- [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and hillco partners: a texas government affairs consultancy, and by klru's producers circle, ensuring local programming that reflects athe character and interestsle, of the greater austin, texas community. - i'm evan smith, she's a veteran print and broadcast journalist, who co-hosts national public radio's best-in-class afternoon news magazine, all things considered, and hosts npr's deep dive news podcast, embedded. she's kelly mcevers, this is overheard. - [evan voiceover] let's be honest, is this about the ability to learn, or is this about the experience of not having been taught properly? how have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa? you could say that he had made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. you know, you saw a problem and over time took it on. let's start with the sizzle before we get to the steak.

are you gonna run for president? i think i just got an f from you, actually. this is overheard. - kelly mcevers, welcome. - thanks for having me. - nice to have you, now i'm going to violate the no high fives on pbs rule. (kelly laughs) - what? - and give you a high five over what a wonderful time this is to be in the news business. is this not the greatest moment to be doing what we do? - this is a great time to be in the news business - every day, something you couldn't have ever believed. - that's true, right. you're talking about the election i would imagine. - oh, and not only that, but even within the same day, it's like, you get up in the morning, here's this big story and then five minutes later. - there's a guy climbing up a building, and you're like yeah, what? - and that's like the ninth most important thing in the world. i remember when the melania trump nude pictures ran in the new york post, nobody even talked about it, because like 50 more important things happened on that day. - there were so many more. - wouldn't that have been a top story most years? - right, and it's great because those nine things were things that were actually about issues and were actually interesting, that didn't involve nudity. - yay for us, right, here we go. - so it's a time when there's crazy developments happening every day,

but at the same time there're developments that for the most part, are getting us to talk about policy and who we are, and what's going on and who lives in this country, and what do they not have, and what is what they not have, how is that influencing how they are gonna vote. you know, it's a fascinating time to be in the news business. and then, that's the sort of day to day election coverage, but then, we also live in this time where we know that people like to listen to really good journalism, not just on the radio, but in this thing called podcasts. - right, amazing. - we're like getting millions and millions of people downloading things where we go out and do really good gumshoe reporting. the kind of stuff that we thought there wasn't a market for at one point. - and in fact for a while went away, largely because there wasn't a market, and technology among other things, that great disruptor, has helped us connect with audiences. isn't that wonderful? - created a market again. - it's all good news, the news is good, the tech is good, we should just get up and leave. goodnight, thank you! i don't want to ruin it. - i'm not gonna say the news is good. i mean, this is the interesting thing, right?

a candidate like donald trump obviously for so long, you know he used to boast about this, that he didn't pay for advertising. he didn't need to, because he was such a surprising candidate. - the king of free media. - that people would just cover him. cable channels would just put him on, and run it, and go. and now you see the ratings skyrocketing on these outlets, and charging 20 times more than they used to for ad-buys. and so, it makes you think, and our ratings are up too. - so you think maybe not so good. - it makes you all think, like "hmm, okay." is this a time when... are people paying attention for the right reasons? and i'm not saying they are or they aren't. i'm not saying i have an answer to that question, but i'm saying that's a question we should always, as journalists, be asking ourselves. - i wonder, so that's a wonderful part of this, and i think another part of it that i also think is sort of maybe good, maybe not good, is that a lot of the news that we're talking about, celebrating, high fiving over, is actually news that is not really great. like, yeah this election is great news,

but also, this election sucks. - no, right. - the substance of it, the content of it, and where it takes us next. and so, i wonder if there's a version for you, in your case, bad for the country, good for npr, right? do you ever feel conflicted, that on the one hand we're surfing off of this news that in the end is actually not gonna make us better people. - this question for us, right, yeah. our rating are going up, the cable news channels are going up. i mean the thing that we know about what we do, is that we are different than that, right? we are taking a time that i think feels crazy to a lot of people, and we're trying to say we're gonna help you slow it down just a minute here. we're gonna try to explain it. we've got an enormous political team of people who are every day, fact-checking, and combing through documents and data, and who are just trying to say, "yeah that's what the screaming people are saying, we wanna just slow it down." we don't yell on npr. - no you don't. - there's no yelling, you know? - it has sort of a narcoleptic, (kelly and audience laugh) narcotic quality, right?

