CBS News’ Robert Costa, Fourth Estate Honoree, Tells Crowd Of Covering Politics, Particularly In Trump Era: “You Never Know How The Story Will Turn”

Robert Costa, national correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning and chief Washington analyst, was feted at the National Press Club on Tuesday with its 2025 Fourth Estate Award.

Costa’s career has taken him from The Bucks County Courier Times, to the National Review to The Washington Post, PBS’ Washington Week in Review and CBS News. Among other things, Costa landed the first interview with Joe Biden after he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, and recently did a sit down with California Governor Gavin Newsom, who disclosed that he would take a look at a 2028 presidential run.

While the changes at CBS News were not brought up in his remarks, Costa did talk extensively of his approach to reporting, namely a certain degree of humility in approaching subjects and establishing relationships.

Costa said that the National Review “gave me a chance to really get to know people who many other news organizations didn’t cover much at the time. My approach from the beginning was to pay attention to people regardless of whether they were seen as worthy or important. You never know how the story will turn.”

He added, “I always tell myself, ‘Listen, think and assume nothing.’ In my early 20s, for example, I had long phone calls with an unknown filmmaker who looked like Santa Claus and Che Guevara. This person was mostly ignored, but he told me he’d shape the future. His name was Steve Bannon.”

He continued, “I met him in 2011, and that same year in 2011, I used to go spend a lot of time with a man who would tell me this grandiose, vivd detail how he would change the country, change the Republican party. No one believed him, but I listened, and his name was Donald Trump.”

Costa also recalled that in 2014, after he left the National Review for The Washington Post, he had breakfast “with a little known senator who told me, hush hush, that he was thinking about running for president.” That was Bernie Sanders, and “he and I have stayed close ever since,” recently hosting the senator at the University of Virginia, where Costa is a fellow.

“That’s an example of the kind of professional relationship I try to build,” he said. “Hold them to account, cover them hard, but be open to the outsiders, to the unconventional, and do not believe that you have all the answers or know what will happen next in America.”

Among those who offered remarks to Costa were CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor and author Bob Woodward, with whom Costa wrote the 2021 book Peril, about the final months of the first Trump term and the early part of Biden’s presidency.

Woodward said that Costa was “kind of the perfect blend of two of my previous co-author collaborators,” Carl Bernstein and Scott Armstrong.

“He has the best nose for news,” Woodward said. “Part of this is having that sniffer that is the key to really going at stories.”

He recalled Costa approaching him at the Post in March, 2016, when they didn’t know each other well. “He just walks up to me and he says, ‘You know, I think we ought to go interview the presidential candidate that I think is not being treated seriously enough.’” The two then interviewed Trump, for a session that Woodward described as “almost a psychiatric hour.” Among other things, Trump talked of real power being “fear” and that he brings out the “rage.” Woodward coopted those words for his first two Trump books.

CBS Sunday Morning host Jane Pauley and former Post executive editor Marty Baron also offered tributes via video. Among those also at the event were CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, Sunday Morning executive producer Rand Morrison, senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, political director Fin Gomez, Washington Bureau Chief Mark Lima, congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns, chief Washington correspondent Major Gartett, former anchor Bob Schieffer, Rita Braver, Sally Quinn, historian Douglas Brinkley and current Post executive editor Matt Murray. National Press Club president Mike Balsamo emceed.

In addition to Costa, Ed Mahon of Spotlight PA received the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism. Mahon reports on addiction, treatment and the opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania.

Other honors went to imprisoned journalists who worked for the United States Agency for Global Media, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration. The Associated Press was honored for its court challenge to the administration’s efforts to restrict its access because it did not agree to change references to the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. A federal appellate court is weighing the Trump administration’s appeal of a judge’s decision that the White House had violated the First Amendment.

“At the heart of all of this is a simple principle: We believe that the right to speak freely without government control or retaliation is an essential freedom, enshrined in the Constitution and must, above all, be protected,” said Zeke Miller, deputy Washington bureau chief.

The event was a fundraiser for the National Press Club Journalism Institute.