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Editor's Note: Groundbreaking Broadcaster Signs Off

Dana Heupel
NPR Illinois

To call Rich Bradley a fixture in Illinois public radio news would do him a disservice. Fixtures, after all, are normally installed after a structure is created. When it comes to the Illinois Public Radio network and several other notable broadcast constructions in this state, Bradley was the creator.

If you regularly listen to any National Public Radio station in Illinois, you probably have heard his smooth baritone providing news reports from Springfield or hosting the popular State Week in Review program. But no more: At the end of September, at age 69, Bradley retired as news director of WUIS, the capital city’s public radio station and a sister unit of Illinois Issues in the Center for State Policy and Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield. He says it’s just time for younger blood to take over.

Forty-six years after he began his professional career in radio news at WCIL in Carbondale, Bradley’s legacy is secure. Aside from working for commercial broadcast stations in Herrin, Carbondale and Springfield, he was among the originators of the commercial Illinois News Network in the 1970s, and he became the mastermind behind the Illinois Public Radio network in the ’80s.
 

Rich Bradley
Credit WUIS/Illinois Issues
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WUIS/Illinois Issues
Rich Bradley

In the fall of 1974, Bradley was recruited from the Illinois News Network in Springfield to become the first news director for what was to become WSSR, the public radio station that was being established at Sangamon State University. The call letters later changed to WSSU and then to WUIS when Sangamon State became the University of Illinois at Springfield.

The roots of the statewide public radio news network began to take hold in the early 1980s, when the Springfield public radio station hired its first full-time reporter at the Statehouse. “The other public stations in Illinois began to express an interest and call and ask for selected stories from time to time about something going on in the state Capitol,” Bradley says. “We fed that audio over a telephone link to them.”

When those requests began to increase, “that’s when I conceived of the idea of working out some kind of mechanism where, in an organized way, we began sharing stories. I was interested in what was going on in other parts of the state; those stations, of course, were interested in what was going on in the Statehouse.”

The stations continued to share audio over telephone lines until 1985, when the General Assembly created the Illinois Public Broadcasting Council, along with an annual funding mechanism for public radio and television that is administered through the Illinois Arts Council. “In that initial legislation … there was a one-time-only appropriation to the council to buy satellite distribution equipment for the radio stations and for the TV stations. On the radio side, the money was used to purchase the hardware for a satellite uplink, which is located here at WUIS. That became the way that we began to distribute —statewide — high-quality audio from the state Capitol over the NPR satellite system,” Bradley says.

“The advent of that uplink really did kind of cement and crystallize Illinois Public Radio as it exists today,” he says. That is why a public radio listener in Peoria can now hear a news report about an event in Carbondale, or a listener in Rockford can follow the news at the state Capitol in Springfield over his or her local station. “It evolved from feeding, originally, audio — poor quality, as it turned out — over dial-up telephone lines to the stations, to the advent of this satellite distribution system which had its hub with the uplink here in Springfield.” In recent years, Internet tech- nology has supplanted the satellite uplink. Now, most stations access one another’s stories through a computer server based at WUIS.

While technology changed during Bradley’s time as a radio newsman — from reel-to-reel recorders to cassettes to mini-disks to digital files that are edited over computers — reporting skills have pretty much stayed the same. The advent of conservative talk shows has altered the tone of commercial radio, he says, “but it’s still a goal for people who work in public radio journalism to be objective — as objective as you can possibly be, anyway.”

He also has seen the decline of local news at commercial radio stations, “primarily because of deregulation nationally. … You had a lot of corporations move in and start buying up all these local stations and began to look strictly at the bottom line, rather than the community service that most of those stations historically have provided.” Syndicated talk shows and music programs edged out local news, he says.

When Bradley recalls stories he worked on during parts of five decades, the one that stands out the most happened during his last year: the impeachment of a sitting governor. “That still has to be the biggest, most-significant story that the station covered,” he says. “I don’t think you can argue the historical significance of that.” 

WUIS broadcast the Illinois House impeachment hearings live, along with other events that led to Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s removal from office. Other significant stories include an interview with then-Gov. Dan Walker after he was defeated in the primary, and being one of a handful of reporters at a local hotel for a speech by Jimmy Carter when few knew the former Georgia governor and presidential candidate. WUIS also broadcast live Barack Obama’s 2007 announcement at the Old State Capitol in Springfield that he was running for president and his announcement there in 2008 of Joe Biden as his running mate.

Bradley says that in retirement, he will miss the camaraderie at WUIS, as well as with his radio colleagues throughout the state. “You’re kind of like a family, and you get to know everybody’s business.” He’ll also have to slowly adjust his internal clock after arising between 3 and 3:30 a.m. for the last 30 years to prepare for his morning broadcasts. He expects the transition at the local station to be seamless.

As for his impetus in creating the Illinois Public Radio network, Bradley remains typically modest. “That only happened, you know, because I happened to be the news director of the public radio station that happened to be in the state capital that happened to have a bureau in the state Capitol building that happened to be covering state politics and government.” 

That may be true. But Bradley still had to create the structure before the network could become a fixture. He was the one who made it all happen.

Dana Heupel can be reached at heupel.dana@uis.edu.

Illinois Issues, November 2009

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