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Bob Edwards, the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” for almost a quarter-century, whose wealthy baritone and funky demeanor imbued his radio broadcasts with authority in reaching hundreds of thousands of listeners, died on Saturday. He was 76.
NPR, which introduced his loss of life on Monday, didn’t cite a trigger or say the place he died.
Mr. Edwards, a local of Louisville, Ky., who knew from an early age that he needed to be in radio, joined NPR in 1974, through the Watergate hearings. That yr, he turned a co-host of “All Things Considered,’’ the general public broadcaster’s signature night newsmagazine of interviews, evaluation and options. Its success led to the spinoff “Morning Edition” in 1979.
Mr. Edwards started as a 30-day short-term host of that program earlier than happening to function its anchor for twenty-four and a half years.
“Bob Edwards understood the intimate and distinctly private reference to audiences that distinguishes audio journalism from different mediums,” John Lansing, chief government of NPR, stated in an announcement, “and for many years he was a trusted voice within the each day lives of hundreds of thousands of NPR listeners.”
Susan Stamberg, his co-host on “All Things Considered,” in an interview with NPR for its obituary about Mr. Edwards, described their oil-and-vinegar chemistry.
“We had 5 good — if rocky — years collectively, till we kind of acquired each other’s rhythm, as a result of he was Mr. Cool, he was Mr. Authoritative and straight forward,” she stated. “I used to be the New Yorker with 1,000,000 concepts and an enormous chuckle. But we actually adjusted reasonably properly.”
She known as him “the voice we woke as much as” for 1 / 4 century.
On “Morning Edition,” Mr. Edwards interviewed 1000’s of outstanding figures within the information, together with the singer Dolly Parton and the famend baseball announcer Red Barber, with whom he performed a preferred common phase of commentary.
Mr. Edwards was ousted from “Morning Edition” in 2004, a transfer that led to protests from listeners and even reached the reached the halls of Congress, the place Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, rose on the Senate ground to object, calling Mr. Edwards “essentially the most profitable morning voice in America.”
Mr. Edwards’s mentioned his departure on the air together with his NPR colleague Scott Simon, saying “tastes change, they usually have totally different concepts about this system and who needs to be doing it.” He was changed by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne.
Robert Alan Edwards was born on May 16, 1947. He knew he had a voice for radio when, as a toddler, he would reply the cellphone and callers would say, “Hello, Mr. Edwards,” assuming he was his father, he informed Mr. Simon.
Early in his profession, he labored for a station in Indiana and in Korea for the Armed Forces Radio and Television, in accordance with a biography on the Radio Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2004. He received a Peabody Award in 2000 for “Morning Edition,” which the awards committee described as “two hours of each day in-depth information and leisure expertly helmed by a person who embodies the essence of excellence in radio.”
After his ultimate “Morning Edition” broadcast, on April 30, 2004, Mr. Edwards went on to host “The Bob Edwards Show” on SiriusXM Radio, which ran via 2014, and “Bob Edwards Weekend,” which was broadcast on public radio stations.
“He was a stickler for even the tiniest of particulars and lived by the philosophy that ‘much less is extra,’” his spouse, Windsor Johnston, an NPR reporter and anchor, wrote on Facebook on Monday. “He helped paved the best way for the youthful era of journalists who proceed to make NPR what it’s right this moment.”
An entire obituary will seem quickly.
