Cokie Roberts (born December 27, 1943) is an American Emmy Award-winning journalist and bestselling author. She is a contributing senior news analyst for National Public Radio as well as a regular roundtable analyst for the current This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Roberts also works as a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network. Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated by United Media in newspapers around the United States. She serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.[1]
Background
Cokie Roberts, née Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs[2] was born on December 27, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received the sobriquet "Cokie" from her brother Tommy, who could not pronounce "Corinne".[2] Cokie Roberts is the third child and youngest daughter of former ambassador and long-time Democratic Congresswoman from Louisiana Lindy Boggs and of the late Hale Boggs, also a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana who was Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Her sister, the late Barbara Boggs Sigmund, was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey and a candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey. Her brother Tommy Boggs is a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney and lobbyist.
Roberts attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls school in New Orleans, before graduating from the Stone Ridge School, an all-girls school outside Washington, D.C. in 1960[3] and then Wellesley College in 1964[4] where she received a BA in Political Science. She has been married to Steven V. Roberts, a professor and fellow journalist, since 1966, whom she met in the summer of 1962, when she was 18 and he was 19.[5] They currently reside in Bethesda, Maryland. She and her husband have two children, and six grandchildren. Her daughter, Rebecca Roberts, is also a journalist and was one of the hosts of POTUS '08 on XM Radio, which offered live daily coverage of the 2008 presidential election.
Career
Cokie Roberts serves as a senior news analyst for NPR, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than ten years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.
Roberts was the co-anchor of the ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast, This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002, while also serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. She covered politics, Congress and public policy, reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts.
Before joining ABC News in 1988, Roberts was a contributor to PBS in 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[6]. Prior to joining NPR, Roberts was a reporter for CBS News in Athens, Greece. She also produced and hosted a public affairs program on WRC-TV in Washington, DC. From 1981 to 1984, in addition to her work at NPR, she also co-hosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress. Roberts is also a former president of the Radio and Television Correspondent's Association.
She also co-hosted This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002 (and continues to appear on the "Round Table" segments from time to time). Roberts has won numerous awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award[7], the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress[8] and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to "Who is Ross Perot?"[9] In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer,[10] for which she was successfully treated.[11]
Author
She is the author of the national bestseller We Are Our Mother's Daughters as well as Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. The book, published in 2004, explores the lives of the women behind the men that wrote the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. Her latest book, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation, continues the story of early America's influential women that helped shape the United States during its early stages, and chronicling their various public roles and private responsibilities.
Bibliography
Controversies
Duke University commencement
In May, 1999, Roberts gave the commencement address at Duke University. Speaking at Wallace Wade Stadium (Duke's football stadium) with several thousand students on the field and their parents in the stands, Roberts opened her speech by stating "It's nice to look out on this field and finally see a bunch of winners," an obvious reference to the Duke football team's poor performance over a several year period. Several students, including a number of football players, walked out. It is unknown whether Roberts ever apologized.
Interview influenced by public relations firm
While working in Guatemala, Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico, was raped and tortured by members of a death squad until a US supervisor recognized that she was from the US.[12] Although there was no doubt of Ortiz's torture and ample evidence to corroborate her claims of an American supervisor, Roberts insisted that Ortiz was lying in a 1996 interview with Ortiz on the TV show "Nightline." Roberts' brother, Tom Boggs, working for the advertising firm of "Patton, Boggs, & Blow," was paid by the Guatemalan military to promote a more positive image of the death squads and the military dictatorship in Guatemala.[13] This incident caused a tremendous amount of scrutiny into other potential nepotistic relationships within the media.[citation needed]
During the August 10 2008 edition of ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Roberts criticized presidential candidate Barack Obama for visiting his sick grandmother in Hawaii; Roberts said "I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of [Barack Obama] going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place"; Roberts repeated this assertion the next morning on National Public Radio.[14][15] Her comments drew a heated response from Hawaiian members of Congress, with US Representative Neal Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) saying "Don't forget Cokie Roberts and the whole Washington crowd live in a kind of an incestuous relationship to one another. They talk to one another, they see one another. They know nothing about ordinary people."[16]. US Senator Daniel Akaka issued a statement stating "Saying our 50th state is somehow 'foreign,' does a great disservice to the hardworking, patriotic Americans who call Hawai'i home." And US Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) was reportedly "shocked and saddened by the remarks"; Inouye was quoted as saying "I would resent anyone suggesting that my roots are not American."
