Steve Inskeep on NPR cuts, Iran, and radio’s place in the podcast era

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. I’m Max Tani, media editor here at Semafor. And with me as always, all the way across the world is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, live from London. Hi, Ben.

Ben Smith:
Hi, Max. Thanks for having me on.

Max Tani:
Yeah, exactly. It’s late for you here, but it’s a normal time for us.

Ben Smith:
What show is this? I’m losing track.

Max Tani:
It’s Mixed Signals from Semafor Media.

Ben Smith:
One of my favorites.

Max Tani:
Yeah, mine as well. But this week on the show, in addition to me and Ben, we are joined by Steve Inskeep. He is the host of NPR’s Morning Edition and also a contributor to the Up First podcast. And he’s been explaining the world to Americans every morning since 2005.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. And to that point, he’s actually also been to Iran six times along the way, a very, kind of, curious guy.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll talk to him about what he makes of Iran and the media’s coverage of it in this moment, having firsthand knowledge himself. We’ll also ask him about being a prominent radio host in an increasingly podcast-heavy world, and of course, the unavoidable topic, NPR’s public funding battle with the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. All that, and a lot more, with Steve right after the break.
So, Ben, Steve Inskeep, he is the host of Morning Edition. We were emailing with him a few months ago and we decided he’d be a perfect guest for the show to talk a little bit about this interesting moment in podcasting and radio’s role in this, kind of, new podcasty environment.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, Steve Inskeep is kind of the ultimate NPR voice. He’s been with NPR since the ’90s. Emerged, I think, in mid-2000s as a really central, and we say voice, literally voice of the program, conducted huge interviews with George W. Bush, with Barack Obama, with Donald Trump, but also with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
And one of the things that’s interesting and unusual about Steve is he’s like, he’s very American and he will at some point remind us that he is from Indiana and his, sort of, approach to the world is very deeply American, but also he has a level of curiosity about international affairs that I think is not actually all that common in the domestic media. Wrote a book about Karachi, his first book in 2011, among others, won an award for reporting on the oil conflict in Nigeria, and has always balanced this, kind of, basically domestic focus of NPR news with a unusual interest in international affairs that at a moment like now, when our very intensely inward-looking country suddenly whips around and is trying to figure out what’s happening in Iran, I find very valuable and I think is a real credit to NPR.

Max Tani:
Totally. And I imagine he has a really interesting perspective on the conflict and he also probably has a pretty interesting view, that I’m curious to ask him about, in terms of the funding battle that NPR is in the middle of with congressional Republicans. I mean, he is at the center and the organization that he’s worked for for 30 years is at the center of another really interesting story, arguably, and sadly in our world of media reporting, a bigger story.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Though, of course, the real question that this episode will answer, like our extremely popular episode with Matt Belloni, is what does Steve Inskeep look like? Let’s bring him on to find out.

Max Tani:
Absolutely.

Ben Smith:
Steve, thank you so much for joining us.

Steve Inskeep:
Oh, I’m glad to be here.

Ben Smith:
You have been a part of so many Americans, of my morning routine for many years, and I guess I wondered just to begin with, if you could tell people what is yours? How do you become Steve Inskeep in the hours before 5:00 A.M.

Steve Inskeep:
Oh my gosh, this is the most common question that I get when I’m out in public, “What time do you get up in the morning?” It’s a little embarrassing. Like, if I was a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, they would ask me different questions, but they ask, “What time you get up in the morning?” I get up, when I’m doing the show, which is no longer every single day, there’s a bit of a rotation, I get up at three o’clock in the morning Eastern Time. The workday starts about 4:00 Eastern Time, and the show has to start at 5:00 A.M. Cannot be one second late. So, that’s the routine. It’s kind of slam bang, you get in, there’s a lot to catch up on. There is a lot of production.
But if you were to ask, when do I read in, when do I prepare? I’m just kind of obsessed all the time and paying attention all the time, and everything I’ve ever done becomes preparation for everything I’m going to do. I do travel overseas, I’m not living overseas, but I will go to Iran, go to Israel, go to the West Bank, go to Gaza, go to China, go wherever I can get away with going, and then hopefully when it is a breaking story, I’ve got a little bit of it in my head and have some idea of where to go with that story. So, everything in my life is preparation for what might happen.

