NPR has been forced to address a problem with Cokie Roberts and her role on the radio network. Roberts wrote a column with her husband last month calling on the GOP to do everything it can to stop Donald Trump.
...But there is a deeper reason, beyond partisanship, to stop Trump: He is one of the least qualified candidates ever to make a serious run for the presidency. If he is nominated by a major party — let alone elected — the reputation of the United States would suffer a devastating blow around the world.
He wouldn’t “make America great again.” He would make America weak again. He wouldn’t increase our power and influence; he would degrade it. That’s why the national interest requires a maximum effort to thwart Trump now. And while the task will be difficult, it isn’t impossible.
NPR has a policy against any of its journalists taking a public stand on political affairs. Cokie Roberts has been a voice on NPR for decades now, but she also appears on other venues. NPR apparently felt it had to clarify her role.
Roberts, often described as a "founding mother" of NPR, left her position as a full-time staffer in 1992 for ABC News. She continued to appear regularly on NPR as a news analyst for almost two decades on a contract basis. After the change in title from news analyst to commentator, listeners may have noticed little, if any, difference in her role.
Roberts remains closely identified with NPR and presents commentary most Mondays on Morning Edition.
Roberts' column was published Feb. 26, and she did not flag its contents to NPR executives. It came to their attention after Roberts sharply questioned Trump during a March 9 appearance on MSNBC.
Roberts own response to the matter has been straightforward:
In an interview granted Sunday night for this article, Roberts was asked whether she had approached her job any differently with the title "commentator" rather than "analyst." She replied, "The answer has got to be, 'No.'
"Here is my basic approach to life," Roberts continued. "I am a totally unpartisan human being. I don't care which party has the right ideas — or which party has the wrong ideas. I am very, very, very interested in civility. I am interested in government working.”
emphasis added
If those words are to be taken at face value, the problem Roberts has with Trump is that he’s… uncivil. Not right, not wrong — just uncivil. And that really captures why so much of the media has trouble understanding Trump’s appeal. He’s not taking positions that are all that different from mainstream Republicans; he’s just being blatantly open about them. That’s what really upsets the media, because they’ve been oblivious to the poison coming from the right for years as long as they could keep up their pretensions.
There’s this problem in telling the difference between an analyst and a commentator; both are offering up opinions based on their particular expertise, but where does the line get drawn between sorting through facts/opinions to interpret them versus using them to support a particular position? Roberts is the quintessential villager — she’s literally grown up inside the Beltway. As Digby wrote back in 2009,
...It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.
It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.) It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about things they all do, creating social rules for others which they themselves ignore.
Digby has gone so far as to coin a term for a common village practice after Roberts, Cokie’s Law.
I can't help but be reminded of something I like to call Cokie's Law, after Steve Roberts wife. It comes from the Village maxim, "It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's out there," which was based upon this quote from Cokie Roberts back in 1999:
"At this point," said Roberts, "it doesn't much matter whether she said it or not because it's become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about."
Digby shows how the law is still in effect as of 2015, with regard to the Clinton email ‘scandal’:
...There are excellent reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. She has a long history of DLC centrism, mixed with a record of hawkishness both as a Senator and as Secretary of State. If people oppose her on the merits I cannot argue with them. But this scandal mongering has always been a facile and tawdry way for Villagers to express their belief in their own sense of moral superiority by complaining about the Clintons' characters. (In his case being "undisciplined" and in her case being a soulless "control freak.") It's always about some Shakespearean flaw rather than the policies, mostly because this is what the Village press corps really wants to talk about. Politics are boring. And I might actually believe some of it except for the fact that aside from a few furtive blowjobs in a hallway, none of the so-called evidence they presented to prove it ever panned out.
NPR’s Cokie problem is just the tip of the iceberg — it’s all through the media.