Talk:Cokie Roberts

Initial comments

In broadcasts on NPR (and perhaps other places as well) Cokie Roberts often starts her sentences with an unpleasant "Look,", as if she were scolding her unobservant listeners. This makes it difficult for me to listen to her, regardless of whether or not I'm open to her opinions. Anyone else notice this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.58.204 (talk) 12:47, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

This is not a chat page ... take your opinions elsewhere. -- Jibal (talk) 21:47, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

is she still married today and what was so great about her?

Is that really her full name? That's ridiculous! --Fastfission 13:47, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's true--that's her full name. She gave a speech this morning at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in D.C. and actually commented on Wikipedia's inaccuracy--said it was "Mary Martha" and not "Martha Mary," and then stated her full name (I followed up with her later at her book signing, and the name as it stands is indeed correct). --Miss Dark 15:49, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

This is not a chat page ... take your opinions elsewhere. -- Jibal (talk) 21:47, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Party?

Is she a republican ? Anyone ?

She did receive a Bush appointment. She's a conservative commentator. So more than likely. It might take going through voter rolls to uncover how she's registered, though. 24.17.247.213 (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 02:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Notwithstanding comments from others suggesting that she is a Republican shill among the likes of Rush Limbaugh, it hardly seems likely that she is Republican. She has worked for NPR and/or PBS almost all of her career--those are not organizations quite like Fox News or the EIB Network. She is Catholic, and Catholics have traditionally been Democrats; and she is married to a Jewish man, and Jews have traditionally been Democrats. And both of her parents served multiple terms in the House of Representatives as Democrats; and children, especially children of politicians, seem often to belong to the party of their parents. (Her parents may have been "conservative" Dixiecrats, but she herself has been hanging around Washington too long to have been affected by the Republican tide that swept across the South in the 1980s.) She may have received an appointment from President Bush, but so did a lot of Democrats, just as a lot of Republicans received appointments from President Obama. If she said Obama should not be seen vacationing in Hawaii, perhaps it was because she feared that it would damage his reputation among the lot of ordinary working-class people who would think him too snooty vacationing in some exotic place, or add to his mystique as an outsider--he is, after all, literally African American and spent a lot of his life in Asia. Perhaps also she was a Hilary Clinton supporter. Hilary's husband, after all, had made her mother the United States ambassador to the Vatican. Perhaps if her reporting seems conservative it is because she is actually an enormously talented journalist and does not betray her own political beliefs in her work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.48.102.233 (talk) 19:33, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

The entry above is nothing but inane blather. I am reluctant to attack a contributor (although that may not apply in this case because the comment is unsigned) but even on a talk page, contributors should conform to minimal standards above the level of and aimless and completely baseless speculation. ---Dagme (talk) 04:51, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

It's a lot more substantive than your comment. But none of this belongs on this page. -- Jibal (talk) 21:50, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Photo

This photo is photoshopped extensively, and given her age must be from 40 years ago. You can tell by the eyes which "bug out" nowadays quite a bit.

The Photo of Ms. Roberts is years old. Wouldn't a more recent photo be appropriate? Like the photo posted on the PBS/Tavis Smiley website on April 30, 2008.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200804/20080430_roberts.html

DVet78 (talk) 17:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)DVet78

I agree. The picture needs to be updated. 24.17.247.213 (talk) 02:29, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

of course it needs to be updated but this is the only photo available to upload to Wikipedia, those other photos fall under copyright issues, so unless you find a free photo, we are stuck with this one. mijotoba (talk) 15:20, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The photo in question is clearly a professional portrait, and unless he/she has assigned the copyright, the photographer holds the copyright... so you might have a copy vio after all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.88.229.196 (talk) 16:28, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Well that may be the case, but the picture was available on a website of the federal government and works of the government are in the public domain, and there was no additional mention of a pre-existing copyright or notice to make any other assumptions. mijotoba (talk) 00:49, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

According

to Tim Russert, & Charles Schumer, Chuck Schumer & Cokie Roberts had been on a 1967 "It's_Academic", according to the Sunday, the 05th, November, 2006 Meet the Press. I, hereby, request assistance in further verifying this.

Thank You.

hopiakuta ; [[ <nowiki> </nowiki> { [[%c2%a1]] [[%c2%bf]] [[ %7e%7e%7e%7e ]] } ;]] 00:21, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Career

Shouldn't we mention her consistent extreme right-wing bias, which has been repeatedly, and factually documented on websites such as FAIR or Media Lens? To call Cokie Roberts a "journalist" is indeed a stretch of the imagination! She is in the same category as Sean Hannity, David Brooks, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News: these people are not 'journalists' per se (in the traditional sense of the term, e.g. reporting news in a factual and objective manner--free of political bias); they are Republican shills, and/or public relations talk show personalities promoting conservative, corporate, Republican interests.

the "career" section is bit of a muddled mess. surely, some editor could put it in a more cohesive timeline. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.173.13.31 (talk) 08:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Why oh why does where she vacation matter? And its racial makeup? inflammatory and undocumented.I cut it. The section on Obama is also biased. The actual words she used were not critical but I will let someone else work with that once the hysteria dies down. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.129.33.82 ([[User talk:166.129.33.82|talk]]) 06:10, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

What "hysteria" are you talking about? Oh! Now I get it: by "hysteria" you mean the reams of well-documented criticisms of Cokie Roberts by numerous members of Congress, public officials, media organizations, and in general people who value TRUTH AND ACCURACY in journalism. For you, "hysteria" here means anybody who tries to set the record straight after the latest smear by Roberts of...for example Barack Obama, or for that matter of any public official to the left of Dick Cheney who Cokie and neo-con friends in the D.C. beltway decide to _target in her next public "shill sesh". Or to put it another way: any sane and reasonable person who dares to refute the hysterical, mudslinging Cokie Roberts.

