Steve Roberts has covered some of the major events of his time, from the antiwar movement and student revolts of the 60s and 70s to President Reagans historic trip to Moscow in 1987, and eight presidential election campaigns. After graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 1964, he began a 25-year career at the New York Times, including assignments as bureau chief in Los Angeles and Athens, and as Congressional and White House correspondent. He was a senior writer at for seven years where he is now a contributing editor. Roberts and his wife, TV journalist Cokie Roberts, write a syndicated newspaper column anchored in the New York Daily News and are contributing writers for USA Weekend, a Sunday magazine that appears in 500 newspapers nationwide. In February 2000 they published , a best-selling account of their 33-year marriage and other marriages in American history. Roberts appears regularly on CNNs Late Edition, PBS , and the ABC radio network. He also hosts his own TV show, The Roberts Report, carried worldwide by the Voice of America. As a teacher, he lectures widely on American politics and the role of the news media. Since 1997 he has been the Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he has taught for the last nine years. [  ]

Steven V. Roberts

journalist

San Francisco Workshop
March 20, 2000

I really am delighted to be with you tonight. As Dave [Iverson] mentioned, one of my qualifications for talking to you is being married to a woman some of you have heard of [Cokie Roberts]. Can you imagine being married to a woman who spends every Sunday morning with Sam Donaldson? I think this is terrific I think I cant help but look good by comparison.

     This is, Im sorry to say, the eighth presidential campaign Ive covered. But one of the things that has happened, being married to Cokie, is that of course I have gotten to know Sam very well and one of you is going to ask a question that seems to be of burning concern in the American public and that is Sam Donaldsons hair. Sam Donaldsons hair is actually one of the great miracles of modern American science. Its a totally artificial substance which is turning gray. I dont know quite how thats happening.

     One of the things that people often ask me is, What is it like being married to a woman who makes more money than you do? I recommend it to you guys. I keep telling Cokie that Im going to retire and shes going to support me in the manner to which I have become accustomed. She hates it when I say that, but I know shes in Denver tonight.

Some of you may also know that Cokies not the only famous woman Im related to. Cokies mom, Lindy Boggs, former member of Congress is now the American ambassador to the Vatican. She turned 84 last week. My mother-in-law has perhaps the most difficult job in the entire American diplomatic core. She has to represent Bill Clinton to the Pope. Think about that.

     Cokies folks were both members of Congress and many families in Washington who were Congressional families have known each other a long time. They would go to the same schools and the same churches. One of the families that she know very well growing up were the Gores. At my mother-in-laws swearing-in, the Vice President presided over the swearing-in and told this very lovely story which Im about to tell you, but he doesnt tell the second half of the story which I also will tell you and you will understand why the Vice President does not like the second half of the story. The first half is really rather sweet. The Vice President points out that when he was four years old, the Boggs family and the Gore family traveled together on some Congressional junket or something and Al got kind of cranky, as four-year-olds will. My mother-in-law picked him up and was bouncing him around. Someone took a photograph of this event and, as the Vice President pointed out, This is one of my favorite photographs of my childhood and here we are all these years later. He was the Vice President and hes swearing in my mother-in-law as the American ambassador to the Vatican and isnt this a nice story about how Washington works and the way cycles and circles of life develop?

     It is a sweet story, but heres the second half. Many years after their first trip abroad, my mother-in-law was a member of Congress, she was about 75 years old, Al was a Senator and they are traveling abroad again together to go to Antarctica and everywhere they stopped on this rather lengthy and arduous journey to Antarctica, Al the Senator from Tennessee is insisting that he needs time to jog: Gotta stay fit, gotta jog. He drove everybody nuts, but hes a Senator so they put time on the schedule so he could jog. They get to the South Pole. Ive never been there but it is explained to me that you have to climb a rather arduous set of metal stairs to get to the actual observation deck under the geodesic dome, where the pole actually is. So theres my mother-in-law, shes 75 years old, shes putting one step in front of another, shes trudging up the steps and she hears behind her this gagging and this gasping and theres Gore hanging onto the railing and he cant get up the steps. So my mother-in-law turns to him and says, Now, Al, the first time you and I traveled abroad together you were four years old and I had to carry you. Am I going to have to do that again? You can see why the Vice President doesnt like that story.

