Roland Burton Hedley, III is a fictional character in the comic strip Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, inspired by the on-air style of the veteran US reporter Sam Donaldson.

[1] Hedley is a journalist who covers sports at the Saigon bureau for Time and, once called back, is commissioned to write an article about Walden Commune, where most of the strip's characters live during the 1970s.

It also contains a subconscious inhabited by a persona of Nancy Reagan called the "She-Mommy," a fornix filled with memories of “an idyllic America, with 5-cent cokes, Burma-Shave signs, and hard-working white people,” and a visual cortex which instead of viewing time normally "is only able to see backwards, through a rose-colored mist.” The story arcs were one of the most iconic and controversial strips in the history of Doonesbury, with many newspaper editors and critics characterizing them as mean-spirited.

After leaving ABC, Hedley works a brief stint as "chief content provider" for Yap!com, but goes back to television when the site is downsized by the AOL-Time Warner merger.

In this post he gets in trouble with his fellow journalists Rick Redfern and Mark Slackmeyer when they find out that he is taking bribes from the White House in order to give them "softballs" at press conferences.