The winners of this year’s recipients of the Walter Cronkite Awards had a common theme: Combating misinformation.
So when award sponsor USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center held a National Press Club luncheon for the honorees last week, there was a bit of reminder of the stakes: During the ceremony news unfolded of the unsealing of former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment.
Many of the winners reported on Trump and his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, something that he has repeated during his current election campaign. He’s also called the indictment itself the “boxes hoax.”
Martin Kaplan, director of The Norman Lear Center, said, “Disinformation is an apt focus in particular for the Cronkite award, not only because it feels like disinformation is everywhere all at once, but because the namesake of this award is Walter Cronkite” who was known as “the most trusted man in America.”
ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, an honoree for Reporting on the Big Lie, was not present but said in a video message, “There’s one area where we as journalists must take sides. We stand for truth, we stand against disinformation. When confronted with those who tell us that up is down or day is night, or that a free and fair election was stolen, or that an attack on the Capitol is nothing more than a tourist visit, we must take a side. The truth is the truth.”
PBS/WGBH’s Frontline received multiple awards, including for Ramona Diaz for A Thousand Cuts; A.C. Thompson and Samuel Black for Plot to Overturn the Election; Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica for Lies, Politics and Democracy; and Gesbeen Mohammad and Vasily Kolotilov for Putin’s War at Home. Raney Aronson-Rath also accepted an award for the show overall.
Other honorees: The NBC 5 Investigates team at KXAS-TV in Dallas/Ft. Worth for Against All Enemies; Kyung Lah and Anna-Maja Rappard for The Lies Undermining Democracy on CNN; Margaret Brennan and Mary Hager for Fallout After January 6th on CBS News’ Face the Nation; Terry Moran of Impact x Nightline for Threat to Democracy from ABC News Studios; NBC News’ Ben Collins for A Status Report on the Information War; Jordan Klepper of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show for Jordan Klepper Fingers the Globe: Hungary for Democracy; Madeleine May and Alexis Johnson of VICE News for Death Threats to Election Workers … We Called Back; Joe Phelps and Roko Belic for Trust Me from the Getting Better Foundation; and Chris Ingalls of KING 5 News in Seattle for The Fraud Crusade. The award was in partnership with the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Rappard and Lah reported on the post-election audit in Arizona by the state GOP that was led by the Cyber Ninjas. The audit still showed that Joe Biden won the state. Rappard said that it is “the bravery of ordinary Americans standing up to the lies, threats and even abuse in their own communities that form the very spine of our stories.”