Steve Inskeep
Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First.
Known for interviews with presidents and Congressional leaders, Inskeep has a passion for stories of the less famous: Pennsylvania truck drivers, Kentucky coal miners, U.S.-Mexico border detainees, Yemeni refugees, California firefighters, American soldiers.
Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Cairo, and Beijing; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "The Price of African Oil," on conflict in Nigeria. He has taken listeners on a 2,428-mile journey along the U.S.-Mexico border, and 2,700 miles across North Africa. He is a repeat visitor to Iran and has covered wars in Syria and Yemen.
Inskeep says Morning Edition works to "slow down the news," making sense of fast-moving events. A prime example came during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Inskeep and NPR's Michele Norris conducted "The York Project," groundbreaking conversations about race, which received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence.
Inskeep was hired by NPR in 1996. His first full-time assignment was the 1996 presidential primary in New Hampshire. He went on to cover the Pentagon, the Senate, and the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he covered the war in Afghanistan, turmoil in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he received a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. He has twice been part of NPR News teams awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for coverage of Iraq.
On days of bad news, Inskeep is inspired by the Langston Hughes book, Laughing to Keep From Crying. Of hosting Morning Edition during the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, he told Nuvo magazine when "the whole world seemed to be falling apart, it was especially important for me ... to be amused, even if I had to be cynically amused, about the things that were going wrong. Laughter is a sign that you're not defeated."
Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, a 2011 book on one of the world's great megacities. He is also author of Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson's long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.
He has been a guest on numerous TV programs including ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN's Inside Politics and the PBS Newshour. He has written for publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.
A native of Carmel, Indiana, Inskeep is a graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky.
-
Former Vice President Mike Pence tells Morning Edition that he and former President Donald Trump have gone "our separate ways." Pence looks back on pivotal moments and ahead to what he might do next. -
In separate interviews with NPR, the U.S. special envoy to Iran responds to that country's foreign minister on Iranians' protests over a woman's death, and the state of nuclear negotiations. -
A senior U.S. military official said something was detected in recent days that sharply heightened concern that an invasion is coming. -
The former president blasted Republicans who have crossed him and kept up repeated election lies in an NPR interview.
-
A federal judge has overturned the $4.5 billion settlement between Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, and the Sackler family, that would have protected the family from litigation of their own. -
An Afghan man who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military was desperately trying to get out of the country. Here's how he and his family made it. -
Ibram X. Kendi has been reading a lot of books about "the human rainbow" to his daughter — so we asked him to recommend some books kids can read to gain a better understanding of race in America. -
Virologist Marion Koopmans was part of a WHO team that reconstructed the early coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. She talked with NPR about her team's investigation. -
The way police handled Wednesday's onslaught showed that "some people are ... given certain kinds of leeway or space, and other people are not," says African American studies professor Eddie Glaude. -
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says the Trump administration is creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the U.S.
