NPR Public Editor by Poynter's Kelly McBride

Many things changed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. NPR was one of them.

Most Americans learned about the terrorist attack on the United States through their TV sets. But a large portion of the population who lived and worked outside of the Eastern time zone first heard news of planes flying into the towers of the World Trade Center through their radios while they were driving to work.

I was one of those people. When I pulled into the YMCA parking lot in downtown Spokane, Washington, just before 5:30 a.m. PT, I was listening to columnist Molly Ivins read a clever essay on Morning Edition. When I turned my car back on shortly after 7 a.m. to head into work, a man was describing a dusty hellscape in the wake of a building collapse to Morning Edition host Bob Edwards.

I did not know what they were talking about until Edwards explained it: “About 18 minutes apart were two crashes,” he said. A bit later, “One of the towers has collapsed.”

In that 90 minutes, NPR reimagined the way its signature magazine shows approach breaking news.

I interviewed journalist and author Steve Oney about what happened that morning at NPR headquarters in Washington D.C. He wrote a book that many see as the definitive history of NPR, On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR. It was released last year. — Kelly McBride

Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina

We ask NPR one question about how the work comes together.

One Question: How did the 9/11 terror attacks change NPR?

This Q&A with Steve Oney was edited and condensed. You can read an excerpt of Oney’s book in this Vanity Fair article.

Q: What was NPR like before 9/11?

A: NPR, especially Morning Edition prior to 9/11, had been very much an orchestrated network. Everything was prerecorded. In part that was because they wanted to do something different than a daily news show. They wanted a daily magazine show. And part of it was that Bob Edwards, the host since 1979, just didn’t like live news. He got in at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. every day and felt that it was a high-wire act to be live that early in the day. He felt safer working with recorded pieces. So that was the old way of doing it.

How did NPR respond to the attacks?

It was a little like an earthquake. There were two geological plates that were passing. The first was the old way of doing the news, which was that it was an orchestration and it didn’t respond to minute-by-minute changes. And then the new tick-tock version of doing the news, which was instantaneous and of the moment.

The problem for NPR was that during that first hour they didn’t respond at all. You know, it was just the network playing these canned pieces that had been originally aired at 6, 7 a.m. and now suddenly you’re into the second hour of the day. The world changed after the World Trade crashes. And NPR, if you turned it on, it sounded like nothing had happened. But by 10 o’clock Eastern Time, the network had recovered and went to live updates. And Bob Edwards was magnificent.

How did they manage to do that?

It was still very much an analog world. So they were getting interviewees by poring over Manhattan phone directories spread out in the newsroom in Washington, looking for the telephone numbers of anyone who might live near the World Trade Center. And that’s how they were canvassing New York to get interviewees to appear on the show. They ended up finding some people, and Bob did great interviews with them. It was a sea shift in the way that NPR would be.

NPR did rally and they broadcast some amazing stuff that morning. Correspondent Jacki Lyden gave a visual account of what she could see out of her apartment in Brooklyn. And she described the towers burning and falling. You know, it was all she could do. It was all NPR could do. But it was enough. That was a story people wanted to, as they say, see with their ears. And Jacki allowed them to do that that morning. And those efforts by the in-house staff in Washington to get people on the telephone, they found somebody in an apartment building right next to the towers, you know, who just described the chaos and the smoke and having to wet towels and put them under their apartment door to keep the smoke from coming in. There was some awfully good radio once NPR picked itself up and got on the air with what was happening.

It seems like NPR didn’t see itself as a source of breaking news?

Right. NPR didn’t know how important it had become by 9/11. It didn’t. The administrators and managers at NPR couldn’t quite conceive that NPR was this national news source. And philosophically, Bob Edwards, the anchor of Morning Edition, was resisting because he felt that the news shouldn’t be responsive to minute events. Because when you did that, you became just like, you know, a website. He believed Morning Edition was supposed to be a symphony of the day’s events. It was not a breaking news show. So Bob had his reasons, but his reasons were just out of tune with the way the network and society were going.

NPR leadership was planning to make programming changes. Did this just speed things up?

Ellen Weiss, who was national editor on 9/11, talked about how they had a yearlong plan to transform NPR and she had just become the boss. They squeezed the reinvention into a few days. They transformed NPR from this more stately, slow processional of news events into something responsive and fast on its feet.

From the moment that the Morning Edition staff found their footing shortly around the time the first tower collapsed, NPR remained live on the air for two straight weeks.

Here we are, 25 years later, and NPR is facing another transition, this one because of the rescinded federal funding and also the changing nature of the broadcast radio audience. Are there lessons from 9/11 that can be applied to this moment?

I like the perishable nature of a broadcast. I also like the fact that you’re going to hear stuff that surprises you. Where if you’re listening to, as people say, my music or my podcast, you’re assuming the job of the programmer. You’re choosing what you want to hear. And so you don’t really learn that much that’s new to you. I learn when somebody else makes the choices, but that’s just because I’m old.

We do have a surfeit of broadcast media these days, but I think public radio is the only outlet for an evenhanded, fair-minded telling of the day’s events. You’re not going to get that on the nightly network news broadcasts anymore. And CNN is too driven by moment-to-moment events. And then Fox and MSNBC are partisans. Public radio, I think, at its best, still tries to play things down the middle. Unfortunately, in today’s world, everyone thinks everyone has an agenda, and an attempt to be fair-minded and accurate is almost anachronistic.

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.

Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute

Kelly McBride
Public Editor

Amaris Castillo
Poynter Institute

Nicole Slaughter Graham
Poynter Institute

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