Max Tani:
Obviously, you’ve been hosting on NPR on Morning Edition for a very long time. I’m really curious how you see the value of radio these days at a time when clearly a lot of people are increasingly listening to podcasts. Obviously, you’re also involved in Up First, but what do you think the value is of radio at a time when podcasting is clearly pretty ascendant?

Steve Inskeep:
Well, it’s live and it’s listened to by hundreds of millions of people. They’re not necessarily the most elite or influential people that you want to get to anymore. I assume that my more elite or go-getter, influential or opinion leader audience is more likely to hear me on Up First, but there’s a slice that will still be listening to the radio in the morning, listening to the radio in the afternoon. Anybody with a long commute is still using a radio and the listenership is huge.
If I told you that I had a podcast with 10 million listeners, I might impress you. I would hope that I would impress you. And that’s what the radio show is. And then there is also a podcast that has several million listeners, and I’ll brag for a moment and say, I think it’s typically one of the top five podcasts in the country.

Max Tani:
It is. That’s true.

Steve Inskeep:
Thank you. Thank you for fact-checking me on that.

Ben Smith:
Do you feel competitive with the Daily?

Steve Inskeep:
Do I feel competitive with The Daily? We started at about the same time, and so, I was irritated that they started first. We, or NPR, has chosen a different business model in that they do one gigantic story at such length that it can become its own half-hour radio program, I believe. And we do three stories in about 10 or 12 minutes, and I think that difference has served us well, maybe it’s served them well.
A lot of people, including The Times, have had, kind of, imitations of that format. But I discover a lot of people that really like that, that feel very quickly informed. It was originally started to get a younger audience, which it has gained. The demographics are said to be, like the median age is about 36, which is pretty close to the median age of America, and the race and ethnicity and everything is very close to America as a whole. Not perfect but close. So, that younger audience is there. But the other thing that that podcast does is it gets an elite audience, it gets an important audience. The way that I’ve described it to people inside NPR is I think of that as our front page. Up First is the front page. It’s the front page of the newspaper, the front page of your news app, whatever it is. That’s what it is in audio form. I think that’s the way a lot of people use it. They’ll listen to Up First and The Daily might be their second listen when they’re spending a little more time.
And the radio also still has, I think, tremendous benefit and we can get a little deeper into a lot of stories there. Our longer or more highly produced stories will typically be on Morning Edition and typically, if it’s a big story, there’ll be a version of it for both.

Max Tani:
Clearly, you’ve really thought a lot about this, the distinctions between radio as a format, podcasting as a format. I was watching your Dave Portnoy interview yesterday, which is, you have a version of that that is for Morning Edition, but then you have one that’s stretched out for the web that looks like a YouTube, kind of, lengthy interview.

Steve Inskeep:
Yeah.

Max Tani:
When did you start thinking about the distinctions between those different formats? Did you always see them differently or has this been something that’s developed?

Steve Inskeep:
When did you start thinking about them? Way too late, I think, or our organization has, I’m just being honest with you, I think we’ve sometimes struggled to get over our own success. NPR does a very distinctive thing that very few people do, and has done it really well and has a really loyal audience, and the audience has sometimes gone way up and sometimes gone way down, but it’s a big audience. But there are a lot of people who are not in that space, have never been in that space, are never going to be in that space. And how do you reach them and how do you reach them with different kinds of material?
And I think almost obsessively about that. I want to reach all of America. I want to reach all kinds of people. I want to explain things. I want to get stuff across. And for some people, a live radio segment is going to be the way to do that. And it is heard by officialdom, it’s heard by university professors, it’s heard by farmers out in Iowa or whatever, it’s heard by my mom. A lot of different kind of people. But for other people, the podcast is that.
And we have lately started what I’m calling, we don’t have a good brand name for it yet, a kind of all-platform interview. You mentioned Dave Portnoy. We’ve done a variety of people. AOC did one of these. Steve Bannon did one of these. It’s 30 or 40 minutes. It’s face to face. It’s really well-produced video. It becomes a podcast episode that is, it’s very much like the video, it’ll be 30 or 40 minutes or maybe a little bit shorter, but it’ll also be in Up First in very short form and it’ll be on the radio in, kind of, medium length. And the radio I think will be, I would like to think if I do it well, you’ll decide, is a little more like a magazine profile in that we’re taking chunks of that interview and other information and archival tape and weaving it together so that I’m a little bit more of a storyteller. But if you want to hear the whole thing, as Dave Portnoy said it, you can go watch the YouTube video.

