in public radio. There were eight of us in all, each of whom worked with a mentor to produce a story that would become part of a Web-based news magazine. In order to decide who would host the magazine, the mentors and NPR folks held auditions: One by one, we were required to stand up and read a few lines to the assembled crowd, who would then compare notes. We weren't allowed to watch the auditions. As we waited in the hallway, some of us tried to make small talk; others found a quiet corner where they could go over their lines. But we were all thinking about the same thing: The Voice, the NPR Voice, and how the hell we were going to pull it off. The Voice is tough to describe, but you know it when you hear it: It's serious, carefully modulated, genially authoritative. It rings with unspoken knowledge of good wine and The New York Times Book Review. We were terrified of it.

As it turned out, I couldn't quite manage The Voice--the hosting gig went to someone else--but I quickly realized that if I wanted anything to do with NPR, I'd need to figure it out pretty quick. NPR's ascendancy has been striking--"Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," its drivetime shows, are the second and third most popular radio programs in the country, and the network's listenership continues to grow--up 18.5 percent in 2001 alone. A big part of the reason is the unparalleled quality of its news coverage. NPR's journalism is in-depth, accurate, fair, intelligent, and, not insignificantly, virtually commercial-free. In the sea of vituperative right-wing radio, NPR is an island of sanity, civility, and seriousness. And its reporters and personalities are truly talented: Their ability to explain complex issues in plain, sharp, value-neutral language may be unsurpassed in all of broadcasting.

But the network has also become something of a victim of its success. If you listen to a lot of NPR, you realize how similar it all sounds: no matter who is talking, or what they're talking about. There's a simple reason for the homogeneity: The drivetime shows, the 800-pound gorillas of public radio, have become so successful that the sensibilities of their influential hosts and correspondents have come to dominate all other NPR programming. Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, Bob Edwards, Carl Kasell, and their peers have a tight grip on the sound of NPR, especially Linda Wertheimer, whose cadence--a sort of patrician delay--still defines the NPR sound even though she no longer serves as a host. It is a sound created by boomers for an audience of their contemporaries. The Voice is theirs, and if you can't pull it off, as I quickly discovered, you'd better get out of the way.

It is an extremely appealing Voice--to a certain demographic. About 20 million people tune into NPR each week. Their mean income is $78,216, and their average age hovers just below 50. Nearly 90 percent of those who shared their racial information are "non-Black/non-Hispanic," according to NPR survey data. In other words, the people whose Zeitgeist Edwards et al., have been extraordinarily effective in catching are affluent, middle-aged white liberals, who tune into the drivetime shows on their way to work and sometimes continue listening for the rest of the day. This demographic just adores NPR, and NPR gives the love right back. You like Stamberg? We'll give ya Stamberg: She was a guest on the recent "Morning Edition" radioplay I'd Rather Eat Pants--"a comic tale of an elderly couple's cross-country trek on a young slacker's motorcycle." You like Kasell? He'll bring his dry humor to "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!," a quiz show during which a wacky gang of aging journalists crack wise about the week's news. Winners even get to have Kasell's voice on their home answering machines.

And it's not just a matter of spreading the Zeitgeist personalities around. NPR also pressures new talent to mimic the style that those personalities have established. In an interview with the Philadelphia City Paper, Tavis Smiley, the former host of Black Entertainment Television's "BET Tonight" and new host of "The Tavis Smiley Show," pointed out that at NPR, "I have to be authentically black, but not too black." And his show bears that out: It's a good program about black topics that follows the same respectful, all-sides-of-the-issue formula of all the other good, respected programs that came before it. On the same day last month, for instance, "All Things Considered" and "Tavis" both ran stories on education reform, hitting many of the same points. NPR's strategy for holding onto its "A.T.C." and "Morning Edition" listeners is to develop programs that are slight variations on the originals. "Tavis" is the ethnic "A.T.C."; "Talk Of The Nation" is "Morning Edition" with phone calls. NPR's idea of cultural diversity is to recruit black personalities, like Smiley and new "A.T.C." host Michele Norris, and ask them to assimilate to the liberal, white, boomer mentality that dominates NPR's "All Things Considered."