A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Pilot Error

The commuting hours became radio’s prime time once TV captured the nighttime audience. That’s why All Things Considered is broadcast during the late afternoon and evening rush hour. It took NPR nearly a decade to launch a major program in morning drive time, when the radio audience is even bigger. Morning Edition was the dream of NPR president Frank Mankiewicz , programming vice president Sam Holt, and news vice president Barbara Cohen (now Barbara Cochran). In 1978, they hired a consultant , Larry Lichty, and formed a planning committee of NPR reporters and producers. These dozen or so people were the sole supporters of Morning Edition. The rest of us at NPR wanted nothing to do with it—indeed many were hostile to the very idea of a second big program. Since its first broadcast in 1971, All Things Considered had defined NPR. It was not the only program we had, but it was the focus of all our attention and most of our precious few resources. Those of us on the ATC staff in the late seventies were proud of the program and very protective of it. We saw Morning Edition as a potential threat—not only to our status as NPR’s premier program but also as a drain on the limited money, material, and energy NPR had at that time. It wasn’t just jealousy on our part. We feared NPR would end up with two mediocre programs instead of the one great one it already had. Staff reporters shared our concerns. They put no faith in management’s promises that Morning Edition would somehow provide its own material with no help from P I L O T E R R O R 68 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X the NPR reporting staff. The reporters knew they would end up filing stories for both programs—limiting what they could do for either. Mary Tillotson and Pete Williams were hired to host the new program . Ted Landphair was hired as executive producer and Mark Kuhn as producer. Landphair was highly respected in the Washington market . His news department at commercial station WMAL (then number one in Washington) had won numerous awards. But Landphair’s very first moves at NPR foreshadowed the doom ahead for Morning Edition. I suspect Landphair had some kind of chip on his shoulder regarding newspeople at NPR. I believe he regarded us as a ragtag bunch of kids unworthy of the professional world, for his first act was to initiate a dress code. Today NPR has people who know a gown from a smock, but to impose a dress code on the 1979 staff (still being paid in the teens) was like putting tuxedos on the homeless. Some of our people had two outfits—good jeans and bad jeans. At a Morning Edition staff meeting, Landphair stood before a flip chart and bellowed, “Here is my title.” Then he flipped the chart to reveal the word BOSS. “And here,” he continued, “is Mark Kuhn’s title,” flipping again to a chart that read BOSS WHEN I’M NOT AROUND. You may well imagine the state of morale on Morning Edition. Boy, was I glad not to be part of that crew! I was even beginning to feel sorry for the people we had seen as a threat. My attitude turned to smugness in October 1979 when the Morning Edition staff finally got around to producing a pilot program. The long-awaited pilot was heard on our in-house speaker system and relayed to eager station managers by closed circuit. It was, by unanimous account, a bomb. Susan Stamberg and I listened in our office. I recall laughing a lot, both at the pilot we were hearing and at the expression on Susan’s face, a sort of shocked, “Am I really hearing this?” kind of look. The new program may have been a threat to our resources , but it wasn’t going to surpass us artistically. The word many used to describe the pilot was commercial, which I thinkwasintendedtogiveLandphairsomeofthebusinesshehadgiven us. As one who began in commercial radio, I felt that calling the pilot too “commercial” was an insult to all the honorable men and women who had worked in commercial broadcasting for the previous sixty years. The word I used was chatty. One heard chatty hosts yammering 69 P I L O T...