Max Tani:
Last year, I was talking to a Republican congressperson who actually said, “NPR is good. I understand and like the content, but now we live at a time, an increasing number of people have access to a lot of different options.” What do you think is the value of a national radio broadcaster in 2025? I guess, to maybe address this congressman’s question, do we need one?

Steve Inskeep:
Well, let’s talk through that. I mean, I’m not going to comment specifically on the funding because NPR wants to do that and the local stations have made their case, and I’m covering it as a journalist, but I’ll talk about the value of NPR as I see it and where it fits in that ever more crowded media landscape.
There are more media outlets than ever. That is true. There are more opinions available than ever. That is true. There are not enough journalists and reporters covering stories and calling sources as opposed to getting their take on what the journalists have reported or what they’ve seen on the internet. And I don’t mean to dismiss the takes and opinions and social media, because I’m on social media and I have takes and I read a lot of takes and I enjoy a lot of opinions. So, I’m not disparaging that at all.

Ben Smith:
You don’t share your takes, Steve.

Steve Inskeep:
I carefully calibrate my takes. I had a colleague years ago who said, “There’s a difference between your opinion and your judgment. You shouldn’t be giving your opinion, but you can give your judgment, and the judgment has to be earned.” The more that I have covered China, the more that I could give you some judgments about China. But I’m also conscious, I don’t know anywhere near everything or most things about China. So, you try to be humble about what you say.
Anyway, what the heck was I saying? Oh, I was talking about the need for NPR in that crowded media landscape. NPR is part of an ecosystem, a system of local public radio stations. By and large, NPR is not getting federal money. Once in a while there’s a grant. What gets the federal money in large amounts or reasonable amounts is local public radio stations. And they use that to run operations that include local reporting. So, because of that system, sometimes they contribute to the network. I get to be part of an organization not with a few hundred reporters, which is what NPR has at the very most, but an organization with several thousand reporters across the United States, and to an extent, around the world, who are out covering governors and covering floods, and covering climate change and covering disputes over immigration, and covering immigration raids and covering the border, and covering every story you could imagine.
And that is a space in which there’s not too much media. I think, I hope you would agree, I don’t know, maybe you disagree, there’s not enough. There’s not enough local coverage. There’s a lot less than there was. And in fact, a lot of newspapers, as you probably know, it’s a local newspaper, it’s in the place, but the editor who actually runs that paper is in Nashville or some other city, or Atlanta, editing several papers.

Ben Smith:
The editor of the New York Daily News for a time was in Allentown.

Max Tani:
Oh, geez.

Steve Inskeep:
Oh, wow. Allentown, okay.

Ben Smith:
It’s brutal.

Steve Inskeep:
You think of that as suburban New York, but, wow, okay, that’s bad. I mean, respect to anybody in that position who’s listening, I’m sure they do their best to do their job, but it’s better to be there and it’s better for the community to have somebody there to hold accountable for what they’re covering while the local station is there. And in a number of cases, there are these regional newsrooms set up. There’s a thing called the Texas Newsroom, and they pool resources from 10 public radio stations and some resources from NPR. They have an investigative reporter on staff. They have people covering the state capitol where the press corps has been gutted in recent years, and goodness knows, there’s a lot of news. They’re doing a lot of interesting stuff.
And that is public media. It’s in Appalachia. It’s in Eastern Kentucky, where I used to go to school and where I first worked in public radio. It is all across the country. It is serving all kinds of people and it’s doing a necessary job. I’ll just add quickly, NPR, the network, also has international bureaus, 14 of them by the last count that I got, around the world and we’re covering international stories. And again, it’s true there’s a lot of international news out there, but there are not nearly as many American news organizations sending people outside the United States to cover stuff as used to be the case.

