Steve Inskeep
Steve Inskeep is host of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the United States. He co-hosts with Renee Montagne.
Inskeep has traveled across the nation and around the world for Morning Edition and NPR News. From the Persian Gulf to the wreckage of New Orleans, he has interviewed presidents, warlords, authors, and musicians, as well as those who aren't in the headlines — from a steelworker in Ohio to a woman living in poverty in Tehran.
Inskeep's first full-time assignment for NPR 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 September 11 attacks, Inskeep covered the war in Afghanistan, the hunt for al-Qaeda suspects in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he received a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid that went wrong in Afghanistan. He has twice been part of the NPR News team that was awarded an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for its coverage of Iraq.
In 2004, Inskeep joined a team that reshaped Morning Edition. Today Morning Edition aggressively covers breaking news, and also, in Inskeep's words, "tries to slow down the news – make sense of information that flies by too quickly, and check glib statements against the facts."
He led Morning Edition teams that hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, Karachi, and Tehran; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a 2006 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for "The Price of African Oil," a series on conflict in Nigeria.
During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Inskeep and NPR's Michele Norris co-hosted "The York Project," a groundbreaking series of conversations about race. Fifteen Pennsylvanians met to talk for hours about a subject that's constantly mentioned, yet not often frankly discussed. This series received a duPont silver baton for excellence.
Although his job often calls for him to deliver bad news, Inskeep looks for the humanity in hard times — and the humor. "I'm inspired," he says, "by the Langston Hughes book Laughing to Keep From Crying. And I'm inspired by people like the Bordelons, who've spoken with us ever since they rode out Hurricane Katrina. At the beginning, they sometimes laughed and cried in the same sentence. Laughter means you survived."
Before coming to NPR, Inskeep worked for public and commercial radio stations in and around New York City. He has written articles for publications including The New York Times and Washington Post. He is also the author of a forthcoming book on the world's growing urban areas, tentatively titled Instant City.
A native of Carmel, Indiana, Inskeep is a 1990 graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky.