Pioneer blazed a trail for female journalists
Cokie Roberts, the pioneering broadcast journalist known to millions for her work with ABC News and National Public Radio, died Tuesday. She was 75.
ABC News, in a posting on its website Tuesday morning, said the cause was breast cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2002.
Roberts started her radio career at CBS, then in 1978 began working for NPR covering Capitol Hill. She joined ABC in 1988. Her three decades at the network included anchoring, with Sam Donaldson, the news program “This Week” from 1996 to 2002.
“Cokie’s kindness, generosity, sharp intellect and thoughtful take on the big issues of the day made ABC a better place and all of us better journalists,” James Goldston, president of ABC News, said in a statement.
Roberts was both reporter and commentator during her career and was widely respected both by her fellow journalists and by those she covered. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., recalled on Twitter a 2001 talk in which she “encouraged all of us, Republicans and Democrats, to always seek consensus where we could.”
“I’ll never forget how moving she was,” he added.
Danielle Kurtzleben, an NPR reporter, praised Roberts as an example for younger generations of journalists.
“I’m proud as hell — proud as hell — to work at a news organization that has ‘Founding Mothers’ whom we all look up to,” she said on Twitter. “God bless Cokie Roberts.”
Michelle and Barack Obama, in a statement, called Roberts “a trailblazing figure; a role model to young women at a time when the profession was still dominated by men; a constant over forty years of a shifting media landscape and changing world, informing voters about the issues of our time and mentoring young journalists every step of the way.”
If Roberts brought deep knowledge and keen insight to her work, that was in part because she was a child of politicians and first walked the halls of Congress as a young girl. Her father was Hale Boggs, a longtime Democratic representative from Louisiana who in the early 1970s was House majority leader. After he died in a plane crash in 1972, his wife and Roberts’ mother, Lindy Boggs, was elected to fill his seat. She served until 1991 and later became U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.
It was a background that gave Roberts a deep respect for the institutions of government that she covered.
Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born Dec. 27, 1943, in New Orleans. She said that her brother, Tommy, invented her nickname because he couldn’t say “Corinne.”
Although her father had considerable influence on her, so did her mother, who was active in furthering her father’s career, and other women she came to know like Lady Bird Johnson.
“I very much grew up with a sense, from them, that women could do anything,” she added, “and that they could sort of do a whole lot of things at the same time.”
She eventually became a radio correspondent for CBS, then in 1978 joined NPR. With Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer, she began to change the journalistic landscape.
“As a troika they have succeeded in revolutionizing political reporting,” the Times wrote in that 1994 article. “Twenty years ago Washington journalism was pretty much a male game, like football and foreign policy. But along came demure Linda, delicately crashing onto the presidential campaign press bus; then entered bulldozer Nina, with major scoops on Douglas Ginsberg and Anita Hill; and in came tart-tongued Cokie with her savvy congressional reporting. A new kind of female punditry was born.”