As I mentioned, this is the eighth presidential campaign Ive covered and I have some thoughts, some ideas that would perhaps be helpful to you some things Ive learned. I have four rules that I formulated over the years that I think make some sense in terms of campaign coverage. The first rule I think of is the bottom up rule. This has nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky. This is an idea that Ive come to believe in strongly over the years, that all too often we cover campaigns from the top down, not from the bottom up. You can see it in the recent Presidential primaries. Endless stories about John McCain and the bus: the story was told over and over and over again from the point of view of the candidates and their speeches and their ads and not nearly enough, in my view, from the bottom up that is from the point of view of the voters.

     One of the things that I think constantly is given short shrift in any campaign coverage (and I dont mean just at the presidential level; it could be the mayors race or a local congressional race) is trying to tell the story of any given election from the bottom up, from the point of view of voters. I understand why we dont do this very often, because its a lot harder. Its a lot easier to go cover the speech of the candidate. Its a lot easier to get on the bus. Traveling on the campaign bus is a little bit like being in kindergarten. Within half an hour people are saying, When are we going to get there? When are we going to go to the bathroom? When are we going to eat? Its an infantilizing experience, in my view, traveling on a campaign bus. But it is easy, because everything is there for you. The storys right in front of you.

     Covering voters is hard, you actually have to talk to real people. In fact Cokie and I have joked about this over the years, that because its so hard, when we go out and do voter stories, we make deals with ourselves. Six voters and you can have a Coke, twelve voters and you can have lunch. It is hard to walk up to people and say, Im a reporter and I want to talk to you. But there are a couple of rules that Ive developed over the years that I think work. If you approach voters in their homes, youre almost always interrupting something and most people will slam the door in your face or wont come to the door. They dont like their privacy invaded. If you approach people in the street, theyre usually rushing somewhere and that doesnt work either.

After many, many years of doing hundreds of these stories, Ive decided that some best places to approach voters are in semi-public places where people are already out. Theyre not in their own homes, but theyre not in the street, either. They are in a semi-public place where you coming up to them is not really very threatening and where they have put time aside already. And what does that mean? Two of the best places, I think, are the food courts of malls and local cafés. Because if someone is having lunch in a café, they are not running into a store for a bottle of milk and you are not banging on their kitchen door, but theyve already set time aside, they are sitting there.

     Over the years Ive decided that those are by far the two best places. In fact, one of the things that Ive done over many years of campaigning is pick out favorite places and go back to them. I just did this in Wilton, New Hampshire a couple of months ago during the New Hampshire primary. There was a diner that I had used incessantly in 1996. I love this place they remembered me I went back (I love the Polish sausage and the omelets as well as everything else). And I just would spend the whole day doing nothing but talking to every one of the patrons who came in.

When you talk to voters you can often skew the answers by the questions you ask. So I think one of the first questions you gotta ask is a very neutral one and my favorite is, Whats bugging you? Just simply, Whats bugging you? Not are you interested in health care? Not do you care about the environment? Whats bugging you?

     Ive found over the years that it is such a good way to get people started talking, but its also a way to find out what really is on peoples minds. In the 1994 campaign I spent two days in a café in Youngstown, Ohio and I just asked this question incessantly. I was working for at the time, and wound up writing a big cover story about why the American middle class felt so shafted by their lives. And I came to the conclusion that the family value, the thing that bothered most American families more than anything else could be summed up in one word and that word was time. Its what nobody had enough of. I didnt walk into that café knowing that thats what was on peoples minds. I just sat and asked that question over and over and over again Whats bugging you? and this is what kept coming back. Finally it got through to me that maybe there was a story here. A reporter for Forbes Media Critic magazine, which is no longer in existence, called me after the cover came out and said, Gosh, that was so interesting. How did you find out that that was what was on peoples minds? I said, I asked. What a concept.

