Cokie Roberts

Career

Roberts's first job in journalism was at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., where she was host of its weekly public affairs program Meeting of the Minds. After moving with her husband Steve, also a journalist, to New York City, she found work in 1967 as a reporter for Cowles Communications. She worked briefly as a producer for WNEW-TV before Steve's career had them relocating to Los Angeles. She worked for Altman Productions and then for KNBC-TV as producer of the children's program Serendipity, which won a 1971 Los Angeles Area Emmy Award. She also moved with her husband to Greece, where she was a stringer for CBS News in Athens at the time of the terrorist assassination of the CIA Station Chief, Richard Welch on December 23, 1975, while her husband ran the New York Time bureau there.

Roberts began working for National Public Radio (NPR) in 1978, working as the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. Because of her early involvement as a female journalist in the network at a time when women were not often involved in journalism at the highest levels, she has been called one of the "founding mothers of NPR." Roberts was a contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) on the evening television news program The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her coverage of the Iran–Contra Affair for that program won her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988. From 1981 to 1984, in addition to her work at NPR, she also cohosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress. Starting in 1992, Roberts served as a senior news analyst and commentator for NPR, primarily on the daily news program Morning Edition. In 1994, The New York Times credited her, along with NPR's Linda Wertheimer and Nina Totenberg, with transforming male-dominated Washington, D.C., political journalism.

Roberts went to work for ABC News in 1988 as a political correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, continuing to serve part-time as a political commentator at NPR. She appeared as a panelist for many years on ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast This Week with David Brinkley. After Brinkley's retirement, she co-anchored the program with Sam Donaldson (renamed This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts) from 1996 to 2002, while serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. The two were replaced as anchors in September 2002 by George Stephanopoulos. She also covered politics, Congress, and public policy while reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts. Roberts continued to serve occasionally as a panelist on This Week and work on NPR. Her final assignment with NPR was a series of segments on Morning Edition titled "Ask Cokie," in which she answered questions submitted by listeners about subjects usually related to U.S. politics.

Reporting on Dianna Ortiz case

In 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico, was abducted, raped, and tortured while working in Guatemala by members of a Guatemalan government-backed death squad. Her abductors believed Ortiz was a subversive. During a subsequent interview, Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors. (The United States provided significant military aid to Guatemala at the time.) Roberts implied that Ortiz was lying about the entire episode, although Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case. It was later revealed that Patton Boggs, the law firm of Roberts's brother Tommy, was paid by the Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which was widely criticized internationally for human rights abuses.

Personal life and death

From 1966 until her death, Roberts was married to Steven V. Roberts, a professor and fellow journalist. They met in summer 1962, when she was 18 and he was 19. They resided in Bethesda, Maryland. They had two children: a son, Lee, and a daughter, Rebecca. Roberts was a Roman Catholic.

In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She was successfully treated at the time but died from complications of the disease in Washington, D.C., on September 17, 2019.

External sources

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Official biography—NPR
• Recent NPR stories by Cokie Roberts (2009)—NPR
• Video Interviews with Cokie Roberts^{[link removed]}—Charlie Rose
• Women of Influence—National Endowment for the Humanities
• 1994 commencement speech; Archived February 5, 2012, at the Wayback Machine—Wellesley College
• Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives; Archived December 11, 2012, at the Wayback Machine—Cokie Roberts gives a first-hand account of growing up in the capital
• Cokie Roberts at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television
• Remembering Cokie Roberts, 1943–2019—NPR memorial page, including the NPR special
• Cokie Roberts at Find a Grave