D-C Radio: Diane Rehm To Exit Non-Com WAMU

Diane Rehm

Diane Rehm, a towering figure in public radio, is parting ways with WAMU, Washington, D.C.’s NPR affiliate, after an extraordinary 52-year tenure. 

The announcement came this week, during a luncheon for WAMU donors, where Rehm revealed she had accepted a buyout offer from the station. Her final day will be May 2, 2025, closing a chapter that began in 1973 and cemented her as a broadcast legend.

Rehm’s journey at WAMU started humbly as a volunteer producer. By 1979, she was hosting Kaleidoscope, a weekday arts program aimed at homemakers, which she transformed in 1984 into The Diane Rehm Show. That show grew from a local call-in to a national powerhouse, syndicated by NPR, with a peak weekly audience of nearly 3 million. Known for her probing interviews and civil discourse, Rehm tackled everything from politics to literature, earning a Peabody Award and a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2014. Her distinctive voice—strained by spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition diagnosed in the late 1990s—became a hallmark of her resilience and authenticity.

She stepped away from The Diane Rehm Show in December 2016, after 37 years, motivated partly by her husband John’s slow death from Parkinson’s in 2014 and her subsequent advocacy for the right-to-die movement—a stance that occasionally clashed with NPR’s neutrality expectations. 

But Rehm didn’t leave WAMU entirely. She launched Diane Rehm: On My Mind, a twice-weekly podcast, and a monthly Diane Rehm Book Club, both produced remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic began. These kept her connected to listeners, though she remained a contractor, not a full-time employee.

The decision to leave now wasn’t entirely her own initiative. WAMU offered her a buyout in December 2024, amid a turbulent period for the station. In 2024, WAMU laid off staff, shuttered its local news site DCist, and saw morale plummet under shifting leadership—moves Rehm publicly criticized during an all-staff meeting. 

At 88, her departure marks the end of an era for WAMU.