Graham Smith
Graham Smith is a Senior Producer on NPR's Investigations team and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting.
He works with staffers, station reporters and independent journalists to dig deep and create sound-rich, long-form stories. He enjoys mentoring, as well as teaching field production and radio skills to reporters making the transition to audio storytelling.
Smith came to NPR in 2003 as line producer of All Things Considered. He's been an editor on Morning Edition and has field produced and reported from conflict zones around the world. He's recorded hosts and athletes skiing at Olympic venues, sought shrimp in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and lost his lunch flying with US Marines on their controversial Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. He has a deep love for meaningful obituaries.
Smith won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for the podcast series No Compromise, which explores an extreme faction within the gun-rights movement. He was also named a Pulitzer finalist in 2020 for his work on White Lies, an investigation into a Civil Rights era murder and what it tells us about America today.
His collaborations with Youth Radio earned him the Robert F. Kennedy and the Edward R. Murrow awards for a story on a culture of harassment at a Navy base, and the George Foster Peabody award for editing a series on teen sex trafficking in Oakland. He also received Murrow awards for his own battlefield reporting from Afghanistan, and another as part of NPR's team covering the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.
Smith came to D.C. from WBUR Boston, NH Public Radio and the Christian Science Monitor. He and family keep bees and raise crops at their little urban homestead, carving out time to walk in nature and play music.
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In an update to NPR's Taking Cover investigation, a U.S. senator asks for answers from the Marines and an Army soldier, still serving on active duty, has been denied the truth about his war wounds.
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Details of a deadly incident during the Iraq War were buried by the Marine Corps for years, including links to a powerful politician.
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In 2004, a U.S. general told the family of an Iraqi interpreter that insurgents killed their brother. The truth was more painful: He was mistakenly killed by Americans he had risked his life to help. -
A mortar blast killed two Marines in Iraq almost 20 years ago. But families weren't told for years it was "friendly fire," a tragic accident, despite regulations. Some of the wounded were never told. -
U.S. combat veteran Bryan Stern runs a nonprofit called Project Dynamo that extracts people from hostile places. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the organization has rescued more than 400 people. -
Supplies are running low at Lviv's regional cancer hospital in Ukraine. The patient load has doubled and supplies in Kyiv are inaccessible. But hospital staff choose the duty of care over safety. -
The first of Ukraine's fallen soldiers are starting to come home. Two men were killed on the front lines in Russia's war on Ukraine. Hundreds gathered to mourn at their funeral on Tuesday. -
On March 13, President Trump promised to mobilize private and public resources to respond to the coronavirus. NPR followed up on each promise and found little action had been taken. -
Thomas Jefferson's garden was a vast, beautiful science experiment involving over 300 varieties of 90 different plants. And no gardening detail was too small for Jefferson to note in the gardening journal he kept for nearly 60 years. -
Thousands of Marines have descended upon the Helmand River valley in Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold that is known for poppy growing. The Marines plan to stay, one of the first concrete examples of the Obama administration's new strategy for Afghanistan.
