These public radio hosts are heard from coast to coast, but what do they have to say about where they live? Does the location of the broadcast influence their programs? Where do they go when they’re not on the air? Find out as we pause for …
Station Identification
By Nancy Davidson
DIANE REHM HAS been broadcasting “The Diane Rehm Show” (wamu.org) nationally for more than 25 years, and there’s no public radio personality more closely identified with the nation’s capital than she is.
She seeks out “the important news stories and the important people who can relate to us most clearly what that news story is all about.” Hillary Clinton’s been on the show repeatedly, and Rehm has also interviewed Dick Cheney.
Rehm—a Washington, D.C., native—says, “It’s a wonderful place to get a tremendous variety of views, but the wondrous part is what the listeners from all over the country and around the world are adding. Call-ins are crucial … Voices of ordinary people facing floods, hearing from people who are spending their last dimes on medicine, writers who are longing to have their works published—they all bring reality to the program.”
ON WASHINGTON, D.C.: “The National Cathedral and the Bishop’s Garden are beyond compare, and, of course, the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, but I also love the [Smithsonian’s] Freer and Sackler Galleries (asia.si.edu) … I adore the National Gallery of Art (nga.gov), but the Phillips Collection (phillipscollection.org) is the first one I ever went to with my now husband of nearly 50 years.”
“WHAD’YA KNOW” (www.notmuch.com) host Michael Feldman couldn’t do his Madison, Wis.-based show without a live audience. “If I sit in the studio, I just vegetate and forget the whole nature of radio,” he says. The show begins with a satiric monologue about the news and then continues with a quiz. Feldman’s greatest gift may be the way he always manages to make the audience participants seem as funny as he is.
“The audience has a Midwestern point of view. I seem to appreciate the way Midwesterners approach things. Taking things in a certain type of stride might be Midwestern,” he says.
“It’s an audience participation show, and that’s what I tell them before each show: ‘If it’s a bad show, whose fault is it?’” he says, with impeccable comic timing and characteristically self-deprecating wit. His monologues on current events could be considered a precursor to Jon Stewart. “The difference is,” he says, “that no one cares what I say.”
ON MADISON: “Madison is an isthmus surrounded by four lakes. Get a little canoe, pack some food and paddle around the lakes. I would recommend coming on a football Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium at the University of Wisconsin (uwbadgers.com). It’s probably the best big college football experience you can have.”
“THE TAKEAWAY with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji” (thetakeaway.org) is a new morning news show that is different from most other public radio shows of its kind—it’s all live.
“With all the technology that’s available, we can bring stories and details to life and get access to people in all kinds of locations, and interact with the audience at the same time,” Hockenberry says.
According to Hockenberry, there’s no place like New York from which to report the news. “It is so exciting to do this show for the N.Y. audience … [and] to drive across to this great building here, to this studio that’s been around since the 1920s, and to feel connected to the tradition of radio and New York,” he says. “As large-scale and humongous as New York media can seem, to me, it’s sort of like a small-town community.”
ON NEW YORK: “I love how New York is a gigantic social urban place, but it’s also a spectacular place of geography. The interaction between the water and the land and the animal life–whether it’s birds in Central Park or marine life down in Red Hook, it’s still so present … If you can see New York in that way, I think it’s really something special.”
TERRY GROSS is the host of Philadelphia’s “Fresh Air” (npr. org), a public radio show broadcast across the country since 1987, featuring in-depth interviews with influential artists, writers, actors, comedians and politicians.
As Gross’s voice reaches out across the airwaves, part of what makes her interviews so compelling is that she could be anywhere.
“I’m not even meeting the people most of the time. They’re in a remote location, in a studio, someplace else,” she says. “The [guest] can’t signal me in any visual way
… There’s nothing that the listener isn’t in on.”
But Gross’s radio show wasn’t always so ethereal. She moved to Philadelphia in 1975 to start a program profiling local figures on WHYY, before broadening her scope. “I’ve stayed in Philadelphia because WHYY made a home for myself and the program,” she says.
ON PHILADELPHIA: “The Mütter Museum (collphyphil.org/ mutter.asp), a former teaching museum for the Philadelphia College of Medicine … highlights examples of medical anomalies: a cast of an arm with smallpox, the original Siamese twins, the largest colon in the world.”
