That Voice You Hear

In this case, that means offering a Zoom’s-eye view of the spare bedroom-turned-subterranean studio space at her D.C. home, from where she has worked most mornings since March 2020. There are photos of her two sons, now 10 and 8; a poster-sized Georgia O’Keefe print; a handful of family knickknacks; and pieces of her sons’ artwork on a shelf. The dog bed on the floor belongs to Lola, a rescue dog of indeterminate breeding. Given Martin’s hours as co-host of Morning Edition, NPR’s signature weekday news program, it’s a blessing that she can very nearly roll out of bed—the guest bed, technically, but hers on those nights when a presidential debate or pending election results keep her up late, and a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call beckons—and into work. Her desk is barely an arm’s length away.

Her home studio is best described as rudimentary—“Some hosts have three computers, these very professional standing things for their laptops, soundproofing ... mine’s not that,” she says—but it gets the job done. She’s long past being self-conscious about her bare-bones setup (microphone, headphones, laptop), nor is she bothered by the occasional audible intrusion on her live broadcasts. “All these things we were really nervous about in the beginning—Oh no, a child has walked in, or a dog is barking—no one cares anymore,” she says. “It just kind of sounds like life.”

With her kids long since back to in-person schooling, and Lola a generally quiet pup, Martin’s pandemic routine feels normal enough to no longer register. She misses the spontaneous banter that comes with recording with a co-host in the same studio, but she and her colleagues have adapted, because what other choice is there? This is the job now. Adapting to minor technical hurdles is the easy part. Adapting to a national political and cultural climate that seems to grow more polarized by the day, well, not so much.

In both her résumé and temperament, Martin seems about as well suited to the challenge as anyone could be. She has spent more than 20 years in public radio, reporting on politics, religion, and breaking news at home, and on war and immigration as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, and Ukraine. She’s well versed in the topics that anger and divide the rest of us; she has interviewed many of the policymakers responsible for, or empowered by, our current state, and many more regular folks impacted by their decisions. She has done all of this while representing a media outlet uniquely positioned for neutrality or guilty of blatant bias, depending on your point of view. She owns an informed perspective on what it all means, and she has thoughts on how she and her colleagues have responded to the anxious new world they find themselves covering.

It’s the same world she has to live in, of course, and thus a place where personal concerns share space with professional ones. In this, her work-from-home schedule offers benefits that provide needed perspective, that make the early wake-up calls and tightrope reporting worthwhile. “After the first feed of the show, I get to go upstairs and wake up my kids,” she says. “That’s a thing I never got to do before. I get to have breakfast with them, because that’s sort of the natural lunchbreak on my shift. And then I get back to work.” Depending on the day, there’s writing to be done, or reporting work, or reading to prepare for interviews.

Work has, in the past, meant war zones; for now, it mostly means early mornings in a quiet basement in Northwest D.C. Martin’s career has prepared her well to thrive in either setting, and wherever she might land next.

Eight or 10 years ago, Bill Haltom was making his weekly drive up from Tacoma to Seattle to pick up his mother and take her to church. His car radio was tuned to KNKX; the sounds of Weekend Edition Sunday accompanied him on the trip up Interstate 5. “And you can imagine my surprise,” Haltom says now, “when I realized, I recognize that voice.”

It had been nearly 20 years since Haltom first heard Rachel Martin’s voice. At the time, she was a first-year student newly arrived from Idaho Falls, Idaho, assigned to his advising section. The longtime professor of politics and government, who retired this summer, taught Martin in only one class, a first-year session of Intro to American Politics and Government. But in that class, and in mostly brief interactions over the next few years, Martin made an impression.

“Rachel from the get-go was astute, she was quick, and she was very personable,” Haltom says. “Beyond that, there’s the superficial—she’s got a great voice. It’s so rich and resonant, which is why I could recognize her voice so many years after she graduated.”

Haltom isn’t shocked at Martin’s career success in the years since; he simply didn’t expect her to take this particular path. “I would’ve imagined that Rachel would’ve headed more in an academic direction, maybe a think tank, something like that,” he says. When she first arrived in Tacoma, those options would have made as much sense as any to Martin, too.

An avid reader and serious student, she grew up thinking she might follow her father’s path and practice law. She devoured the articles in her father’s copies of The Economist, and she remembers watching Jane Pauley on Today and thinking, What a cool job. Still, a career in journalism wasn’t a path she seriously considered. She only knew that whatever she did, she wanted to see more of the world.

But in college, she says, “I was insecure. I’d come from a small town, a public high school. I was still figuring myself out.” Haltom remembers Martin as less interested in participating in politics than discussing and debating the subject with like-minded classmates; Martin credits faculty like Haltom, political scientist David Balaam, and English professor Frank Cousens with “creating spaces where you weren’t made to feel lesser or vulnerable by asking a real question. That allowed me to figure out who I was—a person who wanted to be out in the world, engaged with current events. UPS just helped me become a more curious person.”

Graduation didn’t bring career clarity, but she took a step in that direction with a temporary gig teaching English in Japan (something she recounted in a short 2016 NPR feature on the topic of first jobs; while in high school, she worked one summer as a window mannequin model at her local mall). After that teaching abroad program, she says, “I got the bug. I wanted to see more places, learn about more people.” She moved to San Francisco and worked temp jobs, even took the LSAT; eventually, on a whim, she applied for a job at KQED, the venerable Bay Area public radio station. She admits that the managing editor who hired her had little reason to, other than perhaps a sense of her enthusiasm for the work. “I was just completely hooked on the idea that I could brandish a microphone and people would tell me their stories,” she says.

