A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Maverick

Should I have seen it coming—that truck that hit me on March 9, 2004? I was a company man who loved NPR, but I was never a contender for employee of the month (not that NPR has such a thing). People in the news business disagree about the value of stories and how they should be covered—and these disagreements can sometimes be spirited , even passionate. I think it’s a healthy thing that makes a news organization stronger. Maybe over the course of thirty years, a company gets tired of hearing it and fires the guy who won’t immediately salute. The time I thought I might get the axe was back in 1996 when Bill Buzenberg was the vice president for news. Bill had ambitious plans for expanding NPR’s news coverage but lacked the reporting staff to do the job. Management wouldn’t authorize the hiring of more staff reporters, so Bill developed a nationwide team of twenty stringers under contract and on retainer to report for NPR. This was all very good for our network but not from my union perspective. Bill had established a shadow team of nonunion freelancers whose first reporting responsibilities were to NPR, but they were not getting NPR pay and benefits. Some were being compensated at about a third of what staff reporters were making. In the event of a strike, workers belonging to AFTRA would be out on the street while these twenty stringers would be turning out Morning Edition and All Things Considered. AFTRA was fighting to get these reporters covered by the union contract, so it threatened to take M AV E R I C K 138 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X NPR to the Internal Revenue Service and the National Labor Relations Board and also to tell our story to the Washington Post. Bill Buzenberg noticed that when I introduced any of the twenty on the air, I never said “NPR’s so-and-so reports,” merely “so-and-so reports.” He insisted I say “NPR’s” because they were on retainer and under contract to the network. I replied that the only contract I was under was the AFTRA contract and I didn’t want to violate it by identifying nonunion reporters as “NPR’s.” He said, “Well, if it’s a union issue, get the union in here and we’ll straighten this out.” So I did. AFTRA’s Ken Greene met with NPR management, and ultimately all the contract reporters were put on staff. The happiest person about all of this was Bill Buzenberg, whose reporting staff had just been expanded by twenty people covering cities from Raleigh to San Francisco. It was actually twenty-two reporters because Bill threw in a couple of temps. (NPR also had contract reporters back in 1982 and agreed to hire them once AFTRA took the network to the NLRB. That’s how Jacki Lyden and Howard Berkes joined the staff.) I gave Bill fits, but I didn’t mean to. I liked him a lot and I still do, but we clashed on even trivial matters. He didn’t like the way I said the word “harassment” on the air. I say hare-ass-ment with the emphasis on the first syllable. He hated that because everyone else said it differently , and he insisted that I be like everyone else. I tried to joke with him about it and said he was trying to put the ass back into harassment. I hoped he’d smile if I said he was harassing me. He didn’t. That piece of silliness illustrates another problem I had with my company. The freewheeling, experimental atmosphere of NPR evaporated once the place grew big, important, and popular with the public. The bureaucracy mushroomed with executives, producers, and editors . It became a top-down kind of place where authority was asserted and conformity demanded. The number of NPR employees who could call Morning Edition and order a change in my introduction to a story seemed infinite. There were too many bosses to please. Micromanagement is no fun—probably not even for the micromanager. Hosts and reporters should not be reprimanded for quirks and idiosyncrasies that distinguish them from the standard-issue radio personality, as long as what they’re doing doesn’t color the story or alter the facts. Long ago, [18.224.63.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 19:09 GMT...