SUE SCOTT is an actress on “The Prairie Home Companion” (prairiehome.publicradio.org), a variety show that combines comedy sketches and musical guests performing in front of a live audience. Host Garrison Keillor often draws on his Minnesota childhood for the content of his monologues and makes frequent jokes about Minnesotans, their Protestant ethics and famous reticence.
Keillor hired Scott for her mastery of the Minnesota accent, even though she is from Arizona. She commands dozens of voices, managing to convey entire characters. “Because I’m not from here, I hear the Minnesota ‘O’ and the sharpness of the Minnesota sound,” she says.
Scott has been in the ensemble since 1992. Although the show lets her tour, Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul is home. “The Minnesota audience is the most loyal audience,” she says. “They’ll buy tickets and come every week. They’re like family.”
ON ST. PAUL: “People fly in from all over just to see Minnesota Public Radio’s Fitzgerald Theater (fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org). It’s like they are going to Mecca.”
“I THINK ALL OF US HAVE what I might call a geographical bias,” says Tavis Smiley, the host and producer of “The Tavis Smiley Show” (tavistalks.com), who may just favor the West Coast, where he got into radio and jump-started his career. “My [previous] show was the first program in the history of NPR to emanate live every day from west of the Mississippi,” he says. “I was also the first African-American to do this kind of show on public radio, so we broke a couple of barriers.
“When I first got started, the lack of competition made it easier for me to get off the ground,” he says. “Nobody in L.A. is thinking about being a talk show host on public radio. Everybody wants to be a star.”
ON LOS ANGELES: “L.A. is cool for me. It allows me to focus on the work I do. I don’t have to get caught up in the game. When I go to a restaurant, and there’s me and Denzel [Washington] and Halle Berry, no one’s paying attention to me. I only get treated like a celebrity when I leave L.A. In L.A., nobody cares. It allows me to live a very normal life and have very normal experiences.”
“THE SPLENDID TABLE” (www.splendidtable.publicradio.org) began as a 1992 cookbook by the same name written by host Lynne Rossetto Kasper. TV producers took an interest in her, but most wanted a recipe show. She had another idea. “I wanted to tell the stories behind the recipes,” she says.
Currently based in St. Paul, Minn., Kasper started her culinary career in New York. After she got married, she and her husband moved around the world.
Coming back to the U.S. was “an adjustment,” she says. “But this area has changed in terms of what food is available. It’s not just the talent that we’ve got here—our ethnic diversity has grown.” That’s not all she’s come to love about the food scene here. “The Midwest has always been the place where the food you eat is grown 20 miles from where you are,” she says.
ON ST. PAUL: “The St. Paul Farmer’s Market (stpaulfarmers market.com) brings tears to my eyes. It’s like a symphony. It starts out with the first movement, when the green onions and then the asparagus start to come in. The cymbals are crashing and the trumpets are blaring and every color in the rainbow is out there.”
SOME PUBLIC RADIO hosts don’t think that where they are broadcasting from has any impact on their point of view.
Ira Glass relocated from Chicago to New York in order to create a Showtime version of his program, “This American Life” (thisamericanlife.org).
“Nothing changed when we moved from Chicago to New York, when it came to that,” he says. “It was hard to find stories when we lived in Chicago; it’s hard in New York.”
To Glass, who works more than 70 hours a week, it doesn’t really make a difference what city he lives in. “The main difference you notice about different cities is what kind of food can you buy at 10 p.m.,” he says.
Perhaps it isn’t one specific location that influences Glass, but the country for which his show is named is an endless source of content … even if it takes a lot of work to uncover the perfect kind of anecdotes.
“It’s so hard finding any stories at all that fit our odd format. The stories aren’t about famous people or people in the news, but dramatic things that happen. The people in the stories have something surprising to say about those events, and the incidents lead to some interesting or surprising new pictures of the world,” he says. “To meet these criteria, we’ve always taken stories from all over the country.”
PHOTO: TERRY GROSS: WILL RYAN
IRA GLASS: SHOWTIME NETWORKS
