Original reporting from NPR’s Media Correspondent David Folkenflik.

Susan Stamberg, an original National Public Radio staffer who went on to become the first U.S. woman to anchor a nightly national news program, died Thursday at the age of 87.

Few figures have informed the sensibility of NPR more than Stamberg. Colleagues considered her a mentor, a yenta, a founding mother — always tough, and always true to herself.

Stamberg is survived by her son, the actor Josh Stamberg, and her granddaughters Vivian and Lena.

NPR host Scott Simon contended she was the first real human being to host a regular evening newscast. Stamberg even knit while sitting in front of the microphone at All Things Considered.

Stamberg’s stories and segments over the decades spanned the human experience, from examining matters of state to illuminating pointillist details of artistic achievement. She would be recognized by her peers with honors from the National Radio Hall of Fame, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and more. She retired in September.

Such a reception was not guaranteed when NPR hired Stamberg before its broadcast debut more than five decades ago. She originally was assigned to cut audio tape — it was literally tape back then — with a single-sided razor blade.

Women didn’t yet have a clear place in broadcast journalism, finding themselves sidelined and dismissed at major television networks and even in radio.

At the outset, Stamberg and another of NPR’s “founding mothers,” Linda Wertheimer, insisted they deserved to have an office. They shared a room with photocopiers.

“Susan and I disagreed about politics,” Wertheimer recalled. “That is to say: I thought it was fantastically interesting. All I wanted to do was cover politics. She thought it was the most boring thing imaginable. She couldn’t think why anyone would want to do that.”

Instead, Stamberg interviewed the jazz great Dave Brubeck at her own home, a yellowing copy of a song’s score clipped out of an old musical magazine atop her piano for him to play from.

She called the dentist of then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to learn more about his notably toothy smile.

And Stamberg famously shared her mother-in-law’s recipe for cranberry sauce — she insisted on calling it cranberry relish — with millions of listeners year after year. She inflicted it on such on-air guests as White House chefs, the former editor of Gourmet magazine and the rapper Coolio.

A big break comes by dialing the weather

Stamberg was born Susan Levitt in Newark, New Jersey in September 1938 and was raised and educated on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

She was an only child — and the first in her family to go to college, earning a degree from Barnard College in English literature while living at home.

She met Louis Stamberg while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Once married, they moved to Washington D.C. He went on to have a long career with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

She took a job at WAMU, the public radio station. She made her on-air debut when the weather girl (as the job was then called) got sick.

“It was very sophisticated,” Stamberg told an interviewer for the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011. “You picked up the phone and dialed WE 6-1212. And they told you what the weather was and you wrote it down. We didn’t have meteorologists, there were no computers, and there were no windows in the studio.”

Yet when it came time for Stamberg to speak in front of the microphone for the first time, she realized she had forgotten to make that call. So she said the first thing that came to mind: It was 98 degrees.

The problem: it was February.

“We had probably two listeners. Neither of them called,” she said. “But it taught me enormously important lessons: Always prepare. You don’t go on the air unprepared. And don’t lie to your listeners even if they never hear you and they never call.”

Stamberg continued to recite the weather on WAMU, but found it rather boring. To spice things up — for both herself and her listeners — she added a few lines of weather-appropriate poetry to each report, drawing on her English literature degree.

When Louis Stamberg headed to India for a two-year stint, Susan worked for the wife of the American ambassador there and filed stories for Voice of America, the U.S.-backed international broadcaster.

‘Be yourself’

After joining NPR, Stamberg rose quickly from producer to anchor of All Things Considered in 1972. The first journalists hired at NPR were feeling their way, she said, and that was doubly true for women.

“There were no role models, there were these men, these deep-voiced announcers, and they were the authoritative ones,” Stamberg recalled years later. “So I lowered my voice” — here her raspy voice descended what seemed like two octaves — “and I talked like this.”

She said Bill Siemering, NPR’s first program director, showed courage by putting her behind the microphone.

“He said two magical words to me very early on,” she said. “He said, ‘Be yourself.’ And what he meant was, we want to hear from — we want to hear voices on our air that we’d hear across our dinner tables at night or at the local grocery store. And we want our announcers and our anchor people to sound that way, too.”

Her colleague Jack Mitchell, the initial producer of All Things Considered, said sexism wasn’t the only obstacle that Stamberg had to surmount.

“Besides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,” Mitchell said. “Here is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it.”

Mitchell said that did not play well with NPR board members from stations in the Midwest.

“They, for instance, said, ‘too New York.’ And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those — because of the complaints from managers,” Mitchell said. “We did it anyway and he was very supportive afterwards.”

