Susan Stamberg, first woman to host a national news program, dies at age 87

Susan Stamberg, a “founding mother” of National Public Radio and the first female broadcaster to host a national news program, has died. She was 87.

Stamberg died Thursday, NPR reported. It did not provide a cause of death.

Stamberg joined NPR in the early 1970s when it was getting off the ground as a network of radio stations across the country. During her career, she interviewed thousands of people, from prominent politicians and artists to the less well-known like White House chefs and people who work behind the scenes in Hollywood.

She explained in an oral history interview with Oregon station KLCC in January that she didn’t have women in broadcast to model herself after when she became the host of All Things Considered in 1972.

“The only ones on were men, and the only thing I knew to do was imitate them,” she said.

She lowered her voice to sound authoritative. After a few days, Bill Siemering, the program manager, told her to be herself.

“And that was new too in its day, because everybody else, the women, were trained actors, and so they came with a very careful accents and very careful delivery. They weren’t relaxed and natural,” she said. “So we made a new sound with radio as well, with NPR.”

NPR’s obituary for Stamberg quoted her colleague Jack Mitchell saying she had an “obvious New York accent.”

All Things Considered only had five reporters to draw on while they filled their 90-minute program, creating a daily challenge.

She told KLCC that she coined the term “founding mother” to refer to herself and three other women who helped launch the NPR: Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer.

“I got tired of hearing about Founding Fathers, and I knew we were not that, so we were obviously Founding Mothers, and I was going to put that on the map,” she said.

Stamberg hosted All Things Considered for 14 years. She went on to host Weekend Edition Sunday, where she started the Sunday puzzle feature with Will Shortz.

Shortz, who continues to serve as the program’s puzzle master and who is now the crossword editor of the New York Times, explained that Stamberg wanted the show to be the radio equivalent of a Sunday newspaper that provided news, culture, sports and a puzzle.

She later became a cultural correspondent for Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday. She retired in September.

In 1979, she hosted a two-hour radio call-in program with then-President Jimmy Carter from the Oval Office. She managed the listeners who called in to speak with him. The questions were not screened beforehand. It was the second time Carter had a call-in program after the first with Walter Cronkite.

Stamberg was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, which said she was known for her “conversational style, intelligence, and knack for finding an interesting story.” She interviewed Nancy Reagan, Annie Liebowitz, Rosa Parks and James Baldwin among thousands of others.

She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2020.

Stamberg was born Susan Levitt in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 but grew up in Manhattan. She met her husband, Louis Stamberg, while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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