NPR Praised for Calm Coverage

This is how Diane Ramsey of Fair Oaks, Calif., coped.

When hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, she muted her television set but kept its pictures of destruction flickering in the background.

Then she turned on her Walkman--and found solace in public radio.

“I can’t thank you enough for the intelligent, compassionate coverage you’ve lent to this terrible tragedy,” she told National Public Radio after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hers was one of more than 2,000 e-mails, most of them full of praise, that NPR received about its round-the-clock coverage of the deadly assault on two American symbols.

NPR normally offers six hours of programming a day. But it swung into 24-hour coverage for the first three days of the crisis, an unprecedented commitment for the nonprofit Washington-based corporation that provides news and cultural programming to more than 600 member stations, including KPCC-FM (89.3) in Pasadena and KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica.

If the nation should go to war, “we’re prepared to go back and do it again,” said Bruce Drake, NPR vice president for news and information.

Although ratings for public radio since Sept. 11 are not available, one sign of its popularity since the attacks can be found on the Internet. On the day of the attacks, NPR’s Web site logged 400,000 hits from users seeking news updates; normally the site receives about 70,000 hits a day. E-mail from listeners also burgeoned, from an average of 100 a day to as many as 900 a day. Web sites maintained by local stations, such as KCRW, also registered unusually high traffic.

Many of NPR’s listeners said they turned to public radio programming for a respite from the frenzy of televised news. Their nerves jangled by the hijackings and TV’s constant replays of the World Trade Center collapsing, listeners found comfort in stories that invite reflection--NPR’s hallmark.

Among the past days’ offerings was an intimate conversation with a rescue worker, who spoke of heart-wrenching discoveries in the rubble. (“Numerous firefighters were found together ... holding each other,” the worker said.) There were essays on what it’s like to be Muslim in America; on art as a relief from reality; on scraps of resumes, tax forms, depositions and other documents found in the World Trade Center ruins--what Robert Siegel, senior host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” called the “many scattered artifacts of jobs and dreams that were.”

And there was poetry, lots of poetry.

On the Saturday after the attacks, NPR’s weekend host Scott Simon read W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” The poem, written on the eve of World War II, offers Auden’s mournful view--from “one of the dives on 52nd Street” in New York--of a world on the brink of catastrophe. More than 60 years later, supplied with a horrible new context, it had immediate resonance, eliciting hundreds of e-mails in one day, said Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, who fields listeners’ complaints and compliments as NPR’s ombudsman.

“There were people who were moved to tears, people who moved to the side of the road, people who wanted to know who this guy Auden was,” he said. “The power of the spoken word--it’s been a real balm.”

NPR has provided continuous coverage on rare occasions, the last time in November, when it stayed on the air for 48 hours to follow the raucous developments in the presidential election. “In the original genesis of NPR,” Drake said, “that’s something we weren’t quite built to do.”

But after the hijackings, NPR threw the majority of its 70 reporters in the United States and abroad onto the story. Cultural programming, such as Terry Gross’ “Fresh Air,” was suspended while regular hosts, including Simon, Siegel, Neal Conan, Bob Edwards and Linda Wertheimer, anchored the expanded news coverage.

This week, the network has resumed its regular schedule, although Conan continues to host four hours of special coverage a day. Member stations WNYC in New York, WBUR in Boston and KQED in San Francisco bolstered NPR’s efforts last week with evening call-in programs from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Although most local public radio outlets have returned to their normal schedules, some, like KPCC, have stayed with NPR’s coverage as well as developing special programming of their own.

“The response from the audience has been unbelievable,” said Bill Davis, chief executive of KPCC, where the small news staff put in 12-to 14-hour days during the first week of the crisis, compiling reports on the local effect of the terrorist strikes. “Every single phone call starts with, ‘We are so thankful you are doing this, we can’t get this anywhere else.”’

Local public radio discussion and call-in shows have been devoted to the attacks. “At the moment, what our audience seems most interested in is: Why did this happen? Who are these people? What is Islam? Who is Osama bin Laden? What is the Taliban?” said KCRW host Warren Olney, whose guests since Sept. 11 on his national “To the Point” program have ranged from Barbara Wallraff, a columnist on language for Atlantic Monthly, to social critic Shelby Steele.

Larry Mantle, host of KPCC’s morning “Air Talk,” said he has tried to focus each day on a different aspect of the tragedy, asking “how people are coping with them, and providing as much analysis as we can.” Last week, for example, he reserved half of his show for calls from Arab Americans and Muslims.

If listeners feel a special bond with public radio programs such as his, he noted, it is because “you hear these kinds of things that aren’t really reflected in straight news reporting. It’s hearing a person with a Middle Eastern accent talking about how their day-to-day life has changed.”

Among those applauding public radio’s coverage of the terrorist assaults and the aftermath is Jack Shakely, president of the California Community Foundation, a leading Southern California philanthropic group that has funded public radio programs.

“I have not been to a single board meeting, conference or meeting since Sept. 11 where we didn’t spend the first 45 minutes talking about [the terrorist attacks],” he said. “What we need now is informed conversation and not knee-jerk reaction. I think NPR has done that marvelously.”

Many of NPR’s interviews with witnesses to the destruction showed the power of radio to sculpt pictures with words. One particularly moving piece was an interview by Conan with Craig Childs, an NPR commentator from KVNF-FM in Paonia, Colo., who was in New York on Sept. 11.

What struck Childs was the human landscape surrounding the south tower of the trade center as it collapsed: “Just so many hands went up in the air and it looked as if people were trying to stop it. They were trying to reach up and grab the building,” he told NPR. “Just thousands of hands shooting up into the air all around me.” In that instant, he said, the city metamorphosed into “something organic. It’s just filled with emotion, not necessarily the panic that you might imagine; just sheer emotion everywhere.”

Some critics complained that NPR’s special coverage veered too heavily into the emotional realm, especially with the extra hours of call-ins, often from people in audible distress. “Consolation radio,” one local radio critic termed it.

NPR’s Dvorkin conceded that the critic “might have been right in identifying that we were indeed consoling. But that was an appropriate role at that point. We can’t expect to be only intellectual and rational. And we shouldn’t be only emotional and consoling.

“Radio is an intensely personal medium. If it does its job properly, it engages a person inside his or her head and makes the listener complicit in an act of imagination. To me, that is the value of public radio. It is both intellectual and emotional.”