Accident, Adventure, and Ethics: Tod Robberson's Early Path to Journalism

The first in a four-part interview series with just one of The Cadet's advisors, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tod Robberson, focusing on his early influences and student journalism experience. Cody Bartmann: I know that you've been advising us for quite some time, even since before Richie and I, or even since before I joined the paper, at least. Mr. Robberson: Yeah, it's been an adventure. Richie O'Connell III: We're very grateful for all your time—and of course, your efforts on our behalf as well. I'm probably just repeating what Cody said, but we do really appreciate it. It's helped us a lot as an organization and as a paper. I'm sure it's also helped Colonel Morris, the Cadet Foundation, and all the alumni who support it. Mr. Robberson: Great. My interest in all of this is to ensure that you get the best experience possible in the world of journalism. You've got a particularly difficult role to play because you're serving as cadets at the same time that you're trying to work as journalists and it's just a particularly challenging environment and I wish you a lot of luck but I hope I can help you any way I can. Cody Bartmann and Richie O'Connell: Thank you, sir. Richie O'Connell: What inspired you to become a journalist, and was there any defining moment that made you decide this is what I want to do? Mr. Robberson: I got into journalism by accident. I was in journalism in high school, and I was the sports editor of my yearbook in high school. But I've known since third grade that I was a really good writer. And I remember very specifically Mrs. Bittner in third grade holding up an essay that I wrote describing my house. And she read it out to the entire class and said, "This is an example of really good writing." And so I always, I knew that I knew how to write. The question was how to make a living out of that. And I was going to University of Texas and I was at the end of my sophomore year and I had yet to declare a major and I went in to see a counselor and he said, "Well it sure looks like you've already declared a major." and I said, "No, I haven't." and he said, "Well, okay what do you want to do?" I said, "Well, I'm good at writing. Maybe I should just be an English major," and he said, "Do you know how many well-paying jobs there are in writing in English majors? You know, teaching English?" and I said, "Yeah, I get your point." And he goes, "Why don't you try journalism?" and I said, "I just don't know if that's for me," and he goes, "You're already registered as a journalism major." And I said, "I never did that." And he goes, "It must have been a computer glitch or something, but that's what you've got on your major right now. Give it a try. Just see if you like it." So I enrolled in one class, Journalism 101, an evening class at the University of Texas. And one of our very first assignments was to listen to Gordon Lightfoot singing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So we listened to the song and then he gave us a copy of the lyrics, and then he showed us one example of a story that was written about the event, the Actual Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and he said, "Write a news story based on the song." And so we wrote a story, and that song has stuck in my head ever since then. It's a great song. If you haven't listened to it, it's worth checking out. But anyway, later in the course, we got the assignment to do something involving deep research. And at the University of Texas, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library is on the campus. So I went over to the campus with the mission of trying to find out how this neighborhood in Austin, Texas, got its name, and it's called Clarksville. And so I did the research and found out about a slave for Colonel Littlefield, whose land is now the land that University of Texas is built on, and there's a Littlefield mansion right in the center of the University of Texas. Anyway, he went off to fight in the Civil War, and there was a big pitched battle, and the slaves stayed off to the side while he fought in the war. And when it was all over, the battlefield was covered with bodies, and the slave just assumed Littlefield was dead and went out to the battlefield and was going to pick him up, put him on a horse, and take him home. And he realized he was alive, so he got him to medical care, got him fixed up, and then got him back to Austin. And Littlefield, as a reward, gave him this big block of land in the middle of Austin called Clark, well, which he later named Clarksville. And then I did more research and found out that one of his descendants still lived in Dallas. And I went and interviewed him. I went and interviewed him on his front porch in East Austin and wrote a very lengthy story about his experience as a descendant of a slave, as a person who grew up knowing how Clarksville got its name. His name was Louis Stokes. The journalism professor said, "This is extraordinarily well-written, this is a great story, you need to submit it to the school newspaper." I didn't, but I knew I had it at that point. I transferred to Texas Tech University after that to spend a summer roofing houses with my brother, and then got into the journalism program there. And within eight months, I had won a national award, and so I knew I had it. Cody Bartmann: Before entering journalism, did you imagine that it would take you to so many dangerous and complex environments? Mr. Robberson: I didn't. I've always known I had an adventurous streak in me. I've always enjoyed climbing mountains. I got lost in the mountains when I was in between my junior and senior year of high school, newspaper articles were written about it, it was a very embarrassing moment, but I've tried a lot of different things. I lived in a Sikh ashram for three months. I hitchhiked up and down across America. I just did a lot of crazy stuff, and so I knew I wanted a life of adventure, and I always had this fear of settling into something normal. It wasn't until I was close to my senior year at Texas Tech that the journalism department called me up and told me about an internship that was available in Saudi Arabia. And I applied for it and got it. And he told me at the time, "If you get this international experience, you're going to be set, you're going to have experience that nobody your age will have, and you should take advantage of it, but you just have to have the courage to do it." And that's what I did, which helped me gain the international experience and the introduction I needed. Richie O'Connell III: Thank you, sir. Our next question is, how did your master's degree from Georgetown School of Foreign Service shape your approach to global reporting? Mr. Robberson: The reason I got the master's degree at Georgetown was that I got kidnapped in Beirut, and I lacked enough Arabic to communicate with the guys who were kidnapping me. And it was extremely frustrating because I was convinced they were about to kill me, and I kept trying with very broken Arabic to tell them I'm a friend, I'm a journalist, you know, I just blurted out all these things. It was very frustrating, and I just decided I really needed to learn Arabic. Another inspiring moment was when I was in Beirut, and Thomas Friedman from the New York Times was there too; I knew him. I