- hopefully less so, i mean we talk, we laugh, we have emotions, but there's less yelling, and i feel like if we can hit the sweet spot, we can say, "yes, this is a time with disturbing news, how can we-" we're not gonna comfort you, necessarily, and tell you like, "oh, it's okay, everything's actually gonna be okay," but we're gonna try to tell you the why. - and you're explaining complicated things. - how did we get here. there's all these assumptions we have, like, "this is the trump supporter." you know, a lot of times we look at the data that's not what you think, and "here's what we know about that, and here's the five people we've talked to in this county who think this way." one of the things that i would love to do is to go spend some time, real time, not just at a rally, not just for the soundbytes, but for my podcast, embedded, we go and we kind of live with people, over long periods of time. i would love to go to some of these places that were overwhelmingly supportive of trump in the primary, and first see if they still will in the general,

but also just get to know them and what their stories... - who are they? more than just at the surface level. - and "how did you get here?" - i'm interested in what you said earlier about technology because, in fact, all of this amazing work would be a pyrrhic victory of sorts if nobody was consuming it. but the reality is, because of technology now, we have more people consuming our content than ever. the digital side of npr's audience is extraordinarily robust. in fact, by some measures, you have maybe more people, on a monthly basis, consuming npr's content through digital platforms than by turning on the boring old radio, right? - it's amazing, i mean we have, still our biggest audience is on the radio, but millions and millions of people are downloading our podcasts, and more and more every week, every month, and it depends on what kind of podcast. we've got the quick, every week, sometimes four times a week politics podcast, and then we have these sort of more curated ones that take longer, invisibilia, my podcast. people want to put a thing in their ear, and hear somebody talk to them and tell them something interesting, while they're on the bus, and washing dishes. - that's it, it's the convenience.

- yeah. - so, i'm even thinking not necessarily about the content that you're creating offline from the npr programming, but actually the fact that all of us can access npr programming effectively on demand. right, if i'm not up in the morning in time to listen to morning edition, or i happen not to be in the car or on the bus to listen to all things considered, i can go back at my choosing, and listen to it. - that's right. - and that's something that until the last number of years, did not happen and did not exist, and by definition expands your reach. isn't that great? - yeah, and one of the interesting conversations we're having at npr is how, if at all, does that change the way we do things? - great question. - when there's that show that you turn on when your alarm clock goes off, and it's morning edition, it's that person you've heard for a number of years telling you the same thing in the same format every day, and there are sort of expectations you have about what that should be and what that should sound like. that's a thing. but then when you are going to choose something, when you're like, "i'm gonna mow the lawn, i'm gonna ride my bike, i'm gonna do the dishes, i wanna choose something," i think you're looking for something different, you know?

you're not in the car, listening to the alarm clock, or in the shower, if you have a waterproof radio. you're saying, "i want somebody i'm gonna put right here, next to my brain, and i know i've got 20 minutes." you know what i mean? and i actually think that changes the way we would tell a story in that format. i think it's way more intimate. i think it's more personal. i think you're more transparent. - but now what we're starting to see happen, is, because people like that, they like the more personal, they like the more intimate on podcasts, we're starting to see that then influence the news programs. - the news, right. - yeah, and we're starting to be, i don't know, at least i am, we're starting to be ourselves a little bit more than we might have in the past. - it's probably long overdue, you know? the personalities of the hosts of these big magazine programs, or the tent pole personalities on the cable channels. in some ways they were told by fiat, "you must limit the degree to which we peer

