Radio days

“I love New York at that time,” she said.
By mid-morning, what some call the earth’s greatest city is much brighter. And its electronic murmur — of which the McGovern-produced “The Brian Lehrer Show” is part — has grown louder.
On those weekday mornings, many listeners are at home: the ill, the unemployed, parents minding children, artists, retirees, freelancers and others.
When she’s not working — in the evenings and the weekends — the Dubliner is always thrilled to hear that people are indeed listening to public radio.
“In little merchants in Flatbush, they’ll have it going and I check if it’s on when I’m in a taxi,” she said.
Twenty-nine million Americans tune into public radio at least once a week — an increase of 16 percent since Sept. 11, 2001. Included in that figure are the 1.1 million people who listen to WNYC.
The station has no figures for individual shows, but a high proportion on WNYC listeners are likely familiar with Brian Lehrer who, from 10 a.m. until noon, hosts what Time magazine has called the city’s “most thoughtful, informative talk show.”
McGovern, who grew up in Drumcondra, came across WNYC not long after she immigrated to the United States in 1996.
“It seemed quite familiar in a way — not a million miles from what I’d heard at home, in terms of current affairs and dialogue,” she said.
McGovern had already developed an interest in a media career and felt that her temperament and natural curiosity suited her to radio.
“So I approached WNYC quite a few times,” she said, laughing. “I was always interested in how things happen and why things happen. I see it in the other producers: they’re naturally very curious also.”
McGovern, who’s 32, said that she inherited her bar-owner father’s love of reading newspapers. The middle of five children, she studied English and Italian at University College Dublin. As a requirement for her degree, she spent a year in Italy and went back to teach there upon graduation.
After obtaining a green card, McGovern decided to live in New York, where her parents had married and still had close friends. For the first year, she worked in a variety of temp jobs but also got internships with the “Adrian Flannelly Show” and WNYC. Then, she landed a full-time job with the Flannelly program. A couple of years later, a position opened up at WNYC.
At the top of the list of her strengths, host Lehrer mentioned three qualities.
“She has a great sense of what’s important, what’s interesting and how things sound,” he said, adding that a good producer might have two. “To have all three is rare.”
The producer has to determine whether to allow “Maria in Williamsburg” or “Philip in South Orange” to make a comment or ask a question.
“An awful lot of it is: ‘Why should the listener be interested in this? What does someone have to add to this?’ ” McGovern said.

Master juggler
The program’s slogan, “dialogue not diatribe,” is taken seriously. “We really strive to show all sides,” McGovern said.
Much of the show’s format revolves around interviews with invited guests, whether in the studio or on the phone. On shows last week, for example, Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of American, warned about the “napsterization” of the movie industry, conservative biographer Midge Decker argued that Donald Rumsfeld is one of America’s great assets, and Michael Tomasky, editor of the liberal journal American Prospect, discussed a recent interview he had with Bill Clinton.
“It’s up to me to make sure that the guest has been called, to make sure that the music is correct, that the clips are in the right order, that everyone has been communicated,” McGovern said.
“A lot of it is troubleshooting, but in a way that the listener won?’t hear, like if a guest goes missing, to immediately have things in order.”
In the meantime, a barrage of information, primarily via email and telephone, has to be processed. And sometimes an important news story can break during the broadcast or a press conference is called at short notice in Washington.
McGovern revealed that Lehrer, described by the Village Voice as the city’s most knowledgeable talk-show host, is enormously cool under pressure. And he returned the compliment.
“She’s an absolute delight to work with,” he said. “She’s always on an even keel. She can juggle eight balls at once, which often she’s called upon to do.
“She’s a people person and a team player. And she can sort the reality from the B.S.”
Said McGovern: “We have a lot of laughter. You have to have a healthy dose of humor if you’re to produce a daily show.”
McGovern supervises producers Ilya Marritz and Jim Colgan, engineer Elena Necanther, and, during the show, the call screeners, who are often interns.
The “Lehrer” team spends much of the day planning upcoming shows. “It’s a very collaborative process,” McGovern said.
But Lehrer believes that one relationship is vital.
“A talk-show host and the lead producer really have to be partners in the creative effort,” he said.
Staff are also directly involved in raising the finances needed to keep the station running. During the most recent fundraising drive, two weeks ago, screen actor Paul Newman called WNYC with an offer: He’d give the station $50,000 if listeners donated the same amount between 11 and 12 the following morning.
“I said, ‘We can try, but we’ll probably get $30,000, if that,” McGovern recalled telling WNYC’s program director. “And then Brian came in and he said maybe $35,000. We’d nothing to lose anyway.”
By the time the hour was up at noon the next day, listeners had pledged $110,000.

Educational medium
Public radio was first set up by government to offer a non-biased alternative to commercial radio. Government funding and involvement has been much reduced over the years, however. Six years ago, New York City sold its radio licenses to the non-profit WNYC foundation.
WNYC radio’s mission is “to make the mind more curious, the heart more tolerant, and the spirit more joyful though excellent radio programming.”
American public radio still takes its educational, instructional and cultural roles seriously.
“It’s about feeding those needs rather than ratcheting up numbers,” said Lori Ann Krushefski, WNYC’s director of marketing and communications.
Conservatives have argued that liberals can’t complain about right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh because they’ve got National Public Radio. But research shows that public-radio listeners come from across the ideological spectrum and also differ greatly in income levels. More likely than not, though, the average listener has been to college at some point.
“The thing that really unites the audience most frequently is level of education,” Krushefski said.
McGovern said that public radio “is something very special in the U.S. and very specific.”
In Ireland, Britain and continental Europe, public radio is more mainstream and usually publicly owned. Nonetheless, because of the similarity in ethos, McGovern said that WNYC feels connected to the BBC, RTE and other European stations, as well as domestic radio, through U.S. distributors NPR and Public Radio International. (This weekend, the show’s team will fly to London for a co-broadcast with the BBC World Service.)
McGovern tells friends and relatives at home in Dublin that the program she works for is not unlike the hugely popular “Marion Finuncane Show,” which is broadcast afternoons on RTE Radio 1.
“In Ireland, they are quite used to having long conversations and a slower pace of programming,” McGovern said.
American public radio is similar.
Said McGovern: “It’s not distracted, so that allows you to concentrate on what’s been said. You can have longer interviews of 40 minutes or maybe even an hour.”
It’s this more in-depth approach that has brought many listeners to WNYC and other public stations in recent years.
“We fashioned a series on Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America?’ where Brian interviewed people that were born elsewhere but are now live in American,” McGovern said. “They have been fascinating stories on why they came to America and what America means to them.”
Canada-born ABC anchorman Peter Jennings called to suggest himself as a subject after he’d heard a couple of episodes.
“It led to some great discussions on what really was our attempt post-Sept. 11 to try to learn how other see America and how it can often differ from how Americans see themselves,” said McGovern, who’s now a U.S. citizen.
Sometimes the focus is more local. The “Lehrer” show has had several outside broadcasts recently around the New York area, dealing with community issues.
That sort of variety is another reason why McGovern believes that in producing the “Lehrer” show, she’s found the perfect job.
“To be part of it is fantastic,” she said. “I feel very lucky and I love coming to work each day.”
(“The Brian Lehrer Show” is broadcast on WNYC weekdays from 10 to noon on 93.9FM and AM820 and is repeated at 1 a.m. on AM820. It’s available online at www.wnyc.org. The co-broadcast with the BBC World Service’s Robin Lustig, entitled “Exporting Democracy,” will be aired on Saturday, Nov. 8, at 1 p.m. on both frequencies.)