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 Iraq Study Group presents its report on recommendations for Iraq policy today. Madeleine Brand talks to White House Correspondent Don Gonyea about President Bush's reaction to the report.
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President Bush defends his handling of security and foreign policy, from the U.S. response to North Korea's recent nuclear bomb test to the war in Iraq. Despite polls that show the Republicans struggling in the midterm elections, the president said his party will hold Congress.
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Over the weekend, several newspapers published portions of the National Intelligence Estimate that suggested the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism in the Muslim world. President Bush responded by declassifying parts of the once-secret document, saying that when taken in context, it supports U.S. policy in Iraq.
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President Bush orders the public release of a summary of a classified report by U.S. intelligence agencies on America's vulnerability to terrorist attack -- and how the war in Iraq affects the effort to fight terrorism. Descriptions of the National Intelligence Estimate surfaced in newspapers over the weekend. -
Four Republican senators are at odds with the White House over proposed legislation on terrorism suspects. The White House does not like a version of the bill passed by the GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee. The Bush administration's goal of signing a measure into law before mid-term elections now seems in doubt.
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President Bush's proposed rules for trying terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay ran into fresh resistance today from his former secretary of state, retired Gen. Colin Powell. Powell says the president's plan would backfire on American troops abroad, and that the world was beginning to question the moral basis for the U.S. war on terrorism. -
President Bush acknowledges the existence of secret CIA prisons around the world and says 14 high-value terrorism suspects have been transferred from the system to Guantanamo Bay for trials.
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The President speaks to the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, the first of five scheduled policy speeches on the struggle against terrorism. The White House said it is the first in a series of speeches about the war on terrorism that will lead up to the president's address to the United Nations next month.
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President Bush defends the U.S. mission in Iraq, saying that calls for American troops to leave the country are premature. The president warned that the situation would only worsen without U.S. troops -- and that "chaos in Iraq would be very unsettling in the region."
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A fresh barrage of rockets slams into the northern Israeli city of Haifa, despite days of fierce fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops along the Lebanon-Israel border. Much of the current fighting is centered in and around a major Hezbollah stronghold in southern Lebanon.