Ben Smith:
One of the, I think, unusual things about you is you’re an American voice who speaks to Americans but have always had a very international eye. You wrote your first book about Karachi, Pakistan. And I’m curious, you mentioned the foreign bureaus and I thought of you and called you up because we’re obviously in a rare outward-looking moment for the United States in this conflict with Iran. I’m curious how you see the value of ... As you say, you are a smart, well-informed, but ultimately non-expert, wandering into these complicated places. And I think one thing people sometimes say is, you know what? That’s, sort of, the old colonial model. You send some American out who doesn’t know that much to tell them about what’s happening in Iran or in Gaza, but in fact, there’s more information out of any of these places now than there was when we were at the beginning of our careers. You can just Google Translate the locals.
Why do you do it? Why do you fly out of Washington and take the red eye to wherever you’re going?

Steve Inskeep:
Well, first, I think there’s value in the outsider perspective of being not quite an expert. We’re in an age of disparaging experts, and if you’re humble about the fact that you don’t know the country that well and you’re trying to relate it to an American audience, you can become a kind of translator yourself. You are trying to figure out the culture that’s in front of you or the news story that’s in front of you and explain to Americans what they need to know.
And you talked about people being on the ground. You absolutely should rely on people on the ground. Your news organization, if it is possible, if the host country allows it, should have a bureau there and should have local people who are hired there. At the same time, there are stories that are better told by someone who’s got a more American point of view. American troops are on the ground, which was true when I was covering the war in Iraq, or the United States is involved in some way, which is absolutely true when I go to Israel, or years ago when I was in Gaza. This is an American story as well as an Israeli story or a Palestinian story or anything else.
Interestingly enough, to me, anyway, there are countries that I have been able to get into that we’ve had trouble getting a correspondent into. And you can decide what the country’s motivation is for letting me in, “Oh, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, so we’ll let him in.”

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Do you worry about that?

Steve Inskeep:
Of course, I worry about that, and I give a lot of thought to what I report and run it by a lot of people and try to check my sources and try to be humble about what I know.

Ben Smith:
You’ve been to Iran six times. That is a place that is actually pretty tough to get correspondents into. Do you think they were like, “Ah, this guy doesn’t speak Persian, we’re going to pull the wool over his eyes”?

Steve Inskeep:
I don’t know that that is precisely true, but something else is true with Iran, which I think you might find interesting. If you are Iranian American, it is more hazardous for you to go to Iran than it is for me, a guy from Indiana with no Iranian descent. Iran will view Iranian Americans as their own citizens, and it doesn’t mean that anything is going to happen to them, but the odds are considered greater. It’s thought, at least in the past, it has been thought that if I go to Iran and get in trouble, the worst thing that would happen to me is I’d be thrown out of the country. Somebody who’s Iranian American could end up in Evin Prison. And so, that’s a situation where it helps for me to step up and to have a discussion.
That’s also a situation where, because I’m the anchor of a program, I’m occasionally interviewing an Iranian president or an Iranian foreign minister, and I can say to them, “I’ve been to your country. I’ve looked around. I’ve talked with ordinary people in the Tehran Bazaar, I’ve been to Mashhad.” And I can bring that experience to that conversation. It makes for better interviews, I believe, when I get back in the studio.

Ben Smith:
One very famous one, in fact, I think it was in 2009, you interviewed President Ahmadinejad at one of the many moments of complicated U.S.-Iran relations, and he really questioned repeatedly, I think in the interview, whether the Holocaust had happened. I guess, I wonder, I mean, that is a very unusual experience for any journalist, for an American journalist. You just talk us through that moment a little. What’s going on in your head?

