Introduction
Richard Roth (born 1955) is an American journalist, a CNN correspondent who covers the United Nations. He is not to be confused with Richard Roth of CBS News. He was the host of Diplomatic License (until its cancellation in January 2006), a weekly program that was devoted to United Nations affairs. Roth is a CNN "original" — one of the first employees when the network launched in 1980. He has covered a wide range of stories over the last 25 years, from the 1989 Beijing student uprising in Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War. Before CNN, he was an anchor and reporter for AP Radio and a producer for WPIX-TV in New York City. Roth graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism.
Roth lived in Whitestone, Queens, in the early 1970s. He is a devotee of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest; he is alleged to have revisited the various locations shown in the film, e.g., Mount Rushmore and Cary Grant's famous cornfield sequence.
In popular culture
Richard Roth appeared in Robert Wiener’s book Live from Baghdad. He appeared as a character in the 2002 HBO film of the same name where he was portrayed by actor Hamish Linklater.
The book as well as the film features Roth’s brief involvement with Wiener’s crew in Baghdad which was caused by sudden withdrawal of his fellow reporter colleague Tom Murphy on safety issues. Roth was stationed in Amman before joining Wiener and left the crew shortly before the Gulf War began, but within this time became part of an important coverage where the CNN team stepped into a messy US diplomatic mission in Baghdad and he interviewed a stranded US expatriate worker Robert Vinton. Roth’s interview of Vinton saw widespread coverage in the US and caused subsequent disappearance of Bob Vinton by the Iraqi authorities, though he was finally released and allowed to leave Iraq for home.