Readers of Media Matters for America overwhelmingly voted her "foreign, exotic" Hawaii comments as the Most Inane Punditry of the 2008 presidential campaign.[17]
Bosniak gaffe
Commenting on the October 2, 2008 Vice-Presidential Debate between Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Governor Sarah Palin, Roberts incorrectly referenced Biden's use of the term "Bosniaks" as a gaffe on his part, stating "If (Sarah Palin) had said 'Bosniak' everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know". In reality, Biden's use of the term was legitimate as 'Bosniak' is the official and preferred ethnic designation for indigenous Muslim citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and members of the Bosnian Muslim diaspora, particularly in the rest of the former Yugoslavia and western Anatolia.[18]
External sources
Notes
- ^ President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. "Meet the Council Members". USA Freedom Corps. www.whitehouse.gov. http://www.usafreedomcorps.gov/council/members/index.asp. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- ^ a b Roberts, Cokie. Talk Show with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose (talk show). PBS. 1993-03-08. (Interview [Video]). Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
- ^ Stone Ridge School. "Alumnae Exellence". http://www.stoneridge.org/alumnae/authors.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-11. "Cokie Boggs Roberts '60"
- ^ Wellesley College. "Notable Wellesley College Alumnae". http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/famousalums.html. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- ^ Roberts, Cokie & Steven Roberts. Talk Show with Charlie Rose. A conversation with Cokie & Steve Roberts (Video). Charlie Rose (talk show). PBS. 2000-02-28. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
- ^ Krogh, Peter F. (1995-04-25). "ISD Report" (PDF). Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Georgetown University. pp. 4. http://isd.georgetown.edu/ISDreport_Americas_Diplomacy_Krogh.pdf. Retrieved 2008-04-11.
- ^ "Recipients of the Edward R. Murrow Award". Corporation for Public Broadcasting. http://www.cpb.org/aboutpb/awards/murrow/list.html. Retrieved 2008-04-11.
- ^ "Everett McKinley Dirksen Awards for Distinguished Reporting of Congress". National Press Foundation. http://www.nationalpress.org/info-url3520/info-url_show.htm?doc_id=118438. Retrieved 2008-04-11.
- ^ NPR. "Cokie Roberts, NPR Biography". http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2101090. Retrieved 2008-04-11.
- ^ American Cancer Society (August 8, 2002). "TV News Analyst Cokie Roberts Battles Breast Cancer". Retrieved on March 27, 2009.
- ^ Larry King Live (May 22, 2004). "Interviews With Cokie Roberts et al" (transcript). Retrieved on March 27, 2009. "No, no. My breast cancer is gone."
- ^ Sister Dianna Ortiz Interview, Democracy Now, retrieved October 12, 2009
- ^ "Crisis in Latin America," by John W. Sherman, Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado. 2000.
- ^ ABC. "This Week With George Stephanopoulos, August 10, 2008". http://www.transcripts.tv/this-week.cfm. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
- ^ National Public Radio. "Morning Edition, August 11, 2008". http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93490150. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
- ^ KGMB9. "Cokie Roberts Draws Heated Reactions". http://kgmb9.com/main/content/view/8965/40. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
- ^ http://mediamatters.org/items/200812220009
- ^ Media Matters. "On PBS, Cokie Roberts falsely suggested Biden's reference to Bosniaks was a gaffe". http://mediamatters.org/items/200810030001.