Steve Inskeep:
Yeah. I actually ended up talking with Ahmadinejad twice. After the first very difficult conversation he talked to me again. An interview with someone like that is difficult to prepare with. I mean, he said what he wanted to say. He was a populist in his own way. He dismayed a lot of the cultural elite of his own country. He was a guy who said, I mean, in a way that you could almost see the red-blue divide in America, “I’m for the countryside. I’m from the average guy. I want to beat down on the elites of Tehran.” And the elites of Tehran couldn’t stand him. And then there were all the problems of his anti-Semitism and the government that he represented where he was not the top guy, but was an important guy.
And I did want to ask him about the Holocaust because he did a lot of just asking questions things about the Holocaust, and even considerably worse than that. And he’s like, “Why can’t we just study this thing? What’s the matter with studying it to find out everything that...” I mean, you guys and I know is already known. And I recall that I, and we’d have to go back to the transcript to check, but I believe I recommended a book to him, and it was Elie Wiesel’s Night, which was very, very short. And I thought that was actually a sincere thing to recommend because it’s one guy’s story, and you really can’t read that, whatever it is, a hundred pages and say, “Oh, he made this up.” It’s like, it’s almost like its own proof of the Holocaust. And I don’t know that he ever did, but we continued talking and I think something dramatic came out of that engagement.
There are people who would ask, “Why would you dare talk to this terrible man?” You talk to him because you can get information and occasionally something more. The first time I talked with him was after Iran’s disputed election in 2009. And I suppose this also speaks to the question of why I go to the country. I’d been to Iran before this disputed election. I’d met a bunch of interesting people. I’d done a number of stories. A lot of it was just ordinary people on the street, like, what is it like to be there? What are people living like?
And then they have this disputed election. They jail thousands of people. And then the president comes to New York for the United Nations meeting, and he agreed to an interview with me. And in the course of the interview, I asked him about a man I had met when I’d been in Iran. There was this guy, and I said, “His name is Bijan Khajehpour. He’s an analyst. He’s one of these seemingly friendly to the West kind of people.” But I said to Ahmadinejad, “This man struck me as a patriot. He believed in your country and wanted to develop your country, and you jailed him. He’s in jail right now. Why?” And Ahmadinejad said, “I don’t know anything about this case. I’ll look into it.” And he did look into it. And three days later, Bijan Khajehpour was released from prison-

Ben Smith:
Wow.

Steve Inskeep:
... on bail, and ultimately was able to get out of Iran and is living free in Europe today.

Ben Smith:
Wow.

Steve Inskeep:
It doesn’t always happen like that, obviously, but that engagement is worthwhile.

Ben Smith:
That’s the power of this outside eye. But I want to go back to what you said actually about populism because it strikes me that one of the things that populists do is they say things that will scandalize the media and get them scolded in order to prove, and this is true of Trump, it’s true of European populists, to sort prove that they’re outsiders, that like, “See, the elites hate me too.” And do you think when Ahmadinejad you the Holocaust was the opinion of a few, did he know what he was doing? He knew that it would stir outrage and that he’d get yelled at in the West and that his base would love that?

Steve Inskeep:
Oh, wow. I bet he knew that his base would love that, or some of his base. I don’t want to pretend that everybody’s anti-Semitic in Iran when there are Jews in Iran, but that a lot of his base would love that, sure. And that he liked stirring up the media, but I kind of feel like he was also saying what he thought in this case. Yeah.

Max Tani:
We need to take a quick break, but we will be right back with Steve Inskeep.
You are obviously paying a lot of attention to what’s going on right now, and you have the unique perspective of having spent a lot of time in Iran. What’s the sense that you get of the quality of the coverage here, and do you think that there’s anything that the Western media and media in the United States doesn’t fully understand or maybe misses?

Steve Inskeep:
I just want to say an awful lot is not very well understood by our policymakers or by people across the country. And that’s understandable because it’s a big, incredibly complex world, and Iran is one of the more isolated corners of it and is very complicated and hard to understand. But you will hear people giving analysis of Iran and they’ll talk about how it’s ruled by the mullahs. I don’t even know that that’s exactly the correct term for the theocratic government of Iran. And they maybe don’t know the name of a single person who is doing anything in Iran. We just know that they’re bad. And on a certain level of analysis, maybe that’s all you really need to know. I mean, Iran has pursued nuclear weapons, they’ve supported Hamas, they’ve supported Hezbollah, they did support the old Syrian regime, terrorist attacks even within the borders of the United States, an attempted assassination on Trump, on and on and on.
You can just say, “Well, they’re bad.” But if you want to understand who are the people there, how do they live? What is their government, what are the various levers of power? What are the possibilities of change? What, if anything, can we do that would change things for the better as opposed to the worse? It might be better to have a more nuanced understanding of who’s there and what they’re doing. And I think that kind of basic information is continuously lacking for all of us, which I would argue is another reason for me to be going overseas. I’m an average guy from Indiana who’s always learning new stuff, and I want to find that stuff out and share it with my brothers or my mom or with anybody else who is in the same situation I am.

