Steve Inskeep
2023
By Ray E. Boomhower
For its coverage of the 1996 New Hampshire presidential primary, National Public Radio needed to bolster its political team to tackle a wide-open Republican contest among such well-known names as Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, pundit Patrick Buchanan and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. NPR turned to a young man from Carmel, Indiana, who had been doing some freelance work for the national broadcasting service, Steve Inskeep.
According to Inskeep, he had been hired to “cover anything that needed done that nobody else was available to do. And on my first day there—my first full day there actually -- they said, “Can you get on a plane tonight and go cover the New Hampshire primary?’”
After tramping through the snowy New Hampshire countryside following presidential contenders, Inskeep went on to cover the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to interviewing such famous names as President Barack Obama, musician Bruce Springsteen and actress Meryl Streep, Inskeep considered his favorite interview as being a series with Donald and Colleen Bordelon, survivors of Hurricane Katrina, who stayed for weeks in their flooded home in New Orleans, Louisiana, talking with them for years afterward as they struggled to rebuild their lives.
After serving as host (along with Renee Montagne) of NPR’s “All Things Considered, Weekend,” in December 2004 he became host of the popular “Morning Edition” program. Inskeep also is host of the NPR podcast “Up First” and is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.
“There is a lot of awful, inaccurate, incomplete, misleading information,” Inskeep told a reporter in 2012. “I spend every day wanting to make sure my work is a little more like that of people I admire, and a little less like the people who make me sick. And I would encourage everybody who consumes the media to spend a little time getting to know the difference.”
Born in Indianapolis and adopted by Roland and Judy Inskeep, both public-school teachers, Inskeep grew up in Carmel during a time when it was a suburban bedroom community, with housing developments and a well-regarded high school among “cornfields and railroad tracks and industrial parks.”
He grew up loving reading, devouring books about “wars and I would read about pirates and different parts of the world and read about the British empire and read about the Old West in the United States and because I loved that and because I guess I just grew up curious I’ve wanted to see more and more.”
Later, his love of history led him to such favorite books as Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest; and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men.
As a student at Carmel High School, Inskeep followed in the footsteps of his older brother and tried out for a spot on its radio station (WHJE-FM). “And I figured if my older brother could do it,” he recalled, “I could do it.” Inskeep did play-by-play for the school’s football games, learning a lesson about impartiality while doing so.
“One year they made it to the regional championship and lost to Warren Central on a last-minute field goal. We called it straight—my colleague Craig Sehmon and I—and by straight, I mean we didn’t act like Carmel fans but like reporters,” Inskeep noted. “It was disappointing to lose, but our job was to give the facts.”
The recipient of a National Merit Scholarship, Inskeep attended Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, majoring in history and communications and becoming the voice for the university’s sports teams on the campus radio station, WMKY-FM and WMOR-AM. A former colleague, Paul Hitchcock, remembered that Inskeep’s “mind was always going. Very creative, very outspoken. I did have a sense he would kind of forge his own path in life.”
During this time, Inskeep, who graduated in 1990, discovered public radio, listening and re-listening to Scott Simon’s “Weekend Edition” as he did his Saturday morning shift at WMKY.
“He is a brilliant broadcaster on Saturday mornings on NPR, and I just really got to hear twice how he’d conduct an interview, how he’d write, how he’d put a picture in people’s heads, and it was brilliant and I just kind of fell in love with it that way,” Inskeep recalled.
During his days as an NPR reporter covering war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Inskeep realized there were dangers involved in fulfilling his assignment.
“Journalists do get threatened or killed,” he noted, “and it can be as scary for me as anybody else.” He attempted, however, to manage those risks by keeping a “low profile, go about your business, do what you have to do and don’t call attention to yourself.”
In 2003 his investigation of a botched military raid in Afghanistan won a National Headliner Award. He had also been part of NPR News teams covering Iraq whose work was honored with an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton.
On days when he hosts “Morning Edition,” Inskeep notes that he wakes up just past 3 a.m. and is at his desk by 4 a.m.
“The show starts at five and can’t be one second late,” he added. “This sounds crazy to people, but my California co-hosts—most recently A Martinez—do the same thing three hours sooner. As you might imagine, I’ve focused more and more on getting enough sleep as time goes by.”
On quiet days, much of the show is taped, while on busy news days “it’s almost completely live. When “Morning Edition” stops taping, Inskeep spends time preparing for “tomorrow’s show, next week’s show, next year’s show . . . we’re thinking about long-term.”
When confronted with bad news, Inskeep turns to Langston Hughes’ Laughing to Keep From Crying. When the world’s financial system seemed to be collapsing in 2008, he told an interviewer that it was important for him “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.”