Don Gonyea
You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.
Gonyea has been covering politics full-time for NPR since the 2000 presidential campaign. That's the year he chronicled a controversial election and the ensuing legal recount battle in Florida that awarded the White House to George W. Bush. Gonyea was named NPR White House Correspondent that year and subsequently covered the entirety of the Bush presidency, from 2001-2008. He was at the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, providing live reports following the evacuation of the building.
As White House correspondent, Gonyea covered the Bush administration's prosecution of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 2004 campaign, he traveled with both Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry. He has served as co-anchor of NPR's election night coverage, and in 2008 Gonyea was the lead reporter covering Barack Obama's presidential campaign for NPR, from the Iowa caucuses to victory night in Chicago.
Gonyea has filed stories from around the globe, including Moscow, Beijing, London, Islamabad, Doha, Budapest, Seoul, San Salvador, and Hanoi. He attended President Bush's first-ever meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Slovenia in 2001, as well as subsequent — and at times testy — meetings between the two leaders in St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Bratislava. He also covered Obama's first trip overseas as president. During the 2016 election, he traveled extensively with both GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His coverage of union members and white working class voters in the Midwest also gave early insight into how candidate Trump would tap into economic anxiety to win the presidency.
In 1986, Gonyea got his start at NPR reporting from Michigan on labor unions and the automobile industry. His first public radio job was at station WDET in Detroit. He has spent countless hours on picket lines and in union halls covering strikes at the major US auto companies, along with other labor disputes. Gonyea also reported on the development of alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles, Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted-suicide crusade, and the 1999 closing of Detroit's classic Tiger Stadium.
He serves as a fill-in host on NPR news magazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Weekend All Things Considered.
Over the years, Gonyea has contributed to PBS's NewsHour, the BBC, CBC, AP Radio, and the Columbia Journalism Review. He periodically teaches college journalism courses.
Gonyea has won numerous national and state awards for his reporting. He was part of the team that earned NPR a 2000 George Foster Peabody Award for the All Things Considered series "Lost & Found Sound."
A native of Monroe, Michigan, Gonyea is an honors graduate of Michigan State University.
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The annual G-8 Summit of the world's leading industrial powers convenes Wednesday in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made climate change her top priority, but President Bush is resisting her proposals.
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Rising tensions between the United States and Russia are threatening to dominate President Bush's six-day trip to Europe. His visit to Prague includes talks on the controversial American plan to extend a U.S. missile defense system into Eastern Europe.
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President Bush says that he is glad the House has agreed to send him a funding bill for Iraq that does not set a timetable for troop withdrawal. The bill funds the war through September, when members of Congress are hoping to hear reports of political and military progress.
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President Bush's speech to the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday addresses intelligence documents on al-Qaida. The White House says the documents show that Osama Bin Laden sought a greater al-Qaida presence in Iraq.
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As a debate over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys unfolds, White House officials may be subpoenaed by Congress, and more e-mail related to the case is likely to be made public.
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A spokesperson said Tuesday that President Bush respected the jury's guilty verdict in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and that he was saddened for Libby and his family.
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White House spokesman Tony Snow downplays news of an attack on a U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, where Vice President Dick Cheney had just spent the night. Estimates of the death toll have gone as high as 23; the Taliban calls the attack an attempted assassination.
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Speaking at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., former Massachusetts Gov. Republican Mitt Romney announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. He introduced himself as a political outsider with the managerial skills necessary to fix a flawed government.
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Small portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on the situation in Iraq were released this week. It says political extremism is on the rise, along with insurgent violence — and sees more chaos ahead.
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President Bush says he is ready to increase the size of the U.S. military at a White House news conference where he discussed the situation in Iraq. The president said the year has been "a difficult year for our troops and the Iraqi people."