When ABC News and National Public Radio veteran Cokie Roberts moderated Laura Bush’s appearance at George Washington University to promote Bush’s autobiography, “Spoken From The Heart,” the crowd in Lisner Auditorium didn’t see the unusual happenings backstage: The former first lady’s staff was sifting through the audience question cards, keeping some and discarding others, before handing an approved pile of questions to the award-winning journalist.
Christine Cimino, public affairs director at the Smithsonian Associates, which hosted the event Thursday, told Yeas & Nays that narrowing down audience questions is “pretty standard for this type of thing.” But vetted by the interviewee’s staff?
After Roberts chatted with Bush onstage, a Bush staffer handed Roberts a pile of cards, and she read the preselected questions. The GW Hatchet, the student newspaper, quoted Roberts as calling herself “an enormous Laura Bush fan.”
Roberts didn’t return a call to her home from Yeas & Nays. ABC News spokeswoman Emily Lenzner said Roberts didn’t respond to our voice mail message because she was preparing to leave for India for a Save the Children event.
As for the question cards, “She didn’t know who sorted through them,” Lenzner told Yeas & Nays. “It didn’t make any difference to her because she was still able to pick and choose what she was going to ask,” she said.
According to ABC, Roberts did not accept pay for the event and was not told that anything was off-limits.
Our tipster said Roberts was not happy about the fact that the questions were preselected, but Lenzner says it isn’t so.
“I think from her perspective she got to ask all of the questions that she wanted to ask and she was satisfied,” Lenzner said.
