Every day is a busy day for Tavis Smiley, former host of Black Entertainment Television’s BET Tonight, and current host of The Tavis Smiley Show from NPR, the first nationally broadcast talk show centered around black issues.

Smiley, a well-known political commentator, has had what some might consider a brilliant career. Among his more notable achievements, he landed an exclusive interview with then-President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He also has had memorable tête-à-têtes with Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II.

On Jan. 7, 2002, when The Tavis Smiley Show from NPR launched on radio stations at 16 historically black colleges and universities, Smiley made history: He became the first African American to host his own signature talk show on National Public Radio. And in April, the show was the flagship broadcast from NPR West, a brand new, mega-million-dollar Los Angeles-based multimedia production center.

In only 10 months on the air, Smiley has already interviewed the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; Congressman J.C. Watts; Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and his counterpart, Republican National Committee Chairman Mark Racicot; Sen. John McCain; Bill Cosby; Halle Berry; Johnnie Cochran; Ward Connerly; comedian Cheech Marin; and many others.

These days, he's winding up a tour for his sixth book, Keeping the Faith: Stories of Love, Courage, Healing and Hope from Black America. At the same time, Smiley still offers daily political commentary on urban contemporary radio stations across the country, and appears twice weekly on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, heard in Philadelphia on WDAS-FM.

City Paper: Your show has been touted as the first black-centered show nationally broadcast on NPR. What does that mean to you?

Tavis Smiley: It means that there is a responsibility here to ask the kinds of questions that others won't ask, to raise the kinds of issues that others won't raise, to address the kinds of topics that others won't address, and to profile the kind of people that would otherwise not get profiled on NPR. We started with 16 [stations] on Jan. 7 and we're now at 50 stations and counting, nine and a half months later. That is by any standard or measurement remarkable growth. Particularly given that our show's mission and mandate is to address issues that are important to people of color -- even though we do that every day with a demographic that is overwhelmingly white. So, every day, we have to do a show that is authentically black, but at the same time not too black, because we're not even heard predominantly by black people yet because of NPR's demographics. So, it's a high-wire act, a balancing act every day, but that's what it means to me.

TS: We have a wonderful staff of people who work on this show, booking it and producing it, and our staff is totally mixed -- ethnically, racially, gender, even sexual orientation. We have a staff meeting every day where we talk about issues and I basically have two or three things they have to cover. One, they know that our show every day has to be balanced, entertainment and empowerment-wise. Number two, any idea they pitch me, I want to know why this is important to black people. Why it matters to black people, and why and/or how do we get the larger cross-section of America interested in this topic. How do we make it more appealing to the broader audience so that we can empower and educate them on this issue? And, thirdly, I ask myself, ultimately, and my staff to consider who NPR's traditional listeners are, and what are the listeners of our show most likely not to hear if they don't hear it on our show?

TS: My audience on BET was overwhelmingly African-American -- not exclusively, a lot of white people watched, but overwhelmingly African-American. At NPR, it's the exact opposite. At NPR, the demographics are very clear. They have the most educated listening audience of any radio network. They have the wealthiest audience per capita -- NPR listeners make more money than anybody in the country. So, that makes sense -- you got more education, you make more money. They have the whitest audience and so I have to do a show every day that is designed to bring in more people of color to the network and to raise those issues for those listeners of NPR who happen to be persons of color, who've not had a show that addresses their concerns. So, my mission and mandate is to bring in more people of color, but again, that means I have to be authentically black, but not too black. At BET that was never a problem. It was never a problem at BET how black I wanted to be and at NPR it's a balancing act every day to make sure we raise issues that are important to everybody. So, really, it's vastly different. The bottom line is one's a black audience, one's a white audience and you have to address that without changing who you are.

CP: Black folks, white folks. We take the same story and we hear it differently.

CP: When you're talking to blacks and whites, do you have to have a little conversation with yourself first in order to know which button not to push?

TS: For me it's not a matter of knowing what button not to push. For me it's the exact opposite: I'm trying to figure out what buttons to push. So I go into a mindset of trying to figure out how, why and where the conversation is going and how I can move beyond that and make it inclusive.

TS: The problem is that the paradigm has shifted. I think there has to be a new construct and I think that new construct is being built every day. The problem with black folk is that we have always been wed to charismatic figures as our leaders. The reality is there is no messianic figure that is going to crack the clouds and come back and deliver us to the Promised Land. The work of making black America a better place to live and work is going to be done in the streets. As I travel the country every day, I am meeting more and more people everywhere who are advocates. And so I've found that there are people all across the country who are working on HIV, AIDS, on predatory lending, on insurance red-lining, on housing discrimination, on the public school crisis. The work is going to be done in these communities. It's already happening. There are lot of folk out there who have made themselves a committee of one. And that is happening -- but it doesn't get the headlines.

TS: On television? Not particularly. Now that I've got this NPR show every single day and given the historic nature of what this NPR show represents -- and I don't use that word lightly -- and given that this has never been done before, it's working out quite well, growing and expanding. But it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of investment. I believe in perfecting one project at a time. And I don't want to walk away from this NPR opportunity or give it less attention when it's trying to reach its apex. We've been doing this for nine or 10 months now, so I suspect that over the next few months there'll be changes to our show. I don't know how. I don't know what. I don't know in what way. We've got to figure that out. In January, it'll be right at the one-year mark, our one-year anniversary. So we're going to make this thing bigger and better in the coming months and years, and there will be changes. But the changes are all about making the show the best it can be. We think that our show is uniquely different and it's the difference that's making the difference.

The Tavis Smiley Show from NPR can be heard daily in Philadelphia on WHYY 90.9 FM from 8-9 p.m.