Accepting Our Walter Cronkite Award

A couple of months ago, I had the honor of accepting the Walter Cronkite Award for Political Journalism on behalf of my colleagues in the Wisconsin Public Television News & Public Affairs Department. It's given by the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.

With budget cutbacks, there are a lot of restrictions on travel. But my brother lives in southern California –he's a USC screenwriting grad--and I had been planning to make a visit for some time, so I found a very inexpensive fare and timed my trip so I could also attend the ceremony. I was looking forward to a free lunch, but otherwise didn't give it a great deal of thought. I was glad to be representing WPT. We have been honored with this award four times now--it's given every other year since the focus is largely on election coverage--and we don't want them to think we take them for granted. But I was really thinking more about having a nice visit with my brother.

The first indication that the event was a little bigger deal than I assumed was when I passed George Stephanopoulos in the men's room. I knew that "This Week" was being honored, but I assumed a behind-the-scenes person would be there to accept maybe with a taped thank you from the talent.

Next, I spotted David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of NOW on PBS, milling about in the reception area. I went into the adjacent lecture hall for what had been described as an informal "roundtable" discussion and soon found myself on a panel with Stephanopoulos, Brancaccio and Katy Couric. I was seated next to her Executive Producer, Rick Kaplan. Fortunately, the four other award acceptor/panelists were fellow non-celebrities or I would have felt even more out of place.

The discussion was an interesting, though hardly groundbreaking, analysis of the challenging state of contemporary journalism. All in all, it was a somewhat surreal experience. But it's wonderful to be honored along with the likes of these national agenda-setting journalists, and have WPT's work screened along side theirs.

And the lunch was pretty good