     So I think that is my first rule of covering campaigns: go out and ask people whats on their minds. Ask them in a situation where they have time to talk to you, and in a situation where you can find out enough about their lives so that its not just a collection of quotes, its attitudes that grow out of the mini-biographies. In twenty minutes you can learn a whole lot about someones life, sitting in a café with them. Not in five minutes, but in twenty minutes you can. There was a woman in that café in Youngstown who said to me, You know, it just drove me crazy that I couldnt be home for my kids and I had to work because we couldnt afford for me not to work. So I took a shift at the local pharmaceutical factory. And this woman worked from ten oclock at night to six oclock in the morning and she came home at 6 oclock and got her kids breakfast, caught some sleep, and then went back to work. She said, I did that for three years until my health broke and I had to quit it. Ive never forgotten that woman. Hopefully my readers havent forgotten that woman, either. But you cant get that story in a hit-or-miss way. Youve got to sit with that woman for half an hour in that café and get the details of her life.

     The second thing is: get off the bus. I think that covering campaigns from the point of view of campaign buses is absolutely the single worst possible way to do it, because the campaigns want you there. They want you on the bus. They want you controlled. They want you limited. They dont want you developing other lines of inquiry. They want you on the bus. Youre captives on the bus. Terrible place to cover a campaign from, even if its just a local campaign. Get off the bus.

     I was in South Carolina with George Bush earlier this year and I went to a rally. The traveling national press corps came in with Bush, heard him speak, and left. There was a room full of three, four hundred people, each one with something interesting to say about the Bush campaign. No one who traveled on the bus with George Bush got a chance to ask any of them anything. So I went around to the tables and I said, Why do you like George Bush? (These were all people at a Bush rally). I was stunned at the first answer. You know what the first answer was? I like his mama. Second answer was, I like his daddy. Third answer was, Hes kind of okay. It taught me something about the nature of the Bush campaign that continued to be true all through the South Carolina primary. But nobody who was traveling on the bus with George Bush was able to do those kinds of interviews two hours before he got there and two hours after he left. So I think its something very important to do: get off the bus.

I remember the day I knew that Ronald Reagan was going to be president. I was covering Ronald Reagan in 1980 and he stopped in a place called Serb Hall in South Milwaukee. There wasnt a single person in that crowd that had been raised a Republican, I think. There wasnt anybody with a last name with less than three syllables, either, probably. That included me because Roberts is kind of a phony name. My real family name was Rogowski so I was at home in Serb Hall (my father changed it when I was two). And it was a great moment because not only could you get a sense of Reagans appeal to these people, but their life stories are what really made that a good story. You could not get those stories from those people in that hall by traveling the bus with Ronald Reagan. You had to get there before Ronald Reagan arrived and you had to stay after Ronald Reagan left. So thats a second adage that Ive always tried to follow.

     The third adage Ive always tried to follow is watch the campaign, at least in part, on TV. Not only is the bus the worst possible place to watch a campaign from, but you gotta remember that most of the voters in your towns, your communities are not going to be on the bus, they are not going to be at those rallies. The information that they are going to get about the campaign is from television. Many of your news organizations have learned this, its not a new idea. But I think that its almost necessary to assign a reporter to spend most of her or his time watching the campaign on television. I dont just mean in terms of doing ad-watch boxes. I mean how the coverage comes across, how the candidates are communicating with the voters, because thats how nine-tenths of the voters in your community or anywhere else are seeing the campaign. We, as reporters, have to see the campaign through the eyes of the people who are actually going to vote. We shouldnt see it through the eyes of the privileged observer, which is what we are, but we have to put ourselves in the position to see it through the eyes of the people who are actually casting the votes.

I know that one of the projects that is being done in connection with Best Practices is a program on ad watch boxes. Im a big fan of ad watches. I think they are not done enough in broadcasting. Newspapers tend to do a reasonably good job; broadcasting should do a lot more of it. We dont get aggressive enough in ad watch boxes, either, in terms of calling people to account. Because I think the power of these campaigns to manipulate the images and the messages that they are sending through paid advertising is so enormous that we have an enormous responsibility to hold them to account. I think that some papers and some TV stations do a reasonably good job, but Id like to see more of it.

