All the News Fit to Hear

Public radio is doing just fine, all things considered

It's time for Gimme Shelter!--"America's favorite tax-planning fun game." Today's big contestant: Susan Stamberg. She beats the clock and correctly identifies Federal Tax Form G, earning a chance at an Individual Retirement Account. Applause and organ music erupt in the radio studio. But on Round 2 she draws a blank on Form 2440, losing a chance to "become a limited partner in a solar-powered cattle ranch on a uranium field." Susan has to settle for an electric saucepan. "Until tomorrow," says a smarmy announcer as applause and music swell, "Remember: Give us shelter!"

No, it is not radio's answer to television's Wheel of Fortune or $20,000 Pyramid. And no, Susan Stamberg is not out to make a deal, or even to see if the price is right. She is co-host of All Things Considered, surely the most literate, trenchant and entertaining news program on radio. Gimme Shelter! was typical of the show: an imaginative way of commenting on the current scene, in this case, federal retirement tax policy.

For 90 min. each weekday and an hour on Saturdays and Sundays (at 5 p.m. in most places), All Things Considered's bouillabaisse of hard news, light features and background reports is heard on 200 noncommercial stations. The show is the flagship program of National Public Radio, the aural counterpart of TV's Public Broadcasting Service. It is also the ear-throb of legions of listeners--2 million flip the dial to it at least one day a week, and some 150 send mash notes weekly.

The show opens with a 5-min. news roundup much like those of the commercial networks, followed by a cascade of 15 to 18 features, each ranging upwards of 3 min. in length. Straightforward accounts of Andrew Young's resignation and the Mexican oil spill may be followed by playful reports on a teen-age Soviet black marketeer ($100 for blue jeans, $200 for a new Kiss album) or an interview with Marxist Professor Bertell Oilman, who invented the board game Class Struggle. When interest rates soared last week, All Things Considered explained the event by staging a 10-min. mock Italian opera, Grosso Interesso, with professional singers, orchestral accompaniment and cunningly dubbed voices of real Government economic policymakers.

Once rather unpolished compared with commercial radio, All Things Considered is now as smooth as a game show, with catchy electronic music between segments and inventive sound effects. But what really holds the show together is the cohosts: Stamberg, 40, former manager of Washington's public station WAMU, who signed on as a tape editor at the program's inception in 1971; and Bob Edwards, 32, who arrived in 1974 after working as a writer and newsreader at WTOP, Washington's all-news commercial station. Stamberg is the key to the program's ingratiating charm. In interviews she is confiding and insouciant, first disarming her subjects, then enlisting them in a delicious conspiracy. Her secret: "I'm not afraid to reveal myself. I like to laugh. I'm not embarrassed to enjoy what I do. The idea is to be a mensh." On Oct. 13, Stamberg will help Jimmy Carter field listeners' questions over NPR on the second call-in show of his presidency.

During the show's threadbare early days, Stamberg had to do so much of her own reporting and interviewing that she felt like Sisyphus confronting "a huge boulder that had to be pushed up the mountain each night." Today All Things Considered receives live and taped reports from 13 full-time and scores of part-time reporters around the world, and from special contributors like Heywood Hale Broun (on sport and whimsy), Daniel Schorr (politics and polemics) and Kim Williams of Missoula, Mont, (natural foods and rural arcana). NPR correspondents have a reputation for enterprising reporting, especially in Washington. Says CBS White House Correspondent Lesley Stahl: "They have one of the best news staffs around."

All Things Considered exemplifies a system-wide renaissance at NPR that began two years ago when Frank Mankiewicz, 55, onetime press secretary for Robert Kennedy and campaign manager for George McGovern, became the network's president. NPR's stipend from the Government-established Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its chief benefactor, increased from $7 million to $12 million this year. NPR has requested $19 million next year, and with outside contributions, Mankiewicz proposes to spend a total of $24 million, including $1.6 million for a new morning news program to begin in November and $3.3 million for All Things Considered. The show's budget is only a fraction of what commercial networks spend on news, and Mankiewicz marvels at NPR'S results: "It's like a short-order restaurant. You wonder how they get the food out on time."

Sometimes All Things Considered is too good to be true. Stamberg and Business Reporter Robert Krulwich once took a routine White House press release about gifts received by President Carter and turned it into a make-believe, item-by-item tour of the White House gift storage room. Sound effects were used to simulate squeaking doors, echoing footsteps and breaking glass, when Stamberg ended the piece by accidentally "dropping" a porcelain Boehm figurine given to Carter by a society of professional mediators. Sure enough, one angry listener wrote to complain that the reporters must have used illegal means to invade the President's private quarters.

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