“Why are YOU mad at the media?”

That was the question host Brian Lehrer posed to listeners on the frigid morning of Sunday, February 7, 1993, during the premiere of a WNYC-AM call-in show titled Inside Media. A few weeks later, the existence of a media trade magazine of the same name necessitated a change, and On the Media was born. The stated intent of the show was to “find out what it is ordinary people want to know,” and its mission was “covering those who cover the news and reporting on reporters” — a worthy endeavor, since “one of the things the media does worst on a day-to-day basis is to cover itself … It covers its interests by not covering its issues.”

Lehrer welcomed the guests for the first hour of that very first show, all movers and shakers in the world of journalism: Everette Dennis, executive director of the show’s co-producer, the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University; Suzanne Braun Levine, editor of Columbia Journalism Review; Donna Minkowitz of the Village Voice; and Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek. The panel ran through the major stories of the day: USA Today divulging the HIV status of tennis icon Arthur Ashe, press coverage of the then-current topic of gays in the military, and Bill Clinton’s difficulty in finding an Attorney General nominee.

The panelists also discussed what made the show’s callers mad about the media. The callers, beginning with the outspoken “Larry in Manhattan”, gave Brian and his guests plenty to respond to: media sensationalism (see Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuocco), the influence of corporate ownership on the media, and much more.

For the show’s second hour, Lehrer hosted Columbia University presidential historian Henry Graff, Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, and Susan Page of Newsday for a discussion (with callers) on the unflattering press coverage of the less-than-three-weeks-old Clinton presidency. Anyone who thinks hostilities between the press and certain American presidents is a recent phenomenon may be surprised by this snapshot of the media’s relationship with the Clinton administration.

Lehrer would host the show for the first two weeks, and was followed by Warren Levinson of the Associated Press. After several other locally-based journalists tried their hands as host, the microphone was eventually handed to Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Alex S. Jones — not to be confused, of course, with the infamous, non-Pulitzer-prize-winning Alex Jones of InfoWars.

Though the debut episode wasn’t On the Media as it exists today, February 7, 1993 was the show's Big Bang moment. Listening back now is a lot like taking a time machine back a quarter century, getting out, and realizing that the media and political landscapes of the early nineties are actually pretty similar to today's.