Like thousands of other radio listeners I was shocked to wake up one morning in 2004 and discover that Bob Edwards no longer hosted NPR's "Morning Edition." It soon became apparent that Bob (can you call him anything else if you have been listening to him for 30 years?) did not want to go. In public, he refused to trash those who unceremoniously booted him out, but he also would not pretend he resigned to pursue "new opportunities."
You would not expect Bob Edwards, so even-voiced and composed, to lash out, but reading him now it is clear that his firing still rankles. His own view is that NPR higher-ups never liked him because he was not a company man, willing to jazz up programming so that it looked more like the cable channels forever braying about "breaking news." He practiced long-form journalism, which meant on-the-air stories that continued for five to eight minutes.
"A Voice in the Box" is about a lot more than this one incident, although that turning point, as he himself calls it, does define the man: coolly professional and recalcitrant when it comes to any tampering with his commitment to how the news should be presented. Fair enough, but surely not the whole story.
Rewind to an earlier chapter in the book and read about how insufferable Bob Edwards was to Susan Stamberg. It is to his credit that he does not soften his stiff and even sexist response to her, admitting that it took time and the success of "All Things Considered," the program they pioneered and co-hosted, to make him a believer in her more informal approach to news and news-inspired feature stories.
So it does not take much reading between the lines to see that Bob Edwards is not the most flexible man in the world. But then for him certain principles have been jeopardized by NPR's efforts to brand itself in competition with its big-time rivals such as CNN, MSNBC, and most of all, Fox.
It is rather ironic that Edwards has more freedom now on satellite radio than on NPR, which still pretends in its fundraising to be immune to commercial pressures. He admires many of his NPR colleagues, while disdaining management as a good union man must. His memoir is well worth reading, not only as the record of a stubbornly principled professional but also as an indictment of a national public radio establishment that is too far removed from the reporters who are its very lifeblood.
- Carl Rollyson is a biographer and professor of journalism at Baruch College, The City University of New York.
