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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Making waves

Part 2

by Dan Kennedy

At the studios of WBUR, Christopher Lydon is interviewing the scientist David Baltimore about new treatments for AIDS. On the other side of the glass, computers display the names of callers waiting to go on the air -- or to "make the connection," as Lydon likes to say.

Baltimore is a typically impressive guest on The Connection, which has hosted the Dalai Lama, Ross Perot, jazz drummer Max Roach, Pulitzer-winning novelist E. Annie Proulx, and local notables such as John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Weld.

The success of The Connection is ironic: it was Lydon who was co-anchor and impresario-in-chief of The Ten O'Clock News. For anyone who watched him in his WGBH incarnation, Lydon's transformation during the two years since The Connection went on the air is startling. Gone is the ponderous, elitist don of The Ten O'Clock News. In his place is a sharper, more focused Lydon, the (dare one say it?) populist Lydon whose guerrilla campaign for mayor of Boston in 1993 succeeded in moving public education to the top of the city's agenda. It's no exaggeration to say that Lydon finally found his voice in that campaign, when he promised rhetorically to "blow up" school-committee headquarters.

Lydon's success is a natural outgrowth of an effort that began at WBUR nearly 20 years ago. Starting in the 1970s, general manager Jane Christo took what had been a tiny college station owned by Boston University and built it into a phenomenon with a $7 million annual budget. According to its research, it attracts more than 400,000 listeners during any given week, making it one of the most popular stations in Boston.

Christo, who could not be interviewed for this article because she was vacationing in Morocco, had one crucial insight: that there was a market for round-the-clock news and information. That insight enabled WBUR to capitalize five and a half years ago, when WEEI Radio (AM 850) switched from all news to all sports.

And it enabled 'BUR to pull ahead of WGBH Radio (89.7 FM), which stuck with a mostly music format while Christo filled WBUR's schedule with everything that National Public Radio and other news services had to offer.

The importance of NPR to the vitality of public radio can't be exaggerated. Starting with All Things Considered, in 1973, and Morning Edition, in 1979, NPR -- despite criticism that it's biased (a complaint voiced by both liberals and conservatives) and has become too mainstream -- has grown into perhaps the most admired broadcast-news operation in the country, the true successor to the CBS legacy of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

WGBH Radio's attempts to counter 'BUR's success have met with mixed results. Most famously, in the summer of 1995, it canceled Ron Della Chiesa's afternoon MusicAmerica, which its own surveys showed was not particularly popular, but which had a fanatically loyal band of followers (including 90 of the 100 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra). Della Chiesa now hosts a classical-music show in the morning, and MusicAmerica has been partially revived through an arrangement with a station in Plymouth. But the move created ill will that has never really dissipated.

WGBH, in collaboration with the BBC, also created an international news program, The World, which is broadcast locally from 4 to 5 p.m. and which has received mixed notices. And it broadcasts NPR offerings during drive time. Thus, unlike WBUR, with its strong news identity, WGBH is now stuck with a format of news at drive time, classical music during the day, and jazz at night, a mix that makes it difficult to build station identity and listener loyalty.

The force, then, is clearly with WBUR. And The Connection is its proudest achievement. At its best, the show is Boston's civic forum, a place where citizens can talk about national and local issues, the serious and the trivial.

Yet station officials want to undo what makes The Connection special: they're seeking to syndicate it to public stations across the country. Currently, The Connection is being carried in Western Massachusetts and Washington, DC. The Boston Globe's Ed Siegel appeared to be hyperventilating last Friday when he asserted, with scant evidence, that The Connection is already starting to lose its local flavor. But if Lydon goes coast to coast, Siegel's fears will surely become reality. "I don't know how you talk about the Weld-Kerry race or the Red Sox when you go national," says one admirer who works in the broadcasting industry.

You could argue, of course, that the subject matter of Lydon's shows are more often than not national and even international in scope. Why not go national? But even when the subject is, say, Bosnia, there's something special about listening to your neighbors call in and voice their views. That's a crucial difference between The Connection and a program that doesn't have an interactive component, such as Fresh Air, a first-rate arts-oriented interview show hosted by Terry Gross, of Philadelphia's WHYY Radio. Thus, it's not so much the subject matter as it is the disruption of an ongoing local conversation that is threatened by WBUR's ambitions.

As the attempt to syndicate The Connection shows, WBUR's priorities suggest national ambitions that rival those of WGBH-TV. News director Sam Fleming asserts that 62 of the 'BUR's 105 employees work on local programming. But in fact, most of those people are employed by locally produced, nationally distributed shows such as Car Talk, a wild and wonderful program that's only incidentally about cars, and Only a Game, a cerebral sports-talk show. The station employs just six full-time reporters (admittedly, more than any other Boston radio station, though that's not saying much). And though those reporters are generally respected, their cut-ins to NPR do not add up to anything approaching a comprehensive local newscast.

In fact, for all the positive attention WBUR has garnered, its line-up consists largely of national material: news shows from NPR and, to a lesser extent, Public Radio International and Monitor Radio; its own syndicated productions, as well as Fresh Air; and, maddeningly, all that news from the BBC. "We know the accents are real, but somehow they seem phony," quips David Brudnoy. Yet 'BUR officials say their own surveys show the BBC is popular with Boston's large community of immigrants, especially those from the West Indies and Eastern Europe. And plenty of Bostonians have been struck by the number of the city's immigrant cab drivers who keep their radios tuned to 90.9.

Station officials balk at the idea of starting, say, a daily half-hour local news show, arguing that listeners want a full range of international, national, and local news -- plus weather, sports, and traffic -- during whatever time segment they're able to tune in.

But though that reasoning may make sense for drive-time programming, other times would appear to offer more opportunity for experimentation. WBAI Radio, a public station in New York City, for instance, puts together a local-news broadcast with the help of Columbia journalism students. Why not turn some BU students loose on the streets of Boston?

Part 3

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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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