Roland Hedley
Encyclopedia
Doonesbury
Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, from the President of the United States to the title character, Michael Doonesbury, who has progressed from a college...
by Garry Trudeau
Garry Trudeau
Garretson Beekman "Garry" Trudeau is an American cartoonist, best known for the Doonesbury comic strip.-Background and education:...
, inspired by the on-air style of the veteran US reporter Sam Donaldson
Sam Donaldson
Samuel Andrew "Sam" Donaldson, Jr. is a reporter and news anchor, serving with ABC News from 1967 to the present, best known as the network's White House Correspondent and as a panelist and later co-anchor of the network's Sunday Program "This Week."-Early life and career:Donaldson was born in El...
.
Hedley is a journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
who covered sports at the Saigon bureau for Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
and, once called back, was commissioned to write an article about Walden Commune, where most of the strip's characters lived during the 1970s. They filled his head with a lot of nonsense, convincing him that the hippie movement was coming back and that they represented a national trend. He was even convinced that Zonker's
Zonker Harris
Zonker Harris is the stereotypical hippie character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury. He made his first appearance as a perennial pot-smoking pest plaguing B.D.'s football team in 1971...
lilacs were marijuana plants.
Later he resurfaced in the strip as a television reporter for ABC
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
. By this point he had developed an extraordinarily large ego, which remains his defining trait to this day. He was a total sensationalist, willing to stretch the truth and say anything that would further his career. Often he was sent on very dangerous assignments, and it is implied that his superiors send him on these intentionally, hoping get rid of him. He plays along, knowing that the danger of his job will earn him higher ratings.
As such he has covered pretty much all of the dangerous political developments of the last thirty years, although he often greatly exaggerates the danger he personally faces in order to boost his ego. Any news story, no matter how direly important, can quickly get sidetracked when he begins to talk about his three Emmys, his high ratings, his date with Christiane Amanpour
Christiane Amanpour
Christiane Amanpour, CBE is anchor of ABC News's This Week and formerly chief international correspondent at CNN, where she worked for 27 years. She is a Board Member at the IWMF .-Early years:...
, and so forth.
His most surreal appearances were two trips into the brain of Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
, first to try to comprehend what the then presidential candidate was thinking, and then to try to unlock his memories of the Iran Contra Affair.
After leaving ABC, Hedley did a brief stint as "chief content provider" for Yap!com, but went back to television when the site was downsized by the AOL-Time Warner merger. He then worked for CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
and later for Fox News. In this post he got in trouble with his fellow journalists Rick Redfern and Mark Slackmeyer
Mark Slackmeyer
Mark Sheldon Slackmeyer is a character in the comic strip Doonesbury. Mark starts out as a radical at Walden College, and leads several peace rallies . The character was initially modeled after Mark Rudd, then in the news as a leader of Columbia University's student protests of 1968...
when they found out that he was taking bribes from the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
in order to give them "softballs" at press conferences. He ceased to do so, and his colleagues decided not to blow the whistle on him, supposedly because they would miss having his arrogant self around too much. In March 2009 he began to Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
and that October Trudeau published My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts?: The Tweets of Roland Hedley, the first collection of tweets from a single author. The Twitter account has since been closed.
In 2009 Fox news attempted to fire him as the High Definition
High-definition television
High-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
format showed his facial skin in a gruesome way. He survived the attempt after threatening to sue his employers for discrimination against his allegedly work-related disability.
Over the history of the comic strip, this character's name has been given as both Roland Burton Hedley, Jr. and Roland Burton Hedley III. The official website at Doonesbury.com uses the latter, although as recently as July 12, 2008 he identified himself as "Junior." Hedley's three names evoke the preppie "last name as first name" aura and may have been taken from names on the masthead of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
—Los Angeles Correspondent Roland Flamini, Boston Bureau Chief Sandra Burton and Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan
Hedley Donovan
Hedley Donovan was an editor in chief of Time Inc.. He became editor in chief starting 1964 till 1979 responsible for all publications of Time Inc., including Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, and People. After retiring in 1979 he became a senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter...
.