The Wint-O-Green science experiment

Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts — the other founding mothers of NPR — all made their careers covering various facets of federal Washington. Stamberg was a few years older and she followed a decidedly different path, holding All Things Considered true to its name.

At one point in 1979, she conspired with then-Science Correspondent Ira Flatow to determine what really happens when you chomp on Wint-O-Green LifeSavers in the dark.

“I say let’s go into the closet and find out,” Flatow teased her in a segment that has been handed down as lore for decades inside NPR.

Stamberg laughed. “I’m game if you’re game.”

“I saw it!” She triumphantly called out from the storage closet where Flatow was crunching down on a mint. “I saw a flash of, kind of, a greenish light just for a fraction of a second.”

After 14 years, Stamberg shifted to hosting Weekend Edition Sunday, which afforded her the chance to keep doing the kind of coverage she wanted, given NPR’s evolution into an increasingly formal news organization.

In 1987, she used her platform to launch an NPR institution: the Sunday puzzle.

“Her idea was that Weekend Edition Sunday should be the radio equivalent of a Sunday newspaper. You get your news and culture and sports and everything,” NPR Puzzle Master Will Shortz recalled on that show years later. “We all know what’s the most important part of the Sunday paper. And it’s the puzzle.”

That same year, Stamberg invited a pair of brothers who were mechanics, Ray and Tom Magliozzi, to talk about cars in a weekly segment inspired by their gig on Boston’s WBUR. Nine months later, they had their own national show on NPR. Others claimed credit for first hearing their promise; she put Car Talk on the air.

Probing both famous directors and never-seen actors

She saw cultural journalism as a respite from news, but also brought a seriousness of purpose to it. She believed listeners’ relationship with culture, high and low, defined how they experienced the world around them. Such matters were neither trivial nor flighty.

When the famous film director Elia Kazan appeared in 1988 to promote his memoir, she leaned into the surrounding controversy. Decades earlier, in testimony before a Congressional committee known as HUAC — the House Un-American Activities Committee — Kazan named people in Hollywood he believed to be Communists. Such actions often prompted people to be pressured to recant their beliefs or face blacklisting. They also sparked intense debate.

Stamberg didn’t duck the controversy; she led with it.

“There are 40 pages in the book [about HUAC], and that’s all there is,” Kazan complained. “And every interview that comes out, that’s the most important thing, and I’m tired of it.”

Stamberg persisted and on it went for quite some time.

“It was a very intense experience,” Stamberg recalled decades later. “We were not face to face. He was in our New York studio and I was in Washington.

“When I left the studio, I said to the person who was going to edit that tape, ‘Leave that argument in and we’ll start with it.’ And I’ve often asked myself: if it had been a face-to-face interview, would I have been able to be that persistent — and stayed with it? I bet not.”

Stamberg yielded the weekend host’s chair after just a couple of years, choosing instead to roam around as a special correspondent in search of sound-rich stories about culture.

After her husband died in 2007, Stamberg spent more time at NPR West as her son Josh built a career as an actor in California.

Stamberg profiled the hidden hands of Hollywood each year during Oscar season. In March 2015, for example, she looked at loopers, the voice actors brought in after a TV show or film is finished to add background texture to the sound of a scene.

“What about the part of never being seen?” Stamberg asked looper David Randolph. “You’re neither seen nor heard, really. You’re sort of background mumble.”

“We believe that what we do is really important. And it’s collaborative. Every part of this industry has lots and lots of layers,” Randolph replied.

Stamberg had her own layers, leaving a legacy both as an unabashed truth teller and a spinner of stories. More tangibly, she leaves an irreplaceable mark on NPR’s headquarters in Washington: Her recorded voice welcomes those who enter the elevators, announcing each floor.

Jesse Baker contributed to this story.

Public media began as classroom radio in the 1920s. It was dry, instructional, and pretty boring. Most only thought of news as newspapers or the anchors you see on your parents’ favorite channel every morning.

But it evolved to combine entertainment, education, and lessons in democracy. That evolution helped shape National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service into platforms that elevate untold community stories and give us and our kids the tools to live better lives. NPR and PBS not only tells us the news happening locally and nationally, they give children a safe avenue for early learning.

Josh Shepperd is a historian and author specializing in public media at the University of Colorado Boulder.

He joined The Metro to talk about the history of public media in the United States, and the Trump administration’s current attacks on public broadcasting.

President Donald Trump has asked Congress to pass a rescission package that would claw back funding for foreign aid programs and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The package has already passed the House and now the Senate has until July 18 to approve it.

