CBS woos away Derek McGinty
'I wonder if we can clone him,' muses WAMU program director
Originally published in Current, Jan. 19, 1998
By Jacqueline Conciatore
The news was expected, but still a surprise: public radio is losing one of it most popular talents, Derek McGinty, to commercial TV.
The personable and straight-talking McGinty has been increasingly visible as a host and correspondent on commercial and public television. And months ago newspapers reported that McGinty was getting offers from the big networks.
In October, McGinty began freelancing as a correspondent for CBS's Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, while continuing as host of The Derek McGinty Show, aired by WAMU-FM, Washington, and nationally distributed by NPR. He says he soon realized he had to put full energy into one or the other. "It was an agonizing decision and I went back and forth every day about 100 times," he says. "People like the show, and let me know it was important to them.
"It eventually came to me that I had to take some risk and try something new and try to make it as good as I can make it."
So McGinty will end the Derek McGinty Show Jan. 30 to become a full-time correspondent for Public Eye.
NPR newscaster Frank Stasio will replace him temporarily, except on Fridays, when WAMU News Director Kathy Merritt will take over. WAMU Program Director Steve Martin hopes to have a permanent replacement within three months or so.
About 33 stations, including repeaters, carry the McGinty show.
Martin jokes that he'd like to volunteer McGinty for the cloning experiment that an Illinois physicist has been hyping (see page 11) and admits he's nervous about finding a replacement. "I don't think there are that many out there that can do this kind of talk radio and do it well," he says. But, this is Martin's third host transition — in previous years he had to find successors to veteran Fred Fiske and then Mike Cuthbert — and each time listeners said there couldn't possibly be adequate replacements, he says.
WAMU has invited NPR to sit in on candidate interviews, but the hiring decision will be WAMU's, says Martin.
Diminishing challenge
McGinty is widely praised for his smarts, even-handedness and habit of asking questions that are meaningful to listeners. Shortly after the host won CPB's Gold Award for public affairs programming in 1994, the Washington Post called him "the voice of reason," while free-speech columnist Nat Hentoff said McGinty "get[s] to the root of controversy, and callers know he wants to hear what they say rather than revel in how nastily he can dismiss them."
McGinty's program runs two hours — the first hour airs only in Washington, and the Friday edition specializing in D.C. government has no media rivals for attracting the attention of local politicos. Mayor Marion Barry, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, members of the D.C. Council and school board, and their many critics, are frequent guests. The mayor and others often impulsively phone McGinty and his "D.C. Politics Hour" political analyst Mark Plotkin to have their say. WETA-TV airs the weekly hour on location from WAMU's studio.
Despite the show's success, it was presenting less of a challenge after seven years, McGinty says. And the fact that his new boss at CBS sat down with him and said he wanted McGinty to join the program was important. "I'm a big fan of Bryant Gumbel," he says. "He's a black man in the network. And I always looked up to him and said, 'Maybe someday I could be there.'"
For CBS, McGinty hopes to treat the same eclectic array of subjects that he does now. "I am an idea person," he says. "That's what has driven the radio show, that I enjoy dealing with, taking apart and reassembling ideas."
CBS Executive Vice President for News John Klein says McGinty has a talent for finding and imparting the relevance of stories. "If Derek has a signature piece, it will be one in which he finds a small personal story that illuminates an important widespread social phenomenon," he says. He did a story for CBS's Coast to Coast about a girl expelled from her high school because she wore black lipstick. "It's a seemingly minor incident, but Derek used it to probe our changing attitudes toward kids' expressions of independence," he says.
Public Eye isn't requiring McGinty to move from his hometown. It just means the correspondent will be flying off to cover stories from the District rather than New York, he says.
"Luckiest guy"
McGinty was inspired to take up journalism while in high school, after hearing an address by local news anchor Jim Vance. He got a degree in communications from American University, and eventually wound up at Howard University's commercial WHUR, covering Capitol Hill and co-hosting a news program. The young reporter's dad encouraged him to consider talk radio, and McGinty began at WAMU as a nighttime host, moving to his midmorning slot in 1992. Last year, NPR picked up McGinty's program for national distribution, along with WAMU's Diane Rehm Show.
Though McGinty initially resisted the idea of moving away from reporting, he is today loathe to completely give up hosting, which is why he'll continue moderating town-hall style discussions for WETA's quarterly program, Straight Talk with Derek McGinty. CBS's allowing him to remain as host of the WETA show "made it a perfect contract," he says.
Will the host do something special for his last McGinty program? Perhaps a show recapping highlights, he says. But then again, perhaps not. "It's hard enough to leave, and kind of a bittersweet experience," he says. "I'm happy to be doing something new, but I have had such good fortune here, it's a tough time. . . . I've been the luckiest guy in the world to have a job like this."
Earlier news: McGinty profiled, 1994.
Web page created Jan. 17, 1998
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