A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Bobapalooza

After being trashed by NPR management, I had no intention of serving them as a senior correspondent. Judging from the negotiations between NPR’s Ken Stern and AFTRA’s Ken Greene, NPR didn’t want me to be a senior correspondent either. The two Kens were supposed to determine my salary and working conditions for my new job, but they also negotiated severance terms that made it extremely attractive for me to leave the network. Under the agreement, I’d get a generous check if I voluntarily left the company within one year. The amount would be cut in half if I resigned a year later. After that, there would be no payment at all. What could that arrangement be except a mighty incentive to leave NPR? They really wanted me gone. Meanwhile, Andy Danyo was trying to make me see the upside of my firing. I guess she truly believed the old PR person’s mantra that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. She pointed out that the people firing me looked like jerks in the press and that I was looking good by taking the high road and saying all the right things. Andy also had big plans for me, plans that would make her job much easier. Before the firing, Andy had been planning a three-week book tour to begin in May 2004 with the publication of my book, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. Her idea of a tour was not just about selling books but also doing publicity for NPR and raising money B O B A PA L O OZ A for public radio stations along the way. Lots of stations wanted me to visit, but Andy had to say no to most of them because I’d only be on the road for three weeks. Then I’d be back at my job on Morning Edition. Ah, but now I no longer had a job that required me to be back at NPR in Washington. She could now say yes to all the stations that wanted me to visit, so the three-week tour became the three-month tour—the Bobapalooza Tour, she called it. While I was wrapping up my last month on Morning Edition, Andy was making airline and hotel reservations in dozens of cities. It must have been a nightmare of coordination, but she went at it with great enthusiasm. She was enjoying this! She and my publisher arranged a ton of media interviews with newspapers, Bill Moyers, Fresh Air, and scores of public radio stations. From a small fifth-floor studio at NPR, I did back-to-back interviews all day for five days before the tour even began. All these media opportunities were bothering Ken Stern, and he began calculating the possible damage I could do over the next three months in cities all over America—not just publicly in the press but privately in conversations with managers of NPR stations. He made two moves, first summoning AFTRA’s Ken Greene for some more lawyerly negotiations. Stern is a guy who thinks you solve a problem by throwing money at someone—buying his silence—then putting some new spin into a press release that the other party is forbidden to refute. Stern told Greene that he wanted me to sign a letter saying I would not sue NPR under the Age Discrimination Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and a dozen or so other avenues that I hadn’t even known about. Furthermore, he wanted me to promise I would not speak ill of NPR while on my book tour and handed me a list of talking points I was to emphasize when I spoke. In fact, they were not talking points at all but rather a horribly insulting set of orders telling me how I was to answer specific questions— and especially how I was not to answer specific questions. I had grown accustomed to being micromanaged at NPR and marveled at Ken Stern’s faith in his ability to control the message in all that journalists would write about me on my tour. Here were my marching orders. 143 B O B A PA L O O Z A 144 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X You should always speak positively about your past and future career at NPR, emphasizing...