Tovia Smith

Tovia Smith is an award-winning NPR News National Correspondent based in Boston, who has spent more than three decades covering news around New England and beyond. She has reported recently on America’s current political polarization, how a budding industry of former cult deprogrammers are trying to reach Q-Anon adherents, the COVID-19 pandemic, the #MeToo movement and campus sexual assault. Smith has also reported extensively on clergy sexual abuse (including breaking the news of the Pope’s secret first meeting with survivors), the battle over abortion rights, the legalization of gay marriage, racial tensions in Boston and many tragedies, including the Newtown school shooting and Sept. 11, when she was at Ground Zero covering the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In her reporting on contentious issues such as race relations, abortion and juvenile crime, Smith always pushes past the polemics, and advances the conversation with more thoughtful, thought-provoking, and nuanced arguments from both or all sides. She has brought to air the distinct voices of Boston area residents, with an empathic ear and an eye for detail, telling the human stories that evoke the emotion, issues and cultural zeitgeist. She has gone behind the bars of a prison to interview female prisoners who keep their babies with them while incarcerated, behind closed doors to watch a college admissions committee decide whom to admit, inside a local orphanage to tell the stories of the children living there and into a court-mandated counseling group for men convicted of domestic violence. Throughout her career, Smith has won dozens of national journalism awards including a Gracie award, the Casey Medal, the Unity Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention, Ohio State Award, Radio and Television News Directors Association Award and numerous awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors Association and the Associated Press.