behind the curtain." - that's right. - anderson cooper was one of the early ones of those on the cable channels. rachel maddow is almost compulsive in her-- - use of the first person. - use of the first person. and i think it's actually made us all, as consumers of the media, think very differently in a largely positive way, about how that goes. - i mean there's a fine line, right, i mean, you can go too far, you can be like, "well when i was in iraq," when you're interviewing some general or something, or like, "well, the time i crossed that river," i mean it's a little too much you, right? and so, we're in this wonderful period where, again, i think podcasts like serial and some of the other really good journalism podcasts have shown us that people want you to be a person, they want you to say your name, they want you to have feelings, they want you to use the first-person, i, me. but we still have to ask these questions about when and how much, and i think some people can go too far, and i think some people can still... so it's a question that you have to be asking yourself everyday. - and then there's, of course, the question of whether you really want people in that position to not only show you who they are

but what they think about the issues they're covering. and this campaign, to come back to this campaign particularly, there has been, in fact, jim rutenberg in the new york times not long ago did a story or a column about this, in which he talked about the fact that we're beginning to see from some of these tent pole hosts more of their own political views. and is that a good thing or a bad thing, right? - and, you know, big discussions about that. i think there are some people who say, "look, in an era of trump, people have to take a stand, and i'm gonna say what i am." and that's fine, then just call yourself and analyst or a columnist. - but don't call yourself an independent journalist. i realize that for a lot of people it's a little bit of a "what'd you do during the war, daddy?" moment, they don't wanna look back on this in years future and say "i had the opportunity to do something" - "what did you not say?" - and fact-checking is all well and good, it's just this idea that somehow the delivery of the news is going to be corrupted by the person hosting corrupting it. - right, so it's one thing to be interviewing someone who is a doctor who's just gotten out of syria,

and during the interview you both show emotions, because you can't help yourself, because it's unbelievably moving, and everybody ends up crying on the radio. i cry all the time on the radio. - you're a crier. - i cry all the time on the radio. but i'm not gonna be like, "i can't imagine hillary clinton being president." you know what i mean? there's a line between feelings, and again you use them very sparingly, and opinions. - well we accept the fact that non-partisan doesn't mean non-thinking, but it does mean something, right? so npr is, as it describes itself and as people generally understand it to be a non-partisan news organization, right? so why do so many people think you're a bunch of communists? (kelly and audience laugh) - that's such a great question. - but you understand, i don't believe you're communists, but you know there's a perception. and look, pbs owns this as well. we all suffer from this, that there's a perception that the public broadcasting stations, npr stations and pbs stations, are all a bunch of pinkos. - i would love to know why. i would love to know where that comes from. my hunch is that we live in a time when you're either one or the other. you've gotta fall in one. - paper or plastic,

you gotta pick. - it's super easy for nancy pelosi radio to be considered the commie radio. - i've never heard that. - that's a good one. - can i use that? i'll credit you, nancy pelosi radio. - nancy pelosi radio, yeah, a friend's grandfather used that one on me, and i was like, "wow, never thought of that, no," but if she wants to donate, fine. - but you acknowledge that that is a perception that in some places exists. - in some places? in a lot of places. i report in places that are not your usual big city, big east coast city, and i hear it all the time. like, "oh, you're from npr, well you're just gonna blah." and i'm like, "well, here's what i know." i was in the middle east for five years. a, that's not liberal or conservative, we just did our job. so i don't know what that really means. that's where i got my start for npr. and b, i'm here to tell your story! you're not the kind of person that you would expect to hear on npr, right? and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but i would love for somebody to do a study. - what is the genesis of this?