Given how many people regularly wake up to the sound of Martin’s voice, it’s difficult to imagine that her producers at KQED initially didn’t let her voice the stories she reported. But she stuck with it and got better, the curiosity she had honed in college serving her well as an interviewer. The performance aspect of the job suited her, too. “I had studied music and singing, and I loved thinking about how to draw listeners in with words and sounds,” she says.

Before long, Martin realized she was doing something she was good at and really enjoyed. The job became something more after Sept. 11, 2001. The Bay Area city of Fremont is home to one of the largest Afghan communities in the U.S., and as Martin remembers, in the days after the terrorist attacks, “it was mayhem. You could already see the fissures happening in the country. That really changed things for me.” She enrolled in a master’s program at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, thinking it was the logical next step to a career in international relations—maybe the State Department, maybe the U.N. But before giving up entirely on a journalism career, in the summer between her first and second years she used some grant money to pay for airfare to Kabul, to try her hand at freelancing.

In Afghanistan, she filed stories for The World, focusing her attention not on the military (a beat she’s covered extensively since), but on the everyday stories of Afghan people living in a war zone. “The big takeaway for me,” she says, and what she tried to convey in her reporting, was that the Afghans she spoke to were simply “people trying to give their kids a good shot in life, against insurmountable odds. It put a lot of things in perspective.”

Martin returned home that summer and finished her master’s, but made multiple trips back to Afghanistan, covering the country’s first democratic presidential elections in 2004. In the nearly 20 years since, including a brief stint at ABC News, she has reported from Iraq and Saudi Arabia, London and Berlin. She has served as NPR’s national security correspondent and won national awards for stories on Islam in America, racial discrimination in Hollywood, and the impact of the opioid epidemic on kids. In 2016, she was promoted from her Weekend Edition Sunday gig to co-host of Morning Edition.

She misses the rush of working in war zones, but not enough to erase the downside of those assignments—and the ultimate draw of her current role. “It’s very lonely, very isolating, being a foreign correspondent. It takes a real toll on your mental and physical health,” she says. “I realized it wasn’t going to be a long-term lifestyle for me, and when hosting was presented as an opportunity ... that’s always what I wanted to do.”

The job of host requires a variety of duties, but for Martin, the chance to do intimate, very personal interviews with regular people is the biggest draw. “For me, the conversation is where it’s at. That’s always been the most intoxicating part of the work, to talk with folks who have survived something hard, who have learned something they want to pass on, who have an incredible story to tell.”

Interviewing high-profile newsmakers—live—is a whole other challenge. “It’s an opportunity to hold people accountable in a direct fashion. It’s a lot of responsibility, and also a bit of a live-wire act. That's its own adrenaline rush for me."

In that, the timing of her transition to Morning Edition must've seemed like a personal challenge. The job she thrives on—holding the powerful to account with direct questions that might lead to honest answers—has never been an easy one. And it's hard not to see 2016 as the year when a difficult task became, in many cases, something close to impossible.

It's a real challenge," Martin says of covering politics in the age of Donald Trump. "His tenure as president completely forced newsrooms to recalibrate. And to be honest, I think that's been an uncomfortable space for NPR to be in."

The “P” in NPR represents the operative word in the network’s name: public, as in tax-payer-funded, media. The implication, more broadly accepted in previous decades, was that NPR would strive for no-frills, opinion-free, just-the-facts journalism in a way that corporate-owned media never could. Of course, there have always been complaints of NPR’s bias, mostly from the right. But during and since the Trump presidency, the network has increasingly drawn the ire of those on the left for whom chasing “objectivity” rings hollow when one of the country’s two major parties seems incapable of telling—or accepting—objective truth.

Martin is well aware of the critique. And she largely agrees with it.

“The Republican Party’s insistence on a lie about the outcome of the 2020 election forced us to reevaluate how we treat those lawmakers when they come on the air,” she says. “It has forced everyone in journalism, and I think NPR in particular, to reevaluate how we do our work. We are not in the business of treating both sides equally in the way perhaps we were before, but of erring on the side of democracy. Some of what has weighed down some outlets in the past is an insecurity to draw conclusions. It is no longer sufficient to act as stenographers for political leaders. That is not journalism. That is negligence now, in my opinion."

It's a surprising thing to hear from an NPR journalist, and Martin gets that, too. "It's a real cultural shift, and I think it's been slow in coming," she says. "We've had many editorial conversations about how things are different, and what we must do differently to meet the moment, and we are working to get there. We are still not advocates [for any particular viewpoint]—it's still not NPR's place to do that. But I think there is real progress."

If the task seems daunting—according to many experts on the subject, it's only democracy at stake—Martin discusses it in a way that implies she's up for the challenge. And what better role for someone embracing such a meaningful journalistic test? But just because hosting Morning Edition is a dream job doesn't mean it will be Martin's last. Six years in, it's the longest she'd held a single position in her career, and she acknowledges that she's prone to looking ahead to the next thing. Whatever that might be.

"There are lots of ways to make a difference in the world—even if you stay in the realm of media, trying to dispel misinformation, there are a lot of different ways to do that," she says. "There might come a time when I want to explore a different mechanism by which to make that change.

"Plus, 3 a.m. is really early."