Max Tani:
You’ve been doing this a while. Do you think that America is less informed about the world than they were at the beginning of your career, less interested, more inward looking?

Steve Inskeep:
Wow. I’m not sure that that is true. I think people are really curious. I think we’re all overwhelmed and confused. But I think people are really curious and engaged, but there is so much that’s thrown at us all the time that it’s really, really hard. And I try to respect my audience in a particular way. I think the audience is extremely smart and extremely well-informed. They’re just not informed about every single thing at 5:25 in the morning.
And so, it’s good for me to remind them or to remind myself of the basics and just constantly focus on the basics, the basics, the basics, the basics, and then fold in the latest news. Often, the latest news is incomprehensible without the basics. And often, I wonder if you would agree, maybe most urgent breaking news isn’t anything you need to know at all. And so, it’s good to have a lot of context along with the breaking news.

Max Tani:
No, I felt this way as we’ve been paying attention to the ceasefire with Iran in the sense that every update has actually made me more confused because it seems like very few people know what’s going on except for Donald Trump himself, which is something that Ben smartly said today during one of our meetings.

Steve Inskeep:
And he, himself, said he didn’t know what he was going to do at one point.

Max Tani:
Yes, exactly.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, no, it’s right. It’s this kind of illegible world where I remember somebody asked me, I saw that Karoline Leavitt put the guy from The Free Press, Eli Lake, in the front row, and what does that signal? And it’s like, it can’t signal anything because she doesn’t know what Trump’s going to do because Trump doesn’t know what Trump’s going to do. So, the whole situation is kind of fundamentally illegible, right? And I think it’s a challenge for providing analysis. Right?

Steve Inskeep:
Yeah. And it’s a challenge if you want to be an informed citizen, because that bit of information about Eli Lake is competing against some feature about business in China that might affect what you think about tariffs or whatever else. It’s all just everything is competing against everything else all the time.

Max Tani:
I’m really curious, you interview a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives on your show. You mentioned that you interviewed Steve Bannon recently. I’m really curious if any of the folks that you have interviewed, particularly on the right, and who have been maybe satisfied and thought that your coverage has been fair, if any of those people are the people who are out there today calling for the defunding of NPR?

Steve Inskeep:
Oh, I don’t know that I want to accuse anyone specifically of hypocrisy on this issue. I have always been aware that there are Republicans who listen as well as Democrats. In recent years, I think the Democrats have been more numerous. There’s a lot of reasons for that we could get into. But there are Republicans who listen, including Republican lawmakers, influential people, and I appreciate that.
I do recall, this was years ago now, there was an earlier controversy involving NPR and its dismissal of Juan Williams who was also a Fox News contributor. We could do an entire other podcast episode about that, but we’d have to burn it afterward. But in any case, it was a big controversy. And I went in to see a member of Congress for a face-to-face interview, and we sat down and the first thing he wanted to tell me is, he says, “Juan Williams is a personal friend of mine, and I’m outraged. It is just awful what you’ve done.”
And then we began the conversation and we’re doing the interview, and in the middle of the interview, he digressed from the actual topic of the interview because he was reminded of a story he’d heard on Morning Edition that morning and wanted to talk all about it. And this is not entirely uncommon. There are people in the House of Representatives who voted against federal funding for their local public radio stations, remember, this is local funding, who were on NPR last week. And that’s fine, by the way, you’re not required to vote some way to be on NPR. We want to hear from everybody. We want to hear from you, even if you hate public broadcasting. And I would encourage everybody to engage in that way. I don’t want to accuse anybody now of particular hypocrisy, but just be aware that lots of different kinds of people pay attention to NPR.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Well, that was another era. Now, Juan Williams is attacked on Fox for being too left-wing.

Max Tani:
Well, he’s gone from Fox now for that reason.

Ben Smith:
Right. Driven out of Fox for being left wing.

Steve Inskeep:
Oh, he’s driven out of Fox? Okay. Okay.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Yeah.

Correction: Juan Williams ended his tenure as a co-host of The Five in 2021 but remains a Fox News contributor.

Steve Inskeep:
Well, for a while he was kind of the House liberal. He was open about that, but I guess too liberal.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Right. I wonder if your Republican friends also protested to Fox over that?

