Sound effects: Gender, voice and the cultural work of NPR

The dominant role of women's voices on National Public Radio (NPR) and the atypical voices of some of NPR's women and men contribute significantly to NPR's appeal to an audience of listeners who are ambivalently positioned within a post-liberal, post-civil rights and post-feminist social formation of highly educated Americans. The changing cultural and political meanings associated with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s are echoed in the voices, sounds and stories of National Public Radio, particularly in the changing sounds of men's voices. The cultural work of NPR, then, which can be traced in the content of its journalism, is most effectively conveyed in its harder-to-pin-down sound signification, especially those demonstrated in the voices of the reporters, hosts and commentators most closely identified with the network.