Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts
Born	Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs December 27, 1943 (1943-12-27) (age 67) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Residence	Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Wellesley College
Occupation	Journalist, Author
Employer	NPR, ABC
Known for	Journalist, author, pundit, television personality
Title	Contributing Senior News Analyst
Spouse	Steven V. Roberts (m. 1966–present) «start: (1966)»"Marriage: Steven V. Roberts to Cokie Roberts" Location: (linkback://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cokie_Roberts)
Children	Rebecca Roberts Lee Roberts
Parents	Hale Boggs Lindy Boggs
Relatives	Barbara Boggs Sigmund (Sister) Tommy Boggs (Brother)

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Roberts (née Boggs)^[1] (born December 27, 1943), best known as Cokie Roberts, 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 Christiane Amanpour. 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 such as the Kaiser Family Foundation^[2] and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.^[3]

Background

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs^[1] was born on December 27, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received the sobriquet "Cokie" from her brother Tommy, who could not pronounce "Corinne".^[1] 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^[4] and then Wellesley College in 1964^[5] 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.^[6] 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

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.^[7] 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 Correspondents' 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,^[8] the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress^[9] and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to "Who is Ross Perot?"^[10] In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer^[11], for which she was successfully treated.^[12]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families (ISBN: 978-0062018106) is her 2011 book authored with her husband Steven V. Roberts.

Bibliography

• We are Our Mothers' Daughters (1998, essays)
• From This Day Forward (2000, with Steven Roberts)
• Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (2004, nonfiction)
• Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation (2008, nonfiction)

Controversies

Appearance in front of green screen instead of U. S. Capitol Building

In January 1994, Roberts pretended to be in front of the U. S. Capitol Building in Washington, D. C. Although she wore an overcoat, Roberts was actually standing in front of an image of the Capitol in an ABC studio.^[13]

Interview said to be influenced by law 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.^[14] 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 law 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.^[15]

Hawaii comments

During the August 10, 2008 edition of ABC television'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.^[16][17] Her comments drew a heated response from Hawaiian members of Congress and many others, 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.".^[18] 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."

Glenn Beck comments

In her syndicated column in March 2010, Roberts wrote the following about Glenn Beck: "Actually, Beck is worse than a clown. He's more like a terrorist who believes he has discovered the One True Faith, and condemns everyone else as a heretic. And that makes him something else as well -- a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend." Fox News responded by saying of Roberts, "Isn't Cokie best known for lying to her viewers?", referring to the incident of Roberts acting as if she were in front of the U. S. Capitol building while actually just being in front of a green screen.^[19]

General criticism

Jack Shafer, press critic for Slate.com, has called many of Roberts' on-air comments "blather". ^[20]

External sources

• Cokie Roberts Interview on Plum TV with Chris Matthews - Plum TV
• Official biography - NPR
• Recent NPR stories by Cokie Roberts - NPR
• Video Interviews with Cokie Roberts - Charlie Rose
• Women of Influence - National Endowment for the Humanities
• 1994 Commencement Speech - Wellesley College
• Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives - Cokie Roberts gives a first-hand account of growing up in the Capitol.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Roberts, Cokie (1993-03-08) (Video). Talk Show with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose (talk show). PBS. http://youtube.com/watch?v=xMbWs5gyXrM. Retrieved 2008-05-20. 
2. ^ "Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation - Board of Trustees". http://www.kff.org/about/trustees2.cfm. Retrieved 2010-03-01. 
3. ^ 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. 
4. ^ Stone Ridge School. "Alumnae Exellence". http://www.stoneridge.org/alumnae/authors.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-11. "Cokie Boggs Roberts '60" 
5. ^ Wellesley College. "Notable Wellesley College Alumnae". http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/famousalums.html. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 
6. ^ Roberts, Cokie; Roberts, Steven (2000-02-28) (Video). A conversation with Cokie & Steve Roberts. Talk Show with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose (talk show). PBS. http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2000/02/28/2/a-conversation-with-cokie-steve-roberts. Retrieved 2008-05-20. 
7. ^ Krogh, Peter F. (1995-04-25). "ISD Report" (PDF). Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Georgetown University. pp. 4. Archived from the original on 2008-04-14. http://web.archive.org/web/20080414070231/http://isd.georgetown.edu/ISDreport_Americas_Diplomacy_Krogh.pdf. Retrieved 2008-04-11. 
8. ^ "Recipients of the Edward R. Murrow Award". Corporation for Public Broadcasting. http://www.cpb.org/aboutpb/awards/murrow/list.html. Retrieved 2008-04-11. 
9. ^ "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. 
10. ^ NPR. "Cokie Roberts, NPR Biography". http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2101090. Retrieved 2008-04-11. 
11. ^ "TV News Analyst Cokie Roberts Battles Breast Cancer". American Cancer Society Online. 2002-08-08. http://ww2.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_3_1x_TV_News_Analyst_Cokie_Roberts_Battles_Breast_Cancer.asp. 
12. ^ 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."
13. ^ Robins, J. Max (13 February 1994). "Cokie faux pas upsets Arledge". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR118288.html?categoryid=14&cs=1. Retrieved 25 October 2010. 
14. ^ Sister Dianna Ortiz Interview, Democracy Now, retrieved October 12, 2009
15. ^ "Crisis in Latin America," by John W. Sherman, Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado. 2000.
16. ^ ABC. "This Week With George Stephanopoulos, August 10, 2008". http://www.transcripts.tv/this-week.cfm. Retrieved 2008-08-19. 
17. ^ National Public Radio. "Morning Edition, August 11, 2008". http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93490150. Retrieved 2008-08-19. 
18. ^ KGMB9. "Cokie Roberts Draws Heated Reactions". http://kgmb9.com/main/content/view/8965/40. Retrieved 2008-08-19. ^{[dead link]}
19. ^ Shea, Danny (23 March 2010). "Cokie Roberts: Glenn Beck A 'Terrorist'". The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/23/cokie-roberts-glenn-beck_n_510613.html. Retrieved 25 October 2010. 
20. ^ http://www.slate.com/id/2216890/

Media offices
Preceded by David Brinkley	This Week co-anchor with Sam Donaldson December 15, 1996 – September 8, 2002	Succeeded by George Stephanopoulos

Persondata
Name	Roberts, Cokie
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1943-12-27
Place of birth	New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Date of death
Place of death