- yeah, right. we're based in washington, d.c., we're on the east coast. there's a lot of well-educated, liberal type people who work for the news. that's a thing. - and you have an elite audience, and in this case, although i don't mean it to be, others mean "elite" to be a pejorative. your upper-income, upper-educated, you know it's the sort of wine-swilling, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys. - limousine liberals. so many french fries. - yeah, it's crazy. (kelly laughs) but again, leaving aside the pejorative aspect of that, the reality is, you do know who your audience is. and i wonder if when you think about constructing all things considered, or developing material for the podcast, if the audience member, typical audience member of an npr station, upper-income, upper-educated, more urban than not, and all that, is part of the calculation you make. - we sit down every day for a meeting at 9:30 in the morning, east coast time, which is 6:30 for me, west coast time, just saying. - up and at 'em. - but every single day we're actually trying to challenge that listener.

we're almost erring on the side of surprising that listener. instead of preaching to the choir, we're bringing them something that we hope will surprise them, and challenge them, and make them go, "oh, i never thought of it that way." so we're always looking to writers, thinkers, people on the right, people who will just counter the prevailing view. that's a great thing about an afternoon show, right? you've kind of gone through your day, you've read three thinkpieces on where washcloths come from, or whatever, and we have the luxury of being like, "but no, we're gonna find the guy who really can say the smart thing about washcloths that no one's ever heard before." and we've got a few hours to do that. but seriously, whether it's a political debate or a cultural debate, our idea is to not just get somebody on and throw him a bunch of softballs, and have them just say the thing that perfect listener in boston, x, would already believe to be true. - i also have to say, 'cause i run a public media organization that believes in its

mission as its north star, you are a public media organization. the p in npr does not stand for pelosi, it stands for public. - [kelly] that's right. - and you have a public service mission baked into npr's whole, kind of, "this is what we do, our orientation is entirely to serve the public." so that public service mission, as you define it, translates into what? - as you were saying that i thought of the week of orlando. i couldn't help but think of that. i'm a reporter, i'm the kind of person who goes out into the world. that's when i'm most satisfied and when i'm doing my best work, but i'm also a host now, and so, there are times when i have to be in the studio, and that was a week when my colleague ari shapiro was out in the field doing beautiful reporting after that horrible shooting. and, to me, the public mission that week was to provide a kind of comfort through ideas. i was by myself, 'cause he was out, and all the other hosts were somewhere else, and i was surrounded by dozens of smart people

who just came with all these ideas, "here's what we can say, here's what we say about guns, here's what we can say about gay culture, here's what we can say about nightclubs, here's what we can do in this week of weeks." and remember, that was month of months too, there were just attacks happening everywhere. i mean i think there was a point this summer where people were really feeling like things were pulling apart, right? we just saw so much news off attacks, and the campaign was getting nuts. and to me, sitting in that studio, providing knowledge... sorry, providing comfort through knowledge was what felt like a great thing to do. every day i walked out of that studio and i was like, "this is the best job in the world." - and that's the mission. - yeah. - ultimately, that's what your mission is. you mentioned that you like to be a reporter. you were in fact, as you alluded to earlier today, a reporter for many years. you were in beirut, and you were in syria, you were in iraq, you were in some very dangerous parts of the world. you like being a host as much as you like being a reporter? - oh, we're on the record-- - pick! pick! pick! - i can't answer that! (kelly and audience laugh) - or is there host brain and reporter brain?

- totally. - and there's a fusion of those brains? - there're so many brains. - talk about the difference. - there's so many different sub-brains of the reporter brain, and sub-brains of the host brain, yeah, there's different brains. it's interesting, you know? when you're an anchor and you have someone in the studio and you're interviewing them, your questions are on tape, right? and that's different when you're a reporter and you're interviewing somebody and you record it for two hours and you're gonna sort of put together, it's almost like you're a student and you're writing a term paper. you've interviewed all the experts, and then you get it all together and you sort of parse it out and then you write your term paper. it's a solitary thing. as a host, you're sitting there with someone, and you're the stand-in for the listener. you're asking the questions that you think the listener is asking, or, you're trying to imagine what the listener's thinking and you're trying to challenge that thinking and ask a question that may come out and, "oh, wow, good one." so, it's a totally different thing, because the questions themselves are part of the interview,

