Cokie Roberts: Award-winning US journalist and political commentator

She was a fixture in American TV news for decades and made efforts to improve women’s standing in her profession

Roberts was the author of bestselling books, including several that focused on powerful women in American history (Marvin Joseph/Washington Post)

Cokie Roberts was a journalist and political commentator who became one of the most prominent Washington broadcasters of her era and championed young women in media during a long career at NPR and ABC News.

Roberts, who has died aged 75 after suffering from breast cancer, earned three Emmy awards, having covered Capitol Hill since the Carter administration. Former president Barack Obama called her “a constant over 40 years of a shifting media landscape and changing world”.

Roberts entered journalism in an era when the profession was dominated by men, especially in the political ranks. Her husband, Steven V Roberts, was a New York Times correspondent in Greece, where Roberts began filing radio dispatches for CBS News as she watched the country’s military junta collapse in 1974.

She later worked at NPR and PBS before joining ABC News in 1988, where she served as a political correspondent for World News Tonight, filled in for Ted Koppel on Nightline and appeared as a panellist on the Sunday political programme This Week. She co-anchored the show from 1996 to 2002, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

As her influence grew at ABC – and at NPR, where she continued working as a political commentator until her death – Roberts sought to fill the journalistic ranks with women. “Duck and file,” she advised aspiring female reporters: “Just do your work and get it on the air.”

Roberts was the author of bestselling books, including several that focused on powerful women in American history, and wrote a syndicated political column with her husband, notably urging “the rational wing” of the Republican Party to stop the 2016 presidential nomination of Donald Trump.

For millions of viewers and listeners, she was an indispensable guide to official Washington, able to explain knockout legislative fights and White House intrigue in snappy segments on Letterman or Jay Leno’s late-night talk shows. She said she avoided stories in which there might be a conflict of interest, and saw little conflict in working for two media organisations at once, even if they were competitors.

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born in New Orleans in 1943, and said her brother nicknamed her Cokie because he couldn’t pronounce Corinne. Her father, Thomas Hale Boggs Sr, served in congress for nearly three decades until his plane disappeared in Alaska en route to a campaign stop on behalf of a fellow Democrat. Roberts and her family were briefed daily on a search mission that never found the body. Her mother, the former Lindy Claiborne, took Hale Boggs’ seat in a special election and was later appointed by President Bill Clinton as US ambassador to the Vatican.

Roberts graduated from Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic girls’ school in Bethesda, Maryland, and received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wellesley College in 1964. Her early journalism jobs included hosting a public affairs programme at Washington television station WRC-TV and producing stints in New York and Los Angeles.

She covered Capitol Hill for NPR beginning in 1978, when the media organisation was still an upstart and, by some accounts, could only afford to hire inexperienced staffers, network castaways and women (who were paid less than men). Within NPR’s newsroom, Roberts and female broadcasters including Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer became known as the organisation’s “founding mothers”.

“We had people tell us all along the way that we weren’t qualified to deliver the news, that we weren’t authoritative enough,” she said in 1992. “We would have meetings with men in high positions and find their hands on our knees. We would have invitations from those people to hotel rooms. All kinds of propositions. Insults they didn’t consider insults.”

Roberts served as a congressional correspondent for more than a decade at NPR, which eventually installed a special line into her home so that should call in to “Morning Edition” early in the day, in pyjamas if necessary. At least one such broadcast was reportedly interrupted by the howling of her basset hound.

She married Roberts in a 1966 ceremony attended by President Lyndon B Johnson. They lived in Bethesda for many years and chronicled their marriage in a 2000 book, From This Day Forward, which also explored the history of marriage in America.

Roberts remained a presence in the Capitol well after her cancer diagnosis, traipsing down halls that she had shuffled through as a child and run through as a reporter. “This is a friendly place,” she once said. “It’s beautiful, it’s historic, and if it is true that I have a bias, it’s a bias in favour of the institution.”

She is survived by her husband and two children.

Cokie Roberts, journalist and political commentator, born 27 December 1943, died 17 September 2019

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