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.
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Poland's foreign minister Radosław Sikorski talks to Morning Edition about the right-wing Law and Justice Party losing power, democracy, and support for Ukraine.
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Tony Blair's On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century is the political leadership guide he says he would have wanted in 1997, at the start of his 10-year tenure as British prime minister.
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Richard Reeves, the author of ‘Of Boys and Men,’ offers insights on masculinity in politics.
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In his new book At War with Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster recounts his experience working for Trump and his inner circle.
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NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with Republican pollster John McLaughlin about how former President Donald Trump can win back the White House in November.
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NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to former NPR host Michele Norris, who writes in a recent column for "The Washington Post," about Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.
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NPR's Steve Inskeep asks Republican strategist Tricia McLaughlin and Democratic strategist Katrina Gamble what were the stories their parties' conventions tried to tell -- and were they successful?
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VP Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for president. Former President Trump visits the wall along the southern border in Cochise County, Arizona. The FDA approves new COVID-19 vaccines.
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NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at accounting firm RSM US, about the economic plans of presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
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An example of how journalism sometimes works: a team investigates one story, one narrative, and if they keep an open mind and dig into the facts, they discover the real story is entirely different.