NPR Book Unfurls Character-Rich History Of Public Radio, But Doesn’t Spare The “Risk-Averse” Organization
deadline.comEvery work of narrative builds on those that preceded it. In the case of Steve Oney‘s On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, two books cited by the author as inspirations are illuminating as to his approach to the sprawling, decades-long story of public radio.
One of them is David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. The other is Adam Nagourney’s The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.
McCullough’s tale is “about great American projects and how Americans do things,” Oney told Deadline in an interview. Nagourney’s approach to a contemporary news organization, meanwhile, was published in 2023 but takes readers only through 2016.
Similarly, Oney makes no effort to bring readers into the disorienting Donald Trump era, when social media, AI and “fake news” condemnations battered traditional news purveyors.
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