worked with his wife at a newspaper there, and Tom told me that he spoke Arabic. He was always very careful about when he used it when he was out interviewing militiamen in Beirut because it can get you into trouble, and it really can get you into trouble. And I just realized, you know, so few journalists speak Arabic, and it's a dangerous thing to always rely on translators to tell you what the other side is saying because the translators might have their own political agenda. And if you have the ability to listen kind of and know what the other person is saying before the translator tells you what that other person is saying, you can gauge the trustworthiness of your translator. You can also just get a leg up on everything that's being said. It was a huge advantage. So after I got the master's degree, it was literally like a month and a half after I got the master's degree, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was working part-time at the Washington Post, and the assistant managing editor for foreign news called me up and said, "Look, we need somebody who can go to Iraq right away, and you're the one who's got the experience there." I did have experience covering Iraq. So they sent me, and I was on the front page every day for six weeks until the bombs started dropping and the Washington Post pulled me out. So it came in really handy. I did one very key interview with the Speaker of Parliament of Iraq, who, you know, obviously answered to Saddam Hussein. And I spoke Arabic to him and greeted him, and he said, "You speak Arabic?" And I said, "Yes," all in Arabic. And he dismissed the translator. And I said, "Please, please don't do that. I don't know that my Arabic is that good." And he goes, "No, no, your Arabic is good enough." I said, I asked the translator to stay in the room, but we conducted the interview in Arabic. And the guy was just bowled over by it. He couldn't stop talking about the idea that an American spoke Arabic. And it just made a huge difference in my ability to get an interview that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten. Richie O' Connell III: Going back to student journalism and your time at the University of Texas and Texas Tech, even high school, what lessons from that time still guide you in journalism today? Mr. Robberson: Well, you learn, when you go to journalism school, which I highly recommend, you learn the very basics of the discipline of journalism. And you're going to hear that word a lot from me, discipline. There are certain people who call themselves journalists today who do not practice the discipline of journalism, and you learn the fundamentals of how you conduct an interview without inserting yourself into the interview. You learn how to write, how to abide by the rules of style, of Associated Press style. You learn not to make assumptions just because you have element A, element B, and element C, and think those three are related and lead to element D; that doesn't necessarily mean they do. And so it's a painstaking process of learning from mistakes, not assuming that one thing in the context of another equals the following thing. So you learned it in journalism school, and then you launch into the real world. And without exception, mistakes will happen. Very often, you go into a very small newspaper so that the mistakes that happen don't embarrass you in front of a million people. And once you get enough experience, you know, five years down the line, you can work for a bigger newspaper and eventually wind up at the New York Times and the Washington Post, where they trust that you know what you're doing enough that you're not going to make a huge mistake, that you're disciplined enough in the craft by that point, that you can do the job. So, yeah, I learned it that way, but it was real-life journalism, you know, very much like what you're doing there. I covered the Lubbock County Hospital District, which included the Texas Tech Teaching Hospital, as well as a working hospital that was attached to that. And I got my first national award by covering these meetings that were monthly meetings at the hospital district. They were public meetings, and they had to abide by the Texas Open Records and Open Meetings Act. And I detected very quickly that they were not abiding by that law. And I went back and I investigated how many times they had violated that law, and I came up with, I don't know, 14 different examples of where they had violated the law. And I got the Attorney General of the State of Texas to issue a cease and desist order. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on my behalf to basically stop them from that practice and get a court order ordering them to abide by the law in the future. And so it was a really good experience. I could have done a lot more with that story with better experience. And, you know, had I had some of the modern tools that we have today, it would have been a slam dunk. But yeah, that was a real-life experience that helped me in the future. And more importantly, I would say, it has helped me build a resume that allowed me to, you know, present my experience and expertise to would-be employers and get jobs much faster than I ever would have expected. Within two years of graduating from Texas Tech, I was working at the Washington Post. Cody Bartmann: Having stumbled into journalism by accident, were there any early mentors that shaped your sense of ethics and mission as a reporter, or was it mostly self-taught for you? Mr. Robberson: Well, there were mentors. The same journalism director at Texas Tech who called me up and recommended that I go to Saudi Arabia. He used to spend a lot of his time in our classes talking about when he was an Associated Press reporter, and he told us stories of things that he did that were clearly unethical, but he presented them in class as, "Hey, you know, if you've got the guts to do this, this is what have to do to get ahead." And at the time, I really admired him for doing that and thought that that was actually an acceptable practice. He broke into a, let's see, did he break into a building? He did something unethical, I can't remember what it was, but he was celebrated for it at the time. And I still admire the guy, but I also learned how not to do things that way. Along the way, I got to The Washington Post a year after Janet Cook left The Washington Post. Janet Cook won a Pulitzer Prize for writing a series of stories about an eight-year-old heroin addict whom she had interviewed and profiled on the streets of Washington, DC. It turned out the story was 100% fabricated, and the Washington Post had to give back a Pulitzer Prize, and they had to engage in an investigation of the Washington Post to find out how this happened. They did this enormous multi-page spread in the Washington Post explaining how Janet Cook deceived her editors and made up the story, and how it got published in the paper. That, more than anything else, was kind of my introduction to journalism ethics. And I worked under some of the most famous journalists you can imagine. Bob Woodward, Ben Bradley, they were all there at that time, and so it was a great moment to be a journalist. Next in the series, The Cadet explores Mr. Robberson's time as a war correspondent in some of the most hostile places on earth, from Beirut to South America, kidnapped, shot at, bombed, and more.