Search News
For the Media
For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.
TNG-CWA Banquet Honors Generations of Journalists
A new generation of reporters mingled with two giants in journalism May 19 at The Newspaper Guild-CWA's annual Freedom Fund Award banquet, where Walter Cronkite charmed the audience with memories of his 70-year career and Bill Moyers painted a dire picture of freedoms in peril.
Two Seattle Times reporters and the online public interest journal TomPaine.com were honored with the Guild's highest awards at the event, along with two outstanding scholastic journalists.
Cronkite got an extended standing ovation before he'd spoken a word from the stage of the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Washington, D.C. When he did speak, he began by pointing to the Guild pin that TNG-CWA President Linda Foley had just given him.
"I just now pinned it on my lapel, but you've been in my heart since 1933," said Cronkite, an early Guild activist during his days as a reporter at United Press International.
Moyers, whose broadcast investigations regularly expose grave injustice and government misdeeds, said rising secrecy, the corrupting influence of money on politics and the growing consolidation of media power are threatening America's democracy.
"That's why tonight is so important - why the Barr and Broun and Block awards are about more than ritual, ceremony or even celebration," Moyers said. "They are a ringing endorsement of what journalism can do."
Moyers contrasted the state of media today with the courage of early American reporters who risked imprisonment for exposing the truth and stood firmly independent of government.
"As secrecy grows and media is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we witness the rise of a new phenomenon, a quasi-official partisan press, ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent to some of the most powerful financial and business interests in the world, who loathe transparency," Moyers said.
Cronkite, too, lamented the state of the media today but fondly recalled his early career as a newspaper and wire service reporter, and Guild member. Remarkably, he said, he learned of the Guild when he was a high school student in conservative and anti-union Houston, Texas. He said he had a "very enlightened" journalism teacher who told them about Heywood Broun and the new newspaper union.
In 1939, active in the Guild at United Press International, Cronkite's coworkers at the Kansas City bureau took up a collection to buy him a bus ticket to a union meeting in Ohio, where he was elected chairman of the committee that voted for the first strike against the company.
He was clearly moved by the standing ovation from fellow journalists and Guild members Wednesday night. "I can't tell you how honored I am that you would invite me here to be with 'my' folks," he said.
The evening's emcee was award-winning Washington, D.C. reporter and anchorman Gordon Peterson, moderator of the nationally syndicated news analysis show "Inside Washington." About 300 people attended the event.
Awards presented at the event honor the memories of famed newspaper columnist and Guild founder Heywood Broun, the Washington Post's legendary political cartoonist Herb Block and Guild attorney and mentor David S. Barr.
Seattle Times reporters Christine Willmsen and Maureen O'Hagan won the Broun award for their series, "Coaches Who Prey." The four-part series explored the largely unreported trend of male coaches preying on female athletes and the coaches' success in escaping accountability.
TomPaine.com and its founder, John Moyers, son of Bill Moyers, won the third-annual Herbert Block Freedom Award for being what TNG-CWA called "a consistent voice of reason and democratic discourse at a time of increased political attacks on civil liberties and a flattening of discourse in the mainstream media."
In accepting the award, John Moyers said, "It's humbling to consider the legacy of Herb Block and our common obligation to extend it.
"Right now, making war and protecting private profit seem the highest purposes to which our elected public servants call us. Dissent from official dogma is labeled treason - have you heard what I've heard lately in the debate over Iraq? Overtones of "America - Love It or Leave It." That bothers me. It comes from those who mistake heat and bluster for light and substance, the same people who dismiss deplorable torture of prisoners in Iraq with comparisons to harmless college pranks."
The banquet also honored two David S. Barr scholarship winners. Annalyn Rose Censky, 17, a student at Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson, Ariz., won a $500 scholarship for her story on the injustices suffered by teenagers crossing the border illegally. Olivia Cobiskey, a student at Columbia College in Chicago, won a $1,500 scholarship for her story about a non-profit center that helps Muslim families cope with the pressures of Western-style freedom.
Two Seattle Times reporters and the online public interest journal TomPaine.com were honored with the Guild's highest awards at the event, along with two outstanding scholastic journalists.
Cronkite got an extended standing ovation before he'd spoken a word from the stage of the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Washington, D.C. When he did speak, he began by pointing to the Guild pin that TNG-CWA President Linda Foley had just given him.
"I just now pinned it on my lapel, but you've been in my heart since 1933," said Cronkite, an early Guild activist during his days as a reporter at United Press International.
Moyers, whose broadcast investigations regularly expose grave injustice and government misdeeds, said rising secrecy, the corrupting influence of money on politics and the growing consolidation of media power are threatening America's democracy.
"That's why tonight is so important - why the Barr and Broun and Block awards are about more than ritual, ceremony or even celebration," Moyers said. "They are a ringing endorsement of what journalism can do."
Moyers contrasted the state of media today with the courage of early American reporters who risked imprisonment for exposing the truth and stood firmly independent of government.
"As secrecy grows and media is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we witness the rise of a new phenomenon, a quasi-official partisan press, ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent to some of the most powerful financial and business interests in the world, who loathe transparency," Moyers said.
Cronkite, too, lamented the state of the media today but fondly recalled his early career as a newspaper and wire service reporter, and Guild member. Remarkably, he said, he learned of the Guild when he was a high school student in conservative and anti-union Houston, Texas. He said he had a "very enlightened" journalism teacher who told them about Heywood Broun and the new newspaper union.
In 1939, active in the Guild at United Press International, Cronkite's coworkers at the Kansas City bureau took up a collection to buy him a bus ticket to a union meeting in Ohio, where he was elected chairman of the committee that voted for the first strike against the company.
He was clearly moved by the standing ovation from fellow journalists and Guild members Wednesday night. "I can't tell you how honored I am that you would invite me here to be with 'my' folks," he said.
The evening's emcee was award-winning Washington, D.C. reporter and anchorman Gordon Peterson, moderator of the nationally syndicated news analysis show "Inside Washington." About 300 people attended the event.
Awards presented at the event honor the memories of famed newspaper columnist and Guild founder Heywood Broun, the Washington Post's legendary political cartoonist Herb Block and Guild attorney and mentor David S. Barr.
Seattle Times reporters Christine Willmsen and Maureen O'Hagan won the Broun award for their series, "Coaches Who Prey." The four-part series explored the largely unreported trend of male coaches preying on female athletes and the coaches' success in escaping accountability.
TomPaine.com and its founder, John Moyers, son of Bill Moyers, won the third-annual Herbert Block Freedom Award for being what TNG-CWA called "a consistent voice of reason and democratic discourse at a time of increased political attacks on civil liberties and a flattening of discourse in the mainstream media."
In accepting the award, John Moyers said, "It's humbling to consider the legacy of Herb Block and our common obligation to extend it.
"Right now, making war and protecting private profit seem the highest purposes to which our elected public servants call us. Dissent from official dogma is labeled treason - have you heard what I've heard lately in the debate over Iraq? Overtones of "America - Love It or Leave It." That bothers me. It comes from those who mistake heat and bluster for light and substance, the same people who dismiss deplorable torture of prisoners in Iraq with comparisons to harmless college pranks."
The banquet also honored two David S. Barr scholarship winners. Annalyn Rose Censky, 17, a student at Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson, Ariz., won a $500 scholarship for her story on the injustices suffered by teenagers crossing the border illegally. Olivia Cobiskey, a student at Columbia College in Chicago, won a $1,500 scholarship for her story about a non-profit center that helps Muslim families cope with the pressures of Western-style freedom.