by Grace Vaughn
Feature reporter Roxanne Roberts has built a strong reputation in Washington, D.C. by prioritizing fairness in her work. It is her secret to building trust not only with her readers but also the high-profile people she coversfor The Washington Post.
“Sometimes people will joke, ‘Well I hope you’re going to write a good article’ and I say, ‘I promise you I will write a fair article’, or occasionally someone would say, ‘Well that was a very generous piece’ and I say, ‘but it’s factual,’ ” Roberts said.
Though, this does not mean it’s always an easy task. Roberts recalls covering speeches delivered on the floors of the House and Senate that were “reprehensible, and yet, she remained focused on the job at hand by having a clear sense of why she was doing the story.
“My general idea was that I was representing this esteemed institution with the objective of trying to do a fair story that my editors had entrusted in me. To ask the questions I think the readers want to know, to do it thoughtfully,” she said. “Your objective should be to illuminate that person, and their ideas and try to show why they matter at any given moment in time.”
She finds ease in sticking to presenting the facts and letting readers make their own decisions about how they feel about someone or something.
“Jeff Bezos is very interested in who is reading, how long they are reading, what they are reading. Part of his genius is collecting data on his customers, and that’s the business side of it. My side of it is always that you have an obligation to be as fair as you can be with every piece of information that is available to you,” she said.
The field has evolved in many ways since Roberts first started at the paper in 1988. Navigating issues of disinformation, propaganda and social media were not topics she dealt with in the newsroom prior to the last decade.
When considering how to cover more divisive issues or people, she leans on a lesson learned during a semester in college.
“I once had a great philosophy professor who said, ‘You’re never going to win a debate unless you have a general agreement on terms because you can’t argue someone out of a belief system,’” she said.
Roberts applies this way of thinking to her reporting by approaching differences of belief with curiosity and the goal of gaining a better sense of understanding.
“If the person is also approaching it with good faith, they should not be upset if you ask questions that challenge any of those beliefs because they should be able to say, ‘well I can understand you may not share this, but this is why I believe this,’” she said. “And that can be true whether you are talking about gun control or abortion or climate change or anything else, if there’s an understanding that you don’t have to share the belief to respect the person’s position.”
Despite changes in the industry, she remains hopeful about journalism’s future.
“If you work on the assumption that people will always try to make sense of their world,” she said, “then journalism is always going to be the first interpreter of that, no matter how it gets distorted or siloed on cable or in any other ways.”
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