If NPR’s government funding is slashed under Donald Trump’s administration, it would do significant damage to the broadcasting collective’s local stations, Steve Oney tells me. “So in that sense,” he says, “NPR is vulnerable.”
“But it’s hard to tell what Donald Trump is going to do right now,” adds Oney, whose forthcoming book, On Air, captures the “triumph and tumult” at NPR over its 55-year existence. Oney notes that while Elon Musk has called for defunding NPR on X, “whether they act on it is only speculation.” He mentions that Trump is already “bulldozing his way through a number of projects.”
The “defunding” talk can oversimplify the state of NPR’s finances: The broadcaster says that, on average, it only directly receives about 1% of its annual operating budget from the federal government, via grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and other agencies. However, 30% of NPR’s budget comes from local stations that pay fees to license national content—and those member stations receive an average of 10% of their funding from the CPB. It’s the federal funding that has long put NPR in the crosshairs of Republican administrations.
On Air, which has been in the making for 14 years, chronicles the evolution of NPR, tracing the institution and its leadership from its founding in 1970 to the 21st century. In one instance, Oney captures how the attacks of 9/11 turbocharged NPR’s live-news operation, the subject of a recent Vanity Fair excerpt. While the content of the book follows the trajectories of the public broadcaster’s star talents throughout NPR’s storied history—including Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, and Ira Glass—Oney sees NPR as reflecting and embodying “what’s going on in the country at every particular era.”
“It’s a book that happens to be coming to fruition during a moment in which current events are fraught, and NPR may well be in the middle of it, but it’s a history of an institution’s 55 years and a history of America during that same period,” Oney tells me.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: Can you speak to how the medium of radio allowed NPR to carve out a niche for itself in an industry that was becoming increasingly saturated at the time and still is?
Steve Oney: Well, at the time NPR began, radio was really the bastard child of electronic media. It was forgotten. In fact, the words “and radio” were typed and taped into the bill that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at the last second. The glory and the hope in public broadcasting was all about PBS. NPR was a stepchild in the founding of the two broadcasters, so it was like a lot of great stories where a surprising contestant ends up winning the race. This is one where a medium—radio—that a lot of people had written off actually proved it was a perfect and supple medium for storytelling. Really you can trace the beginning of the podcast revolution right to the very first broadcast of All Things Considered, where they threw together this deadline, 20-plus-minute documentary on an anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, which just so happened to take place on the day that NPR launched All Things Considered.
As you chronicle throughout the book, NPR has battled a perception that it has a liberal bias. In your view, what has allowed for this impression to manifest?
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it has a liberal bias, but I would say—this may be a distinction without a difference—that it oftentimes champions progressive views, and that’s been more pronounced during certain periods of NPR’s existence. It was very pronounced in the mid-1970s when they actually conceived of a change to begin creating ethnic programming, programming aimed at different genders and races. It’s been true of late, during the DEI dustup.
