Of the changes ushered in by Mankiewicz, Jack Mitchell, in his new book, Listener Supported, writes, "Gone was the notion, so central to the thinking of the first NPR board, of public radio as the people's instrument. The vox populi became the voice of the best professionals." Some of those professionals--Nina Totenberg, Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer--had close ties to the Washington establishment. They were the sort of "coolly objective journalists" Siemering and his colleagues had hoped would steer clear of NPR. But Wertheimer & Co. were more or less in control by the time NPR collapsed financially in 1983.

That crisis resulted from financial incompetence and cuts in funding for public broadcasting, which hit public radio especially hard. Rescue came in the form of a substantial loan from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and from a vigorous fundraising drive by NPR's member stations. (Owing to the decentralized nature of public radio in the United States, the stations have a major say in how NPR does business. NPR itself owns no stations; it merely produces and distributes programming for the member stations. Some, like WNYC in New York and WBEZ in Chicago, produce programming that is regarded by many as often superior to NPR's.) Out of the crisis arose a new NPR--leaner, better managed, more news-oriented, more enamored of audience research and more eager to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer an alternative or countercultural institution.

Indeed, NPR executives had reason to be concerned about the network's image in Washington. Richard Nixon loathed public broadcasting, and nominated the ultraconservative industrialist Joseph Coors to the CPB board. Financially, public radio did well in the Ford and Carter years, but the arrival of Ronald Reagan led, in 1983, to a 20 percent reduction in the federal appropriation for public broadcasting. By the mid-1980s, NPR, still on shaky financial footing, was under pressure from political actors like the Heritage Foundation and The New Republic, which published a much-discussed attack on the network in 1986 by Fred Barnes, wherein he claimed that NPR had an inherent bias against conservatives and a reflexive sympathy for left-wing movements in Central America. Writing in Mother Jones in 1987, Laurence Zuckerman chronicled a series of newsroom conflicts over US intervention in Grenada and Nicaragua, conflicts that helped to determine the network's overall political direction in the Reagan era. At one point State Department officials complained that an All Things Considered segment was too critical of the US-backed contra rebels. Then-news director Robert Siegel, according to Mother Jones, invited those officials to lunch and concluded that the piece was indeed problematic. Gary Covino, who produced the controversial segment, told Mother Jones, "The way [Siegel] handled this story sent the message spoken and unspoken that this was not the kind of stuff NPR should be doing.... Many people picked it up very quickly and began censoring themselves."

NPR's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War marked the network's arrival into the media big leagues. With a million dollars from CPB and the member stations, NPR for the first time sent a team of its own correspondents to cover a war from the field. In the 1990s, as profit-hungry television and radio stations retreated from in-depth reporting on politics and public affairs, NPR endeavored to take over that role. It did so with considerable integrity and professionalism. Awards were racked up; new foreign and domestic bureaus were created. Educated listeners gravitated toward NPR in times of political ferment and, with few options available to them for serious news, stayed for the long haul. By the mid-1990s, NPR was finally in possession of the professional recognition it had long desired. "NPR does a really rich mix of reporting and coverage of the United States," says Martin Turner, who heads the BBC's Washington office. "It's a pretty high standard."

By and large, and with key exceptions, NPR's critics fall into three groups. There is little doubt that NPR is most concerned about the first, and most vocal, group: political conservatives. In 1994 Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans put public broadcasting on the chopping block, vowing to "zero it out" of the federal budget. The effort backfired, as viewers and listeners besieged Congress with calls and letters defending public radio and TV. Gingrich & Co. lost the battle to choke off public funds to NPR, but they probably emerged victorious in a larger quest: to anchor NPR in the political center. In a 1995 conversation with University of Maine professor Michael McCauley, who has written an authoritative new book, NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media admitted that he felt NPR aired less objectionable material in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s, when AIM first began to assail the network on ideological grounds. These days, Newt Gingrich himself is full of praise for NPR: "Either it is a lot less on the left," he remarked in 2003, "or I have mellowed." (NPR itself trumpets the Gingrich turnaround in its press packet as "an amusing fact.")

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