NPR Host Leila Fadel on Covering War, the Role of the Press, and the Battle to Control Information

During one of her first assignments covering conflict as an international correspondent, National Public Radio’s Leila Fadel took an unusual helicopter ride.

“At the time, when you would land in Baghdad, they would do this corkscrew so that you wouldn't get hit by anything,”  Fadel said during a recent Justice & Journalism conversation presented by New Hampshire Public Radio  and the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership & Public Service.

NHPR senior reporter Annmarie Timmins moderated the discussion.  Watch the interview here.  (Quotes in this article have been edited slightly for clarity.) 

NHPR senior reporter Annmarie Timmins interviews NPR host Leila Fadel. 

Fadel discussed her experiences covering conflicts in the Middle East and the U.S., the challenges of covering the Trump Administration, and the state of journalism.  “It is a bleak time for journalism right now," she said. "Not necessarily because of how we're reporting, but because of this battle to control information.”

Fadel, who is now a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First, covered anti-government uprisings in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia.  Prior to joining NPR, she covered the Iraq war for Knight Ridder and The Washington Post.

“It was an amazing experience to cover the formation of the Iraqi government, to cover something that felt so important as a U.S. foreign policy issue, to make sure that Americans were getting the real from-the-ground facts, plus what the politicians were saying,” she said. "And then people could decide how they felt about that policy, because a lot of lives were at stake, a lot of money was at stake, and a lot of truths were not told." 

“I felt it was really important, too, to make sure that people living through it got to tell the story of what that war was.”

As a national correspondent for NPR, Fadel covered policing and race, Muslim American communities, and health care inequities revealed by the coronavirus. She is Lebanese-American and was raised in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. 
 

On handling the flood of news surrounding the Trump Administration:

There's so much happening that there's very little follow through on each policy because you're moving on to the next and moving on to the next. We've been trying, and I don't know if it's always working, to be very purposeful about the way we cover, how we cover, and continuing to follow through. And so I really think it's about slowing down and not taking everything as a huge big story and really thinking about what is happening and what is the public service here? What do people need to know?

On covering conflicts:

I think about a lot of crises we've covered over the years, there's a time of extreme interest when something starts – the Ukraine war, the Syrian civil war  -- and then there's just a kind of numbness.  You want people to feel like they can understand what's happening and then react to it, because that's the whole point of what we do, is to inform, so that everybody can then decide how they want to react to whatever's happening.

On the importance of a diverse newsroom:

As a journalist, I know in our newsrooms that we are stronger when we have people who were born and raised wealthy or poor, of different races, of different ethnic backgrounds, of different age groups, who speak different languages. When I say diversity, it isn't just about gender or race, it's about all of it. It's about our ideologies and our lived experiences because now we represent more of the country.

On dealing with declining faith in journalism: 

I think we all do want to talk to everybody. It is getting harder because, you know, the polling shows that there's Americans that are losing trust in the media. I think there has been a lot of demonization of the press, being called 'the enemy of the people, they're unfair, they're all biased, they're all liars'  I think we can always do better. We can always do better stories, get more voices. But ultimately, every journalist I know their mission is to try to shed light and tell the truth and get viewpoints on the air. But sometimes people don't want to talk to us. 'Oh, where are you from?' they ask.  'Oh, you guys are biased,' they say.. The best way to do the work is to continue to ask and to continue to put those voices on the air, along with all these other voices. But it does not mean we just air things that are not true.