NPR announced today that Leila Fadel has been selected as the fourth host of Morning Edition, NPR’s morning drive time news magazine carried by 834 public radio stations nationwide, and Up First, NPR’s daily morning news podcast. Fadel’s first day on-air will be announced in the coming weeks. She will be based at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“This work is about telling stories that reflect our nation and the world as it is, to have conversations that illuminate and that hold our public officials to account,” Fadel said. “No place does this work better than NPR. I’m excited to take my years of field reporting, at home and abroad, to the host chair and work with a team I’ve long admired.”
“We are delighted to have Leila join the Morning Edition team, she has had an exceptional career to date, covering some of the biggest stories of our time on both the national and international stage,” said Sarah Gilbert, NPR’s Vice President for News Programming. “Leila’s experience and range as a journalist and host made her the natural choice for this role, which she will take up from February of 2022, based in DC.”
Fadel is currently a national correspondent for NPR based in Los Angeles, covering race and identity. Since returning to the United States she has consistently reported on the fault lines of this divided nation. She won back-to-back Murrow awards for coverage of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting and for the 2018 Southern California fires. She flew to Minneapolis in the midst of the pandemic as the city erupted in grief and anger over the killing of George Floyd. She’s reported on policing and race, on American Muslim communities and on the jarring inequities the coronavirus laid bare in the healthcare system. Her “Muslims in America: A New Generation” series in collaboration with National Geographic, won the prestigious Goldziher Prize in 2019.
Previously, she was NPR’s international correspondent based in Cairo, from where she covered the wave of revolts in the Middle East and their aftermath in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Her stories ranged from the state-ordered massacre of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters in Cairo, to the 2013 coup for which she won the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, to the harrowing tales of the Yazidi women who were kidnapped and enslaved by ISIS. In 2016 she returned to the United States to be a Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow. In 2017 she won a Gracie award for the story: She’s Lost 2 Daughters To ISIS; Will Her Younger Girls Be Next?
Before joining NPR, she covered the Middle East for The Washington Post as the Cairo Bureau Chief, and the Iraq war for nearly five years with Knight Ridder, McClatchy Newspapers, and later The Washington Post. Her foreign coverage of the devastating human toll of the Iraq war earned her the George. R. Polk award in 2007.
Leila Fadel will be joining Steve Inskeep, A Martinez, and Rachel Martin on this bi-coastal, 24-hour news operation. Produced and distributed by NPR in Washington, D.C., Morning Edition draws on reporting from correspondents based around the world, and producers and reporters in locations in the United States. This reporting is supplemented by NPR Member station reporters across the country as well as independent producers and reporters throughout the public radio system. Since its debut on November 5, 1979, Morning Edition has garnered broadcasting’s highest honors, including the George Foster Peabody Award and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. The show reaches 11.7 million weekly listeners on 834 stations. The team also produces the popular Up First daily news podcast, which highlights the top three stories listeners need to start their day. Up First has consistently placed near the top of Podtrac’s monthly ranking of the 10 biggest podcasts by a monthly US audience.