I deleted the following:

Cokie is hated by millions of Americans who painfully endure her bug-eyed face on those insipid political TV shows like ABC's "This Week". Cokie is hated for her extreme right-wing viewpoints which border on the insane and racist. For example, Cokie recently attacked Barack Obama on ABC's "This Week" for visiting his ailing grandmother in Hawaii:

Roberts: …going off this week I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach and if he’s going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that.

So, Cokie disapproves of Barack Obama going to visit his ailing grandmother, and she also shows apparent disregard for the state of Hawaii--portraying the 50th state as a "foreign, exotic place" that somehow shouldn't be visited by presidential candidates who happen to be from there. WTF!? Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka subsequently rebuked the bitter old hag Roberts for her arrogance and the sheer stupidity of her statements. But making such outlandish, crude comments as this is nothing new for Roberts, who always has a sneering, negative comment at the ready for anybody who is not a war-rabid, Bush enabling neo-con extremist.

It's pretty sad that someone (over the age of 12) would deliberately sabotage a biography article just because of a different political view! comment added by Usl1984

Usl1984: you're sounding pretty sad yourself...for somebody supposedly "over the age of 12". Or, maybe you don't like it when so many people (including members of Congress) criticize Cokie Roberts for trying in her ugly underhanded way to sabotage Barack Obama's campaign with such a lame criticism like where he goes for a vacation! Roberts is a shill for the GOP and uses the same ugly tactics as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, etc. But more to the point: right-wing neo-con extremists are always happy to sling mud on liberals, democrats, and minorities--but whenever they get a taste of their own medicine they cry bloody murder! Ah, the glaring hypocrisy of it all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.52.223.26 (talk) 17:27, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

If you knew anything about this country, you'd realize that most members of Congress have the brainpower of the keyboard I'm using to type this, and therefore have little room to criticize what anyone else says or does. Why do people hate free speech in this country so much nowadays?! Just because someone isn't a liberal, Communist, braindead shill of government takeovers and Obamaunism, they're somehow evil and inferior? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.202.255.7 (talk) 05:38, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Controversies

Someone had deleted the controversies section about Cokie Roberts earlier and they used the Wikipedia:DUST rule to justify it, I did not think about it before, but he is right, those kind of news are better left for the future, especially the recent comments about Obama, since it hasn't even been a year. Please consider reviewing DUST to avoid adding trivial information which may very well be ephemeral and not important from an encyclopedia point of view. mijotoba (talk) 23:38, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

• And someone stuck it back in again. It's minor trivia in her career; it might have been important enough for the press to cover in the heat of her campaign, but otherwise, feh, who cares that a reporter says something clueless? --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 05:56, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Agree, they are all DUST. What a trivial waste. Will delete according to WP:DUST. It's just chatter. The paragraph supposedly sourced from John Sherman's book, Latin America in Crisis, sounds like OR. Also, I tried to find the references in Sherman's book today while working on the page for Dianna Ortiz and could not do it - a Google search did not reveal Roberts, her brother Boggs, Jr., nor his lobbying firm in this book. Unless someone has a quote from Nightline, and a quote and page cite from Sherman making this connection, this is not adequately sourced to use.Parkwells (talk) 19:32, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

The information is more than 15 years old, so I'm not sure it qualifies as WP:DUST. I did a quick Google search for "diane ortiz cokie roberts" and found plenty of information. I don't think that providing a quote automatically gives adequate source to something, but I'll find one. Below is the actual paragraph. Mvblair (talk) 14:34, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

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.

I updated the page, per these suggestions and included references to Nightlin. It should be a little cleaner now. Not having a "controversies" section, I included it in the discussion about her general career. Mvblair (talk) 01:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

It appears that someone just renamed the section and put it under "Criticism" That entire section reads more like someone's opinion than an actual non-biased article. Sources seem to all be opinion pieces. Section needs to be reworked, or deleted entirely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.183.47.148 (talk) 18:33, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Lee Roberts on the move in North Carolina Government

Would someone closer to this article please ad his position as Budget Director for NC. The thread to banking connections sits at mom's roundtable with George, perhaps.http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=YnZTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eocDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3173%2C3230147 --Wikipietime (talk) 16:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

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deletions

Bernie Rogow I see that you are brand new here. Please before deleting again, let's discuss. --valereee (talk) 20:40, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

'Criticism'

The 'Criticism' section seems gratuitously overlong and detailed. – Sca (talk) 14:47, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

The paragraph about Guatemala is definitely giving undue weight to a specific incident from a long career, especially in a fairly brief article. The paragraph about her objectivity shouldn't present the counter-arguments to her positions, just state that she had them. –Jason A. Quest (talk) 15:33, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Should this section be deleted, or just modified to clean it up? Sometimes the end is only the beginning... (talk) 15:56, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

I've trimmed back that section and merged it into the Career section. —Tourchiest ^talk_edits 19:47, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

I think that was the right call. It was a huge deal back in the day and almost ended her career. 2605:A000:1304:4761:A0:A89E:813D:8F3D (talk) 15:43, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

• Cokie Roberts-a.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 04:51, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Electoral College

Cokie Roberts has stated publicly that she supports the Electoral College system for electing presidents and thus opposes electing presidents by popular vote. Can somebody find a reference for this and include it in the article? ---Dagme (talk) 15:04, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Date diagnosed with breast cancer.

In Internet version, the date DIAGNOSED with breast cancer is AFTER her date of DEATH. Date of diagnoses needs to be changed. 4Henrietta (talk) 17:07, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Interview citation

The article states: "During a subsequent interview, Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors."

Anyone have a link/citation for this interview? Wikinetman (talk) 13:39, 3 January 2023 (UTC)