By
accident, by luck and sometimes even by design, Reedies have launched
their careers on the radio waves
By Todd Schwartz
How did he know? When Guglielmo Marconi
was shooting static through the attic, building his “wireless telegraph,”
did the Italian inventor know that someday radio would be perhaps the
ideal medium for Reedies? Think about it: in the realm bordered by 535
kilohertz to 1.7 megahertz, and by 88 to 108 megahertz, there is sound
and fury and talk and a million kinds of music and wacky ideas and occasional
static. Dead air is a sin and expression is everything.
And that’s the Reed frequency, without a doubt.
Across the country, up and down the dial, behind the mike or behind the
scenes, you’ll find Reed alums working in radio. Some of them got
their start in the Doyle basement, narrowcasting over the 10 crackling
watts of KRRC. Others found their way to the business as mysteriously
as a Texas country and western station finds it way to your radio dial
on a midnight drive across eastern Oregon. We tuned in a few of these
radio Reedies....
When Margaret (Smith) Binda ’50 attended
Reed in the late 1940s, there was no campus station, so it wasn’t
until she returned from several years living and working in Africa that
she joined the world of radio. Emphasis on world.
Binda’s thesis was The Two Germanies. She analyzed the viability
of the recently divided nation and concluded that reunification was inevitable.
She just didn’t know it would take four decades.
After several years living and working in Africa for the U.S. State Department,
Binda returned to Washington, D.C., with a firsthand knowledge of African
affairs and an interest in international broadcasting. In 1972 she landed
a job at Voice of America, the congressionally funded broadcasting arm
of the U.S. government. Working in the newsroom, she wrote stories on
developments in Africa and the Middle East, and reported from Capitol
Hill and the White House.
|
Margaret (Smith) Binda
Õ50 |
She rose quickly within the ranks, and by 1981 was
deputy director of VOA’s Africa division, sending out programs in
eight languages: English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili, along with Hausa
in Nigeria, Amharic in Ethiopia, Chinyanja in Malawi, and Somali in the
area known as the Horn of Africa.
Binda spent a year studying security issues at the National War College
in 1986-87 and eventually became director of all Africa broadcast services
in 1989. The job was a constant balancing act.
“The tension between the journalists, who want to get objective news
out, and the bureaucrats, who prefer to avoid any story that puts the U.S.
in a bad light, is guaranteed,” Binda says. “Those of us on
the journalistic side of the equation know that credibility is everything
and that you very quickly lose your audience if listeners believe you are
skewing news to protect America. As a senior manager, I had to walk a tightrope
to get the news out and not get fired! The State Department and the Pentagon
were often breathing down my neck.”
A case in point was the airing in 1993 of an interview with the Somali warlord
Mohammed Farah Aideed—no doubt one of the last voices the U.S. government
wanted to hear on the air. Binda ran the interview, pairing it with an opposing
interview with the U.S. admiral heading the U.N.’s Somali operation.
Perfect journalistic balance, and lots of heat on Binda. In the end, the
head of VOA backed her up.
“It was good programming and, of course, drew enormous attention,”
Binda remembers. “I liked that moment. I’m proud of my tenure
as Africa director—we were able to increase our audience in the many
African countries we reached, and we brought in many more qualified African
broadcasters. For Africans to hear trusted African voices on the air enhanced
our credibility greatly.”
Binda left VOA in 1993 when she reached 65, the mandatory requirement age
in the Foreign Service. She continues to live in Washington, D.C., and is
a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Half a century later, Binda remembers her Reed experience fondly. “At
Reed I learned to take a thoughtful, critical approach to everything I do,
and that helped in my career,” she says. And when asked to compare
radio with other media: “In radio the pictures are better—more
personal, more internalized than TV, and they stay in your mind longer.”
next page
|
|