Linda Wertheimer

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Linda Wertheimer is a radio journalist for National Public Radio (NPR).

Wertheimer was born on March 19, 1943 in Carlsbad, New Mexico.^[1] She graduated from Wellesley College with the class of 1965. She worked for the BBC and WCBS after graduating. Wertheimer was reportedy told she should be a researcher, rather than an on-air reporter, by an executive at NBC.^[2]

NPR, however, had no such reservations. Wertheimer began her career with NPR from the beginning in 1971, and became a political correspondent in 1974. In 1976, she was the anchor for NPR's coverage of a presidential nomination convention, and later, for election night: she was the first woman to do so.^[3]

She has anchored ten presidential nomination conventions and twelve election nights in her career. She continued in her role as a political correspondent through 1989, at which point she became a host of the NPR news magazine show All Things Considered, a role she would continue in for thirteen years. In 2002, she left that role and became NPR's first senior national correspondent.

In 1979, Wertheimer won a DuPont-Columbia Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. She won the award for her live coverage of the debate in the United States Senate about the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, concerning the Panama Canal, in February 1978. Her coverage spanned a period of 37 days and marked the first time a live broadcast was transmitted from inside the Senate chamber.^[4] Washingtonian magazine named Wertheimer one of the top 50 journalists in Washington, while Vanity Fair called her one of the 200 most influential women in America.^[5]

She is the author of a book, Listening to America: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on NPR, a book about recent American history as covered on NPR.^[6]

Her husband Fred Wertheimer is a past president of Common Cause and current CEO of Democracy 21. Because of his vocal advocacy of the issue (and the appearance of a conflict of interest), Linda Wertheimer does not do stories on campaign finance reform.