Max Tani:
Stood up for him. Yeah, exactly.

Steve Inskeep:
Well, that’s an interesting point, and I will just mention another thing. One of the popular criticisms of NPR in recent years is, “You didn’t cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.” My understanding is that Fox didn’t initially cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. I think a lot of media didn’t because they didn’t know. You could criticize whether NPR should have covered it more later. We can have a whole discussion about individual stories, but I don’t know, we can focus on the coverage or a particular story rather than the label you want to put on somebody.

Ben Smith:
I agree with you. You can argue forever about what exactly are NPR’s politics? What are the New York Times’ politics? Did they swing too far to pander to their listeners in this way or that? But I think there’s also, sort of, a broader splintering of the media and a return to a pre-broadcast era of a very fragmented, very partisan media.
And I guess, I wonder in an environment that just seems really to be pulling in that direction, not everybody is like Semafor, I think we found a lane that is, sort of, intended to counter that. But the broad trend is toward this partisan splintering. Do you see any path back towards some kind of consensus around media, around something like NPR? Can you close your eyes and imagine a future in which Republicans and Democrats feel warmly toward NPR the way maybe they did 30 years ago?

Steve Inskeep:
I can at least imagine what I try to do about it. First is to acknowledge that there are some problems with bias and perspective, and I think it’s less often partisan than it is cultural or generational. You sometimes do have ... I mean the New York Times, it’s a New York newspaper and kind of has a New York perspective, and it’s my favorite newspaper in the world, by the way. It’s amazing. But it’s just kind of a reality, that’s where they’re coming from. You might think of NPR as a Washington organization, although I like to think of us as nationwide because we’re drawing on stations all across the country. There are news organizations that go for different demographics, different kinds of people.
And then there’s the conflict that you have seen played out at The Times, where you used to work, and other places, and you could probably say within NPR, between somewhat older and somewhat younger journalists and their idea of what journalism was supposed to be and of fairness and telling the truth and so forth. What does it mean to tell the truth? Obviously, we all stand for telling the truth, but what does it mean to get the story across?
So, there are these conflicts, and a thing that I try to do first is recognize the reality and try to be transparent about it. Like, what is my source? I should do really well at citing my source. When I hear an analyst on television who begins, “We know,” blah, blah, blah, because they’re setting up the facts. “We know the mullahs are,” whatever, and now he’s going to give his take. I don’t trust that person because he didn’t tell me the source of what he claims to know.
So, being transparent is important. And I think also it’s important to recognize the very thing that you said, the environment that I am broadcasting into. I’m broadcasting or podcasting into an environment where there are thousands of other media organizations whose business model is to tell their audience not to trust the media and only to trust them. That is their financial interest.

Ben Smith:
You can’t trust those people. All right? We got to tell our audience right now, do not trust those people.

Steve Inskeep:
Exactly. Exactly. Only trust me. Exactly. But to just recognize that, to recognize that people are primed for skepticism and they’re trained for skepticism and they’re told to be skeptical at all times. I think it’s okay to respect that.
Honestly, it’s okay that people don’t trust the media. A lot of media have reported some really terrible or misleading things. You should think for yourself. It’s okay not to trust the media. But my job as a member of a media organization is to be trustworthy or maybe even make it so that you don’t have to trust me. To be so transparent about what I learned and how I learned it, and so fair that you understand what I’m trying to tell you and why.

Ben Smith:
All right. Well, I am persuaded that the future of media is Gen X voices from Indiana.

Max Tani:
I got to say though, the thing that Steve still has is he’s got that radio voice. Neither of us have that voice.

Ben Smith:
That’s amazing. I know.

Steve Inskeep:
Stop that.

Max Tani:
It’s incredible. We got to figure out how we can start replicating Steve’s voice.

Steve Inskeep:
No, you guys sound great. You ask great questions. Ben knows, because I sent him a note the other day, you have a great way of putting serious things on the table in a kind of light way that is really great.

Ben Smith:
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Steve. Obviously, we’re huge fans and it’s nice to be on air with a real professional.

Max Tani:
That’s true. That’s true.

Steve Inskeep:
Wow. Thank you.