whereas when you're a reporter they're not. and that's interesting. - although, we visited about an interview that you did, or that was done for all things considered recently with khizr khan, the gold star father who became so well-known during the democratic convention, and you had said, how many minutes did you air? - we ran that interview on the air, it ended up airing at 11 minutes. - which is very long. - it's long, crazy long for us. - but you also said, and this is where technology helps. you were able to post the full interview online almost immediately. and so in some ways, the cherry-picking of the best material by a reporter, that phenomenon is mitigated a little bit these days at least by the ability to show all that we didn't give you. - that was an interesting interview. it's an interesting one to talk about, because it shows what you do, it's another example of host brain. so, here was a week, we all saw him at the democratic national convention. he takes out the constitution, and then for the next, whatever, five days, the guy was on every news-- - he's on spongebob, right, every time you turned on--

(kelly and audience laugh) the guy's on every single show. - he was on anderson cooper, he was on newshour, he was on everything, and we had a request in, because we're a news organization and you put in a request, but we were all kinda like, "eh, do we really wanna get into the fray?" and finally, when it came down, it was gonna work out at the very end of this crazy week for him. and i was like, "that's when i want him." i don't wanna do the, "trump said this, how do you respond? hillary said this, how do you respond?" the tit for tat, news, news, news, blah, blah, blah, blah thing with him. i was like, "i wanna ask this guy who he is! how'd he get the constitution? did he plan that?" i had so many questions for him that were totally outside of that week. and i also wanted to be like, "how was this week for you?" "are you okay? do you have any regrets?" "looking back, did you know it was gonna be like this?" it turns out the constitution wasn't planned. he was wearing a different jacket, and he changed his jacket at the last minute, and put on the one that has his favorite pocket constitution, because it also turns out this guy loves pocket constitutions. he has them everywhere. he has stacks of them in his house.

he gives them out to guests when they come over. - well i was amazed to hear, his son was in, i believe, the rotc, is that right? - that's right. - the son who was killed overseas. and so he and his wife host rotsey students from the same school that his son attended, and always gives them constitutions. and that was something i know because of that kind of reporting. - and he had no idea that he was gonna do it that night, but he had the jacket and was like "oh," in the cab, to his wife. "i got the thing, maybe i should pull it out." and she was like, "well, if you do it you gotta do it right." so she made him practice, because she was like, (audience laughs) "you wanna put the cover first." so he was like, "okay, go, go, go." he was telling us the story, this is npr, you know what i mean? that's not gonna happen-- - it's like gold, npr gold, right? - yes, i know, i was like this is npr. - the best thing in the world. - i got to just ask the question that people were probably curious about, right? when you look at this guy it's like, who are you? where'd you come from? how did you get to this day? - and you have a luxury with npr to do, and you say "11 minutes is long for us," but 11 minutes is super long-- - yeah, crazy long.

- for news organizations, right? - it was one of those times, we're in the studio, and we're in the middle of the interview, and i see my producer call to the line producer who runs the show and decides how long things are gonna be, and he was like, "yeah, we're getting the whole a." it was in the middle of the interview. the a segment means the whole first-- - they knew they had something great, right. - they were just like, this is so beautiful. - one of the great things about the embedded podcast, we have a few minutes and i want to talk about that, that i love, is it's clearly the reporter brain overwhelming the host brain, right? where you think, look, "i've got such a good story to tell, i wanna go deep." and in fact, at the beginning of every embedded, and there've been seven or eight, right? - yeah, we did a whole season of nine episodes. - at the beginning of every one you say, "we take a news story and we go deep." and it really is an opportunity for you to do what you cannot find on most broadcast media, right? you don't get to have the luxury of 26 minutes or 40 minutes, 'cause these podcasts are of different lengths. when you take one story and you just sort of look at it from every single angle, i think it's fantastic and i think it shows me

