Edwards expounds on NPR career

Wednesday, March 6, 2002 | 8:26 a.m.

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National Public Radio newsman Bob Edwards took a month off from "Morning Edition " last year an unusually long break for him and listeners were worried that he might have left the program for good.

"So many people around the country were horrified that Bob appeared to have gone that (management) had him call into the show to chitchat with the fill-in host," said Flo Rogers, program director of Las Vegas NPR station KNPR 89.5-FM.

Edwards will be in Las Vegas on Thursday for two speaking engagements one in the afternoon at West Charleston Library, which is open to the public, and another in the evening at a sold-out fund-raising dinner and reception for KNPR at the Palms.

"Morning Edition" airs from Washington, D.C., and is broadcast by NPR member stations, such as KNPR.

Rogers says more than half of KNPR's approximately 100,000 weekly listeners tune into Edwards' program, heard from 5-9 a.m. Monday through Friday.

"It is no exaggeration to say it is the anchor program for the radio station," Rogers said. "It's the engine that drives all the listening."

How much of the show's popularity is due to content, and how much is due to Edwards?

"That's difficult to say," Rogers said. "Public radio normally isn't personality driven." However, Rogers said, listeners' concern when Edwards took a four-week vacation, instead of his usual one week, is telling.

"He is reassuring, steadfast, warm and wonderful," she said.

"Morning Edition," which has 8.4 million listeners nationwide each week, has been a fixture on KNPR since the station first went on the air on March 24, 1980. Edwards has been the program's host since the show's premiere in November 1979.

The Louisville, Ky., native joined NPR in 1974 as co-host of "All Things Considered." The hot news at that time was the Watergate break-in and the crumbling Nixon administration.

"I got here Feb. 15 and Nixon resigned in August," Edwards, 53, said recently from Washington.

Between the break-in at Watergate and Nixon's resignation, Edwards worked for three different employers in the nation's capital -- a small local station, a commercial national broadcasting network and then NPR.

Edwards said the difference between reporting the events on public and commercial radio was one of time.

"On 'All Things Considered,' we had 90 minutes, which was plenty of time to tell the story in the detail that it required," Edwards said.

He recalled when Nixon released the bound transcripts of the tapes that secretly had been made.

"There was no Internet," Edwards said.

Because of the volume of the transcripts, which were released midweek, Edwards said no one would be able to read them until the weekend, when some of the larger newspapers around the country might publish excerpts.

"We thought people shouldn't have to wait that long so we went on the air and read them," Edwards said.

Different people in the studio took on the roles of the people who had been recorded, such as H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman.

"Nowadays the transcripts would be on the Internet immediately, but back then people were grateful," Edwards said.

During the 28 years that Edwards has been a newsman on public radio, he has watched many major world events unfold -- among them the end of apartheid, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR.

Perhaps one of the strangest stories was of the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton.

"Monica was the one tabloid issue that we couldn't avoid," Edwards said.

The O.J. Simpson trial, in which the former football star was charged with murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, hardly was mentioned by Edwards until the not-guilty verdict was rendered.

"Then it became a different story," Edwards said.

Early in his career, about the time he graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., in 1971, Edwards considered joining the ranks of journalists who worked in broadcasting on commercial television and radio.

"I was going to be the next Walter (Cronkite) on CBS," Edwards said. "They were the model, the Tiffany network. Then CBS went to hell and (public radio news) has become the industry standard.

"If you are a broadcast journalist, this is the place to be."