Ben Smith:
Thank you, Steve.

Max Tani:
Ben, what did you think of what Steve had to say about podcasting, radio, the whole thing?

Ben Smith:
I mean, he is old school to me in the most charming way. Just genuinely open-minded, interested, I think, open to different points of view. I think you can tell he has some level of just sort of an old school journalist resentment of overconfident punditry that fills so much of the airwaves. But also, there’s just something interesting to me about his career because guy did not need to go to Iran six times for that job. Certainly didn’t need to go to Karachi and write a book about Karachi.
I mean, he has this very specific, kind of, real interest in the world, which then I find at moments when many, many people, myself included, who have never been Iran, find themselves on the airwaves talking about Iran. And also at a moment, I think you probably saw that amazing Tucker Carlson interview with Ted Cruz, where it seemed like Cruz both didn’t know where the Bible passage he was citing appeared in the Bible, and also-

Max Tani:
Unbelievable.

Ben Smith:
... didn’t know that much about Iran. And again, I think you can argue how important that is for every senator, and everything, whatever.

Max Tani:
Sure.

Ben Smith:
I mean, I don’t mean to overstate it, but there is something about making the effort that just indicates a kind of open-mindedness, right? And a kind of curiosity. And Steve just embodies that.

Max Tani:
Totally. And there’s no need for him to be talking to shop owners and local people on the ground there, right? Too. That’s a step beyond what the normal ... I mean, a lot of journalists, I’m sure, would fly in to interview head of state in Iran and then just fly right back out, right? He took the time to try to get the sense of what normal folks were feeling. And that does feel like a step beyond what everybody else would do. Certainly what I would do. I think I would parachute in and get the great interview and parachute right back out.

Ben Smith:
You wouldn’t find the best restaurant in Tehran?

Max Tani:
That’s true. I would do that. I would do that. But I don’t know how don’t good of a sense I’m getting of the average person if I’m at the nicest restaurant in Tehran. I don’t know. I might get a sense of what’s going on, but it might not be the right one.

Ben Smith:
Well, there’s sort of two maxims that I feel like he contradicts. Right? First, the whole face for radio thing. Very handsome man. Great on broadcast.

Max Tani:
I know. I know.

Ben Smith:
And then sometimes that is a challenge with meeting radio people, that they don’t look anything like their voice. And he actually-

Max Tani:
He looks like his voice.

Ben Smith:
... looks exactly like his voice.

Max Tani:
Totally.

Ben Smith:
And then of course, they say never to meet your heroes, but Steve Inskeep is exactly what you want Steve Inskeep to be in person, which is very nice.

Max Tani:
Do you think he’s one of the last of that kind of breed, like, the totally straight down the middle, unflappable, straight out of capital J journalism, reporters? I mean, he strikes me, he has a lot in common with my old boss, one of my first bosses in journalism, John Dickerson, who’s the host of CBS Evening News, now the host of CBS This morning. Very similar old school demeanor. Do you think that he kind of represents that as well?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, and NPR does. And I don’t know if the future continues to favor that, although I do think it’s funny, I think a lot of amateur media and podcasts and YouTubes, part of the ... It doesn’t have Steve’s kind of professionalism and discipline, but that just sort of sense of just absolute curiosity driving it, sometimes goofy, ill-informed curiosity about the shape of the planet Earth. It can go horribly awry.
But I do think in this moment of just unbelievable, unearned confidence all over the place, actually, I think there’s a lot of appeal to open-mindedness and curiosity, and he embodies it in a certain style. But I actually, I don’t think it’s going away. I just think it finds a different kind of generational form. But yeah, I mean, that was a very fun conversation.

Max Tani:
Yeah, thanks for inviting him. It was great.
Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezzino, Garett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tory Core. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is, of course, by Billy Libby. Our public editor this week is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sadly not as big of a fan of Steve Inskeep as we are.

Ben Smith:
I feel like she’d like him if she got to know it.

Max Tani:
That’s true. How could you not?

Ben Smith:
If you are Marjorie Taylor Greene or anyone else, and you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Please feel free to review us and only if you liked us. And if you’re watching us on YouTube, please subscribe.

Max Tani:
And if you still want more, you can always subscribe to Semafor’s Media newsletter out every Sunday night.