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

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Today on The Metro, we continue our coverage on the fight over public media funding and what’s at stake for local news and music stations across the country.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) due to alleged bias. Now, in the House Rescissions Act of 2025 — which narrowly passed the House last month — he’s asking Congress to claw back CPB funding that has already been approved.

The Senate Appropriations committee held a hearing on the bill last month, and the Senate will need to vote on the package by July 18.

If passed, local stations — including WDET and the programs you love — would face profound impacts. At WDET, about 6% of our annual budget comes from CPB.

Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, serves as NPR’s public editor. She says in her role with NPR, she serves as an independent critic of NPR reporting, engaging with listeners and critiquing public media stations when appropriate.

McBride spoke with Metro co-host Robyn Vincent about how public editors at major media outlets help hold journalists accountable, and how NPR could improve its coverage of federal funding cuts to public media and allegations of bias.

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

More stories from The Metro

Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee pushed back against the Trump administration’s bid to kill $9 billion in federal funding that Congress already has approved for public broadcasting and international aid programs.

In President Trump’s request to Congress, sent last month, he justified the cuts because the targeted foreign aid programs were “antithetical to American interests,” and because “[f]ederal spending on [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] subsidizes a public media system that is politically biased and is an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer.”

In a hearing Wednesday, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the committee, noted in the case of public broadcasting that 70% of the federal dollars targeted for rescission support local programming and emergency communications. She acknowledged concerns about NPR’s news coverage, which she said “for years has had a discernibly partisan bent.”

“There are, however, more targeted approaches to addressing that bias [at NPR] than rescinding all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Collins said.

In response to a later question, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought testified that emergency broadcasting services funded by CPB would be safe. He also argued that because the CPB rescission doesn’t apply to the current fiscal year, local stations would have “ample time to adjust” and “they should be more judicious” about whom they pay for content.

Upon further questioning by Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has come out against the public broadcasting cuts, Vought committed to working with her on funding for rural stations. Yet he reiterated that Republicans have spent years trying to address public funding of content.

Murkowski later gave what she described as
“a little bit of a bird’s eye view” of the public radio situation in Alaska, which includes rural stations that receive up to 70% of their funding from the federal government. She went on to detail the vital services the station supply. “[A]lmost to a number, they’re saying that they will go under if public broadcasting funds are no longer available to them,” she said.

The vast majority of the $9.4 billion in cuts requested by the White House are to foreign aid programs addressing global public health, international disaster assistance and hunger relief.

But the package also includes a cut of nearly $1.1 billion in funding for 2026 and 2027 for CPB. The private nonprofit sends most of that money to local public television and radio stations across the country. PBS receives about 15% of its annual revenue through CPB, while NPR gets about 1% directly. Indirectly, NPR also receives some of the money going to member stations, who pay the network to air its programs.

The rescissions measure narrowly passed the House earlier this month, 214 to 212, with two key Republican lawmakers switching their votes from “no” to “yes” at the last minute to get it over the finish line. The House held a hearing earlier this year at which many Republicans accused PBS and NPR of being woke and biased against conservative viewpoints.

On Wednesday, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the panel’s top Democrat, questioned the legality of the White House’s request. Under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, both chambers of Congress must approve such a request by a simple majority within 45 days of its submission—in this case, by July 18.

The cuts to CPB would “rip away funding that supports over 1500 local public TV and radio stations,” Murray said.

“Rural communities will be the hardest hit, not to mention our kids,” she said, adding that the cuts threaten “free, high-quality programming that is thoughtfully developed to get our kids thinking and to grow their curiosity.”

NPR in a statement said: “There is no substitute for the direct support and nationwide infrastructure and services funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that enable these noncommercial stations to serve their communities.” In a statement after the House vote this month, PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said: “Our work is only possible because of the bipartisan support we have always received from Congress, support we have earned by providing services that cannot be replaced by commercial media.”

Reporting by Scott Neuman, NPR

Federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is the focus of a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday. 

The publicly-funded nonprofit, which provides funding to PBS, NPR and its affiliates like WDET, would lose $1.1 billion — two years’ worth of funding that has already been approved by Congress — if the bill passed by the House earlier this month gets Senate approval. It would also rescind more than $8 billion in funding for foreign aid programs addressing global public health, international disaster assistance and hunger relief.

That bill passed in the House by a margin of 214 to 212, with four Republicans crossing the aisle to vote against the package. There were also four Democrats and two Republicans who did not vote on the bill at all.

President Donald Trump has already signed an executive order to eliminate CPB funding, claiming all public media is biased, but the Rescissions Act of 2025 would go beyond that, revoking funding already approved by Congress.

Today on The Metro, we break down what it would mean for public media organizations like WDET if the legislation gets Congressional approval.

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

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