     A very good example of this just happened recently with the ads that George Bush used against John McCain accusing him of being against breast cancer research. At one point the Washington Post got so outraged over these ads that they actually wrote an editorial condemning the ads. Now that was maybe going a little far, but I thought it was useful because there was no lie in the ad. Its not as if an ad watch box could say, Something that was said there is wrong, because McCain had cast one vote that could be distorted or could be depicted as being against breast cancer. It just didnt happen to mention the fifteen other votes that he had cast on the other side of the issue. Well, thats our responsibility to point that out, and not just in a little box, but point it out in a more aggressive way. Not because we care, not because we favor one candidate over another, but because our readers and our listeners deserve that kind of effort from us because thats the only place they are going to get it. Theyre not going to get it anywhere else unless they get it from us.

And the final thing and this is kind of a controversial point in some ways, but I believe very strongly in it is that the past is prologue. What I mean by that is I believe very strongly that we not only have a right to write about the private lives of candidates, we have an obligation to write about the private lives of candidates. Everybody in this room knows that the general public does not agree with that sentiment. We all know the figures and we all know the statistics of polls which show that they dont want us covering the private lives of politicians or they think we do it badly and at times we do do it badly. At times we do go too far, at times we dont recognize legitimate zones of privacy.

     One of the problems that our readers and our listeners have in evaluating our performance on this question is they dont know what we dont print or broadcast. They never know, so they dont understand what its like to sit in our newsrooms and seriously debate these questions. They dont know what its like and I bet everybody in this room has been in those discussions and there have been times, where youve decided in your own newsrooms, This is a story that were not going to print. But the general public just thinks we dont give a damn, were going to go out and print anything, were going to broadcast anything as long as itll boost our ratings but everybody in this room knows that thats not true. That we take our responsibility seriously to be fair to the people that we cover, but part of our trouble in defending ourselves and explaining ourselves is by definition we cant go out and tell those people about all those stories we decided not to run out of fairness because thats the whole point.

In fact, I once ran into a terrible problem. I was at U.S. News and we had a story where we found out (this was during the 1980 campaign) that one of the candidates for president had fathered an illegitimate child in his youth. There was no doubt that the story was true because we found out about it in a somewhat unfair way which is part of the reason we didnt run the story. The child in question was in a support group for adopted children and one of our reporters was in the same support group and thats how he found out about the story. Theres no doubt that the story was true, no doubt it would have been a sensational story. Obviously we didnt print it because none of you know about it. But it was a very difficult decision because this happened to be a candidate who was big on family values among other things. But in the end we didnt print it for, I think, good reasons; because it would have violated the privacy of this young woman who didnt ask to be a national figure, it had happened a long time before, it wasnt a contemporary issue and, interestingly enough, this man had actually acted quite responsibly. He had acknowledged this child and paid for her education. So you couldnt justify it on the grounds that he was being a scoundrel because he wasnt. He was actually being a pretty good father.

     But one time I was on a panel with somebody who was just berating me by saying, Well, you guys in the press, you never give a damn, you never care about any of this stuff, you just slash and burn. This guy got me so pissed off that I told the story, not realizing there were C-SPAN cameras there. Now, I never used the mans name and I will not tonight and I never have. But I did tell this story, saying, Let me tell you a story about how we really take these question seriously. Of course, the minute the C-SPAN show aired, AP was on the phone with me saying, Who was it? Fortunately they eventually lost interest and the story passed over. But this is the dilemma we often find ourselves in, defending ourselves from our critics who dont know what we dont print.

I think that its harder and harder for those of us in the mainstream press to make judgments that we can control or keep to. Im hardly a Web-basher, I think the Web is a great thing, but one of the things that all of us have to contend with is this: we can sit in our newsrooms and try to be fair, try to make decisions about the private lives of the people we cover and not necessarily be able to hold to our own decisions because there are so many other outlets that dont necessarily have the values we believe in and will put these stories out without checking, without caring.