why they saw in you what they did when they gave you this opportunity to co-host, because you are such a great journalist. and that comes across, in the way that you... let's be clear about what's in embedded and what's not. it is not all your reporting. - no. - right, you feature reporting of others. but you frame it, and you give us, "here's how to think about this." and i think that's something that is kind of amazing. as we sit here at the latter part of august, npr has just announced that they're gonna stop, in fact it maybe already have happened, they're not gonna have comments on npr stories online. - that's right. - what knucklehead decided that? (kelly and audience laugh) - we're talking out of my department. - someone who thinks the p in npr stands for pelosi and not public. it feels to me like the public portion of this, we should be interacting. it is one of the ways in which the world has changed, is, this used to be a one-way conversation. you used to provide content and we used to consume it. and now, it's inherently a two-way conversation. - wasn't my decision. - oh i know it wasn't,

i'm not putting it on you. - definitely out of my league. not necessarily something i'm sanctioned to talk about. i do know this. other news organizations have done it. it was, i think, a diminishing returns situation, where it wasn't a place for public discourse. and there are tons of ways-- - well it was a sort of discourse, but it was kind of blah. the problem is that you hold the door open, they walk through it, right? here's and opportunity for you to hold forth in a profane way and call names and do all that kinda stuff. - and the resource that it takes to actually monitor that are insane and immense. and so, in order to really moderate and sort of get rid of just the profanity for instance, i mean that's huge. but i think the great thing is that there's a ton of ways, there are other ways to comment, you know? it is a two-way street, and everybody wants it to be a two-way street. - and npr said specifically that social media has effectively replaced the commenting function on a lot of news websites, so that people wanna hold forth, they've got a vehicle. - they can troll us on twitter all they want, yeah. - but i wanna stay with this idea. in some ways the comments thing was a trojan horse

to ask before we end here about this part of it. you really are now, truly, a public figure. you are not just an invisible name or an invisible face behind a microphone, but the way journalism and news production and all that has changed, the expectation is that you're gonna interact with your audience, whether it's through comments or anything else. are you good with that? - as long as it's in the right context. again, i think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about how much of you should be out there in the world. do i really need to be telling everybody what i had for lunch? maybe some journalists want to do that, you know, posting every picture of every meal. that's fine. i guess i'm always asking myself, "how much of my opinions, how much of my story, how much of that needs to be out there?" because, how much will it affect the perception of the work that i'm doing? that i am transparent, and that i am fair, and that i'm truthful. - you want the focus on your work. - yeah. - interestingly enough, your colleague at npr, scott simon. when scott simon's mother got sick, and eventually passed away, scott simon effectively live-tweeted

the death of his mother. to the point now, when i think of scott simon now, the first thing i think about is his mom. i mean, maybe that's a positive thing. it definitely put me in a different frame of mind in terms of thinking about him. but at the end of the day the focus really can be or should be on the news. - yeah, as a storyteller, as a person who writes books, as a person who brings people to the table on the radio, and shares their stories, maybe that was something that was completely appropriate for him-- - well, it's a new world. - and for his listeners. but yeah, these are all things you have to think about really closely i think, before you go launch a tweet-storm. - what a treat to get to see you. - yeah, thanks. - thank you for being here. - thanks for having me. - good luck with everything you're doing and especially the podcast, i can't wait to be listening to it some more. - thank you, season two's coming soon. - kelly mcevers, thank you so much. great, great, great. (applause) - [evan voiceover] we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q&a's with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. - nothing goes on the air without being edited.

nothing goes on the podcast without being edited. we have these podcasts that sound like they're just sort of chatty, like our politics podcast which is really, really, really, really good, you have no idea how much editing that actually gets. it sounds like it just rolls of the tongue, and they're just like, "ha ha ha ha ha." it is so heavily edited, so heavily fact-checked, and how do you do that, right? it's like people are chatting. we've got a bank of editors sitting in a room being like, "nope, can't say that, nope, that's not right, take it again." - [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and, by klru's producers circle. ensuring local programming that reflects the character and interests of the greater austin, texas community. (chimes jingle)