Npr’s Ray Saurez Leads Hunt For Ideas In Talk At WSU, Radio Host Regrets Show On Princess Di
It brought him some blistering hate mail, but Ray Suarez doesn’t regret suggesting to a national radio audience that the death of Princess Diana was not the most important world event since Pearl Harbor.
Still, while talking it over in an appearance this week at Washington State University, he grew visibly bothered about devoting a segment of his National Public Radio program, “Talk of the Nation,” to her death. You could see him thinking, verbally hashing out his frustration that the death and funeral was a “TV moment” in which the world felt compelled to place flowers in public places.
Finally, in a sort of personal revelation, he said: “I’m sorry we did the Diana show.”
It was a Ray Suarez moment, one in which an idea rises in the air, bounces around, then settles down in a new “I-never-thought-of-it-that-way” form.
This moment involved more than 500 people who skipped “Seinfeld” to see him speak in the Compton Union Auditorium on Thursday night. On weekdays, the moments involve nearly 2 million listeners as Suarez leads guests and callers in a wide-ranging two-hour national forum.
“I’m trying to take issues - sometimes difficult, sometimes complex, sometimes eminently vexing - and ask the audience to look at them with me,” the New York native said Friday morning over eggs and rye toast. “We lay out the signposts, like pounding stakes in a slalom course … and then we do it together, host, guests, callers.”
Now in his fifth year as the show’s host, Suarez, 40, is getting good results. At any given moment, the show will have 375,000 people listening. They stay tuned for an average of 47 minutes, one of the highest “time spent listening” factors in public radio.
Spokane reception is spotty, but the show reaches about half a million area listeners from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Thursday, on KWSU (1250 AM) out of Pullman/ Moscow, KLWS (91.5 FM) in Moses Lake and Ephrata, and KWWS (89.7 FM) in Walla Walla and Tri-Cities.
His reviews are good, too.
“Suarez simply has no equal in radio talk,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s radio critic last year. “… While Suarez always comes across as a guy full of confidence, knowledge, passion and wit, he never comes across as one full of himself.”
At work is a formula at odds with the trends in electronic journalism. As Suarez told the WSU audience, the impulse to give viewers what they want has reporters obsessing about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey and covering the funeral of Henri Paul, Diana’s driver. Domestic abuse and substantial foreign news get overlooked.
“Mrs. Paul, yeah - I’ve been eating her fish sticks all my life,” Suarez said. “But Henri Paul?”
On “Talk of the Nation,” Suarez takes the approach that listeners can be reporters too, as if to say, “Here, do the story with us.”
“It’s something that I only realized fully over time, how important callers are,” Suarez said. “They’re not just there like baby birds in the nest, their beaks open, waiting to have chewed-up worms disgorged into their throats. They don’t have to do any masticating themselves. No work. No effort. We’re all working this through together.”
Recent shows have been as topical as women in the workplace, the Republican Party and Promise Keepers, but the show has also featured more off-beat topics like the life of Napoleon, the 20th-century presidency and sacred texts.
A major challenge, he said, is prying listeners from their more die-hard convictions - making abortion and Israeli-Palestinian relations particularly tough subjects - and getting media-wise guests away from “the script.”
Rephrasing the question usually pulls guests away from pat talking points and prepared answers, he said.
“Helen Chenoweth was an exception,” said Suarez, who has had the Idaho congresswomen as a guest several times. “She’ll never come off the script. And I don’t knock her for it. The script works for her.”
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