     Remember the story of Henry Hyde? Perfect example. Henry Hyde, as most of you remember, clearly had had an affair in his youth (he called it a youthful indiscretion, if you do the math he was forty). The husband of the woman that he had had the affair with had never forgiven him and he went to fifty different news organizations trying to peddle the story of Henry Hydes youthful affair with his wife. Fifty news organizations turned him down. Why? Because fifty news organizations decided this was not fair to Henry Hyde. This story did not tell you very much about who Henry Hyde was today or how he was chairing the impeachment hearings. The 51st news organization they went to, Salon magazine, did print the story. The Washington bureau chief of Salon magazine quit to protest the decision of his own editors and said, They are doing this to create a buzz, they are doing this to create attention for themselves, they are doing this to boost their visibility, and Im not having any part of it. And he left.

     But then what happened after the story got out? Many of those fifty news organizations, which just a week or two before had said, This is not up to our standard, this is not fair to Henry Hyde, then went and wrote stories, saying, Well, its out there now.

This is not an easy thing and its harder and harder for those of us who believe in the old-fashioned virtues, who believe in fairness, who believe in trying to make these judgments carefully. Its harder and harder for us to keep to our own values. I think we should keep to our own values, but I also think we should not be intimidated by our critics who say that the private lives of the people we cover should be off limits and heres why I believe this so strongly.

     Whether people are voting for city council or governor or president, when they come out of a voting booth, you ask them, Why did you vote for so and so? How many times have you ever heard someone say, Well, I liked his education plan. Thats not what they say, what they say is, I liked somebody, I trusted somebody. I have confidence in somebody. I believe that person understands people like me.

     In the end, I think this is the way people vote more than anything else, certainly more than any specific issue. How do we as professional journalists help our voters in our town, in our state, in our country, how do we help them know the kinds of people they are voting for if we dont tell them how these people have acted in the past? If all we tell them is their positions on education, if all they know are those 30-second ads that they see on television, if all the information they get is from those photo ops and those carefully crafted focus group speeches they dont have enough information to make that most basic of all judgments which is: how are these people going to act in the future?

     And it seems to me that as journalists we have a profound obligation to help people understand how these people are going to act in the future by telling them how they have acted in the past. And if we dont do that, were not doing our job. So I dont think we should be intimidated. I think we should continue to be fair. There is a zone of privacy, but at the same time there is a profound obligation.

Let me give you the example that I think illustrates my point as well as any that I know: Gary Hart, 1988. Gary Hart, after being dogged by all these rumors of infidelity, said to the national press corps, Follow me. Ill prove to you that nothings going on. Well, the Miami Herald took him seriously. They watched him, they posted people outside of his townhouse on Capitol Hill and of course within days they found out the guy was still fooling around. They had pictures of him with Donna Rice on the Monkey Business.

     Am I glad that I didnt get the assignment to stand outside of Gary Harts townhouse? Yeah, Im really glad I didnt get that assignment. Do I think this was the high point of American journalism? No, I do not think so. But leaving aside the moral question, any voter, any reporter can decide for herself or himself, Am I going to vote for someone who sleeps with someone theyre not married to? Lets leave that to the side. Did we learn, did the voters learn, in the course of this incident, something about Gary Harts arrogance? Did they learn something about his recklessness? Did they learn something about his lack of discipline? And are those qualities voters need to know about someone who seeks the public trust? My answer is a total, unequivocal yes! Voters need to know that.

     I think the same held true with President Clinton and the Monica story. We learned a lot of very disturbing things about the president, not from the point of view of morality, but the lack of discipline and the recklessness that I think were profoundly important. And I think Gary Hart had been elected president, if the Miami Herald had not followed him, if these stories had not come out, and then he did things as president which were reckless and arrogant and lacked in discipline, wouldnt have the voters been entitled to say to us as journalists, Where the hell were you? Why didnt you tell us about this guy so we couldve made a more informed decision?

So thats my final adage, that the past is prologue and that we have an obligation to the people we cover and the people who read us and listen to us to let them know who these people really are while maintaining a sense of fairness or retaining a zone of privacy, but not allowing the people we cover in any election, from the lowest to the highest, to manipulate the images and the messages that the voters see and hear to the point where they dont know the real person behind the façade.

     Now, if I can sum up our job as political reporters in one sentence its this: Dear Viewer, Dear Reader, you know those 30-second spots you just saw, all of those photo ops, all of those speeches, all of those focus groups? They are not the whole story. Thats our job in one sentence, to provide the rest of the story.

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