Awards & Accolades

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has won the John Steinbeck Award, Galleycat reports. She is the third female recipient and the first recipient under the age of 40.

The award is given “to writers and artists whose work captures the spirit of Steinbeck’s empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes.”

“Listening to Rachel Maddow is like listening to Walter Cronkite,” Steinbeck’s son, Thomas, said in a statement. “We have that kind of trust in her.”

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ChildHelp, a non-profit that helps prevent and treat child abuse and neglect, honored HLN host Nancy Grace with its “Positive Impact in Media” award this weekend. Below, Grace is joined by “Today” co-host Kathie Lee Gifford, as well as singer Michael Bolton, actor John O’Hurley and his wife Lisa, as well as “Hell’s Kitchen” chef Scott Leibfried.

CBS News, NBC News and, for the first time, Al Jazeera English, have just been announced as winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards.

CBS News “60 Minutes” will be honored for Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan‘s report from the frontlines of the war in Afghanistan, and NBC News, along with Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, will be honored for breaking news coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings.

Al Jazeera English will receive its first duPont silver baton for a documentary about shortcomings in the recovery efforts in Haiti and NOVA, on PBS, will be honored with a duPont award for a documentary on Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

“This truly dynamic group of news organizations and journalists represent the best in broadcast and digital news reporting,” said Bill Wheatley, duPont Jury chair and former executive vice president of NBC News. “Journalists are using technology in new ways to effectively tell these important stories covering the news, issues and events that are critical to our society.”

In all, 14 awards will be presented during a ceremony on Thurs., Jan. 19. CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley and Michele Norris from NPR will host the 70th anniversary of the duPont awards, presented each year to honor excellence in broadcast and digital journalism.

TVSpy has more on several local news stations who will be honored with duPont Awards.

TVWeek’s NewsPro magazine has announced its “10 Most Powerful in Television News,” and the 2011 list features executives from all the broadcast and cable networks.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes is recognized as being the force behind “one realm of News Corp.’s journalism empire that has stayed above the fray” of the News of the World hacking scandal. CNN president Jim Walton and EVP Ken Jautz are both on the list, as is MSNBC president Phil Griffin.

For the broadcast networks, ABC News president Ben Sherwood was named, as well as his NBC News counterpart Steve Capus. CBS News is represented by both chairman Jeff Fager and president David Rhodes, and the pair are cautiously applauded for charting a new, and unconventional, course for the network:

CBS News, with journalists now in charge, is the most intriguing. Its move to hard news, particularly in the morning hours, is admirable, but there will be lots of “told you so’s” if it doesn’t work.

See the full list here.

The Writer’s Guild of America, both the east and west coast branches, have announced the nominees for the 2012 WGA Awards. Writers for PBS dominate the news categories on the list, but CBS News and ABC News are also well-represented.

The TV news nominees are after the jump, all of the nominees can be viewed here.

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Steve Capus of NBC News and Martha Raddatz of ABC News will be honored with RTDNF First Amendment Awards in 2012.

Capus, the president of NBC News, will be presented with the First Amendment Leadership Award, which goes to a “business or government leader who has made sigificant contribution to protecting freedom of the press.”

Raddatz, the senior foreign affairs correspondent at ABC News, will receive the Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award, which is named for the former senior Washington correspondent at Broadcasting & Cable.

The awards will be presented at a black-tie reception on March 15, 2012, in Washington, DC. Other 2012 winners are Marci Burdick, the senior vice president of Schurz Communications, and Jim Bohannon, an anchor at Dial Global Radio Networks.

 

Last night the Committee to Protect Journalists held its annual gala at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. The bulk of the event was to honor journalists who risked their lives to cover the news, and along the way a few well-known faces showed up. In addition to the international award recipients, Mansoor al-Jamri of Bahrain, Javier Valdez Cardenas of Mexico, Umar Cheema of Pakistan and Natalya Radina of Belarus, former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather accepted a lifetime achievement award, while Comcast CEO Brian Roberts accepted his first public award since his cable company acquired NBCUniversal.

In his speech, Rather set his sights squarely on corporate media–of which Roberts is clearly a part– and sent a message to journalists to not forget their heritage. He was introduced by First Amendment lawyer James Goodale, who began by defending Rather’s report on former President George W. Bush‘s military service. “All the facts in that particular program were substantially correct,” Goodale said. “He was correct.”

Questions surrounding that report led to Rather’s departure from CBS News.

“As you know, we are living in an age when big money owns everything…including the news,” Rather said. “That cash bought a lot of silence for a long time. Enough time for unchecked power to get this country tangled into messes all around the world. We all know that money talks. But, so do the people…

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ABC’s Christiane Amanpour was presented with Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism this afternoon.

In her acceptance speech, Amanpour, the host of ABC’s “This Week,” called journalism “a great endeavor; it is a sacred endeavor. It is a public service.”

“It’s hard work,” she told journalism students during a question and answer session before the awards ceremony. “Stand up, grab the microphone and don’t be afraid to ask the questions.”

Amanpour is the 28th recipient of the ASU award, which has previously been given to fellow ABCers Diane Sawyer and Cokie Roberts, as well as Brian Williams, Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.

Bloomberg Senior writer David Evans will be awarded the 2011 John Chancellor Award, named for the longtime NBC Newsman and predecessor to Tom Brokaw in the “NBC Nightly News” chair.

The Chancellor Award, presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, goes to reporter “for his or her cumulative accomplishments.” Evans’s investigative reporting for Bloomberg has included stories on how secret profit schemes cheated the families of fallen U.S. soldiers, sickened or killed patients and cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

A nine-member committee selected Evans for the $25,000 prize. The award will be presented at a dinner at Columbia University on Wednesday.

PBS’ Judy Woodruff was the mistress of ceremony at an awards luncheon of the of International Women’s Media Foundation today at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Four women journalists were honored for their work confronting danger while doing their jobs. Among them: Adela Navarro Bello, general director and columnist for Zeta news magazine in Mexico, Reuters Iran bureau chief Parisa Hafezi and Chiranuch Premchaiporn, director and webmaster of the Prachatai online newspaper in Thailand. Kate Adie, a BBC anchor, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Spotted in the crowd, CBS News’s Lesley Stahl, NBC’s Kate Snow and from ABC News, president Ben Sherwood, “Nightline” co-anchor Cynthia McFadden, “This Week” host Christiane Amanpour, correspondents Martha Raddatz and Juju Chang, and GMA co-anchor George Stephanopoulos.

Another ceremony was held Monday night in Beverly Hills honoring the women. Here’s a KABC report on that event: