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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Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he is making an effort to answer any legitimate questions concerning his administration and its conduct during the war in Ukraine. -
The New York icons whose songs pulled rock inside out (and whose breakup was nearly as legendary) gather for the first time in years to discuss their rereleased concert film, Stop Making Sense. -
NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, after the Biden Administration proposed a new national standard for staffing nursing homes. -
Over the weekend, players from around the world gathered in Yokohoma to battle against each other at the Pokémon World Championship. -
Mandy Gunasekara, a former EPA official in the Trump administration, says climate change will be "mild and manageable." She wrote a playbook to weaken the EPA if a Republican wins the 2024 election. -
NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to former Trump budget director Russell Vought, who now heads the think tank Center for Renewing America, about reshaping the executive branch if Donald Trump is reelected. -
A mural in Washington, D.C. depicts Americans wrongfully detained abroad and fades with time to represent passing days. Neda Sharghi's brother Emad imprisoned in Iran is one of those faces. -
GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota says "a little bit of common sense" is needed to address the frustrations about a military spending bill in Congress right now. -
Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr says Trump's actions amounted to "flipping the bird at the government" provoking a federal indictment on his own. -
In his first interview since thousands of subreddits went dark in protest, Huffman said he is not going to reverse his plan to start charging for outside access to Reddit data.
