Oct 23, 2026 · 51 min · 11 segments
Who gets an obituary in The New York Times, and who gets overlooked? Obituary writer Sam Roberts joins Sam Hankin on The Avid Reader to discuss Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit and the…
Sam RobertsGuest
Sam HankinHost
What I was going to ask you was, That same woman and some of the older obituaries were almost insulting, were ones that raised the characteristics that were less than less than good that this guy was a louse.
If the people were still alive, I think the obituaries would be subject to libel laws or slander.
But it's amazing what they get away with in describing certain people in obituaries in some of the British papers.
What I find to be the biggest challenge in writing obituaries is when someone commits a misdeed, when they make a mistake, when they do something that they regret, how do you put that in perspective, in context, in an obituary? How do you fit that into the arc of someone's entire life? I ran into that problem not that long ago when I wrote the obituary for Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman, the first black chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House.
Toward the end of his career, he was censured for an ethics violation that was relatively minor.
You couldn't say no ethics violation is minor, but I think in the great scheme of things, this one was.
Where do you put that in the obituary? Do you call him a disgraced former politician? Or do you talk about the fact that he was a powerful congressman who influenced a lot of legislation on taxes and other things, anti-poverty legislation? And the fact that his constituents reelected him after the censure by the House is some indication that...
And that the ethics violation notwithstanding did not really affect his reputation as someone who delivered for the district and was known as a productive congressman.
Yeah, that picking and choosing and deciding whether some type of... peccadillo or misdemeanor or felony of sorts is something that it's like the obituary I read that chat created is objective, but you don't really have to be objective.
But if you aren't, doesn't that make every obituary writer, a biographer and subjective in nature.
Sam, the biggest subjective judgment we make is who gets an obituary in the New York Times.
We have room, as I point out in the book, for three or four obituaries on a daily basis, whether it's online or in the print paper, and those are very subjective decisions.
We start off with a long list of possibilities and we vet them, who we should look into in greater detail, who is recommended, who's a maybe.
And, you know, it's very, very hard to explain to someone that their spouse, a doctor in the country who saved thousands, scores of lives did not get an obituary in the New York Times while some mass murderer did.
What I was going to ask you was, That same woman and some of the older obituaries were almost insulting, were ones that raised the characteristics that were less than less than good that this guy was a louse.
If the people were still alive, I think the obituaries would be subject to libel laws or slander.
But it's amazing what they get away with in describing certain people in obituaries in some of the British papers.
What I find to be the biggest challenge in writing obituaries is when someone commits a misdeed, when they make a mistake, when they do something that they regret, how do you put that in perspective, in context, in an obituary? How do you fit that into the arc of someone's entire life? I ran into that problem not that long ago when I wrote the obituary for Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman, the first black chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House.
Toward the end of his career, he was censured for an ethics violation that was relatively minor.
You couldn't say no ethics violation is minor, but I think in the great scheme of things, this one was.
Where do you put that in the obituary? Do you call him a disgraced former politician? Or do you talk about the fact that he was a powerful congressman who influenced a lot of legislation on taxes and other things, anti-poverty legislation? And the fact that his constituents reelected him after the censure by the House is some indication that...
And that the ethics violation notwithstanding did not really affect his reputation as someone who delivered for the district and was known as a productive congressman.
Yeah, that picking and choosing and deciding whether some type of... peccadillo or misdemeanor or felony of sorts is something that it's like the obituary I read that chat created is objective, but you don't really have to be objective.
But if you aren't, doesn't that make every obituary writer, a biographer and subjective in nature.
Sam, the biggest subjective judgment we make is who gets an obituary in the New York Times.
We have room, as I point out in the book, for three or four obituaries on a daily basis, whether it's online or in the print paper, and those are very subjective decisions.
We start off with a long list of possibilities and we vet them, who we should look into in greater detail, who is recommended, who's a maybe.
And, you know, it's very, very hard to explain to someone that their spouse, a doctor in the country who saved thousands, scores of lives did not get an obituary in the New York Times while some mass murderer did.
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