[deadpool] Cokie, Cokie, lend me your crypt...
danny burstein
obwnn: PBS, NPR, and... the NBC Blue Network.
I don't recall her ever being a member
of LOSA, but many of her clips made
it to the broadcast.
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Richard de Give
Doug Elrod (dre1@cornell.edu)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/18/opinions/cokie-roberts-ellerbee/index.html
-Doug Elrod (dr...@cornell.edu)
RIP, Ms Roberts (and so it goes)
damo...@gmail.com
Cokie Roberts is gone and I'm angry as hell
Opinion by Linda Ellerbee
Updated 1:42 PM ET, Wed September 18, 2019
(CNN) It is the late '70s. There is a waiting room, a hall
with a wooden bench, actually. Cokie Roberts and I sit on the bench in the
waiting room that isn't.
She is new to NPR. I am new to NBC News. Because we are
newbies, and, well, girls, we are sent to cover stories where news isn't always
new.
Inside the room, a conference committee of US
Representatives and Senators is working out the final bits of a piece of
legislation before it goes to the president to be signed into law. The
legislation is the Hyde Amendment, which will prevent or severely curtail federally
funding for pregnancy terminations.
You know...abortions.
The Hyde Amendment will not prevent women from getting legal abortions. It will merely prevent poor women from getting them.
There are no male reporters in that hall with us. There are no women in the room where law is being made. Cokie and I speak of unfairness, something we live with, work with and protest as best we can. We speak of how we want to change things -- not just laws about reproductive rights, but how we want to remove all restrictions on women.
We believe we can. We believe we will. We are still new in journalism.
But the thing is, Cokie did. Cokie looked at her world. Saw it. Researched it. Reported it. Analyzed it. And explained it.
One of great things Cokie did was to put the news in plain English, force it to stand up and make sense. She did that better than I.
In the first decade of the 21st century Cokie got breast
cancer, which would claim her life Tuesday. I had breast cancer in the last
decade of the 20th century. We spoke about that too, wondered if the fact the
government spent so little money on breast cancer studies and treatment might
have something to do with the fact that breast cancer was primarily a woman's
disease.
We used what we knew to fight for our lives, and for the lives of other women. We pointed out early and often out that nobody knew much about breast cancer. We protested. Maybe we changed something. Maybe we didn't.
And maybe that was our theme song over the years. We saw women make gains. We saw those gains taken back. One step forward, two steps back. Bow to the left. Bow to the right. Smile, ladies.
This is where I could sing Cokie's praises. This is where I could tell you why she counts. But there are plenty of other people to do that today, and I am too angry.
I'm angry because Cokie is gone. I'm angry because in 2019, I live in an America where women are still being told to go back out into the hall. Go sit on that bench again. You don't belong in the room where it happens.
I'm angry as hell. Cokie was 75. I'm 75. And all I can think
about today is a protest sign carried by a woman on the day after Donald
Trump's inauguration.
I saw the woman and her sign on the news. Today I want to shout it from the rooftops. For me. For you. For all our sisters.
But mostly, I want to shout this for Cokie Roberts.
"I'M 75 YEARS OLD AND I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M STILL PROTESTING THIS SAME CRAP!"
But Cokie, know this: I'm not going to stop. RIP on that one, my friend.
f :: t :: li :: work/personal 410/458-5018 :: partisan/political 443/420-8184
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