Photo By Ed Sharpe - Glendale Daily Planet

(Award luncheon screenshot)

(Award luncheon screenshot)

Lehrer and MacNeil are the second joint winners of the Cronkite Award. CBS founder William Paley and former CBS President Frank Stanton received the inaugural award in 1984.

“The Cronkite Award is a kind of Holy Grail for people like us who do television journalism,” Lehrer said after accepting his award. “To be honored in the name of the best—Walter Cronkite—is as good as it gets.”

He shared many wise words relating to what people are interpreting as journalism.

The video of his speech is at
 http://www.smecc.org/media/cronkite_fin-256.wmv

"The bloggers are mostly  reactors commentators, not reporters
The talk show hosts are provocateurs commentators, not reporters
The comedians are entertainers commentators, not reporters
The search engines search, but they don't report"

 He also stated, "You want to be entertained?  Go to the circus for god's sake...don't watch the NEWS HOUR . I never want people to confuse the news with entertainment or.. me with the crowns!"

Lehrer defined his rules of journalism he developed during several years ago at a seminar being held at the Aspen Institute.

Reflecting back on a job from his youth, a bus caller in a depot in Victoria Texas, Lehrer commented on the power of education stating "If you learn something early, and you learn it well and it is totally irrelevant you will never forget it!"

He then treated us to a bus call.... "Now may I have your attention please....
This is your last call for Continental Trailways 6:40 p.m., Silversides air conditioned Thruliner to San Antonio now leaving from lane one for ..."

  (A lengthy list of town names obscured by loud applause from  audience)
Connecting in San Antonio for Del Rio, Van Horne El Paso Las Cruces and Phoenix.

"All Aboooooord!
Don't forget your baggage please!"

Robert MacNeil, the other  half of the dynamic duo related stories of  retirement, how people still confuse their names.

"A journalism education is probably today the best general education that an American citizen can get. I know a lot of people thing the law is probably the best basic education, and it is great, but journalism forces people to acquire skills that are in huge demand and very scarce in this society the ability top assimilate large amounts often of complicated information, to distill the essence and what is important from that and reproduce it in simple plain English that ordinary people can understand. Those are skills that businesses are craving to have."

MacNeil, also related the uses and distortions of language with examples form today's pubic relations organizations in addition to historic examples of Orwell's New Speak and thoughts and ideas put forth by the Stalinist regime in the past.

MacNiel went into depth on how terms of  "Fair and Balanced"   "Investigative Reporting"" In Depth Reporting" were used , but more importantly how these terms are abused in the field of journalism.
(The full video of this amazing speech will be up later on Glendale Daily Planet - http://www.glendaledailyplanet.com )

Previous Cronkite Award recipients include TV journalists Tom Brokaw, Bill Moyers and Jane Pauley; newspaper publishers Al Neuharth, Katharine Graham and Otis Chandler; television executives Ted Turner, Roone Arledge and Don Hewitt; and newspaper journalists Bob Woodward, Helen Thomas and Ben Bradlee.

(Award luncheon screenshot)

(Award luncheon screenshot)

Cronkite School celebrates 25 years of excellence

Arizona State University’s journalism program has experienced an amazing evolution during the past 25 years.

Technology changed the way that students work from the demise of the typewriter to the advent of video display terminals. Laptop computers, email and the Internet are modern-day tools of the trade.

What hasn’t changed are the basic tenants of journalism.

As the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication celebrates its 25th anniversary, the school continues to teach professional journalism ethics while expanding its offerings to embrace the multimedia age.

Highlights throughout the years have been many. One of the biggest was naming the school after Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor who was an essential member of American’s households during the 1960s.

“The landing of the Cronkite name - thanks to Tom Chauncey - in 1983 was, of course, huge,” said Doug Anderson, who joined the school in 1979 as a professor and served as director from 1987 to 1999. Chauncey, the owner of the local CBS affiliate, contacted Cronkite and asked him to help the school.

Other milestones included broadcast students earning real-world experience when the school’s weekly television newscast called “Southwinds” was launched in 1989. (Today’s broadcast students host Cronkite NewsWatch three days a week from the school’s new building downtown.) Cronkite students also began dominating the William Randolph Hearst Foundation's Journalism Awards Program during the 1990s, elevating the school’s reputation and showcasing the best work that budding journalists were turning out. They also worked at Valley newspapers, radio stations, television stations and public relations outlets through internships established during Anderson’s tenure.

Today’s students continue to dominate the Hearst awards.

“That is a great measure of the quality of a journalism program,” said Christopher Callahan, current dean of the Cronkite School.

Landing the sixth $1.5 million Knight Chair from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in the 1990s was another milestone that took Cronkite from a nationally known program to a top-10 journalism school.

“The Cronkite School was among the first 10 journalism programs in the nation to receive the Hearst Foundation's Visiting Professionals Program endowment and was among the first nine to be selected for the Freedom Forum's Professional-in-Residence program,” Anderson said. “Another of many highlights was having the privilege of being able to hire so many bright, talented and hard-working professors to make the school far more nationally formidable than anyone would have dreamed possible.”

The Cronkite School took another leap forward in 2004 when ASU President Michael Crow announced that the school would become an independent unit and be an integral part of the new Downtown Phoenix campus.

Since arriving at ASU three years ago as dean of the Cronkite School, Christopher Callahan has continued to raise the quality of the school with a new curriculum that emphasizes hands-on, multimedia training, star faculty who bring years of media experience to students and a state-of-the-art journalism complex in the heart of the city.

“We’re really living in the digital age. This school – more than any in the country – embraces that,” Callahan says.

But the Cronkite School keeps traditional journalism values at the heart of its core mission – teaching students to write and broadcast objective, comprehensive stories under tight deadlines using digital skills that are increasingly in demand.

“Those students are highly sought out,” Callahan said.

So are the faculty who teach them from former CNN anchor Aaron Brown to former BET executive Retha Hill. Relative newcomers join veterans such as Frederic “Fritz” Leigh who served as the Cronkite School’s first associate director and started ASU’s campus radio station in 1982.

“It’s a great mix of high-level professionals coming out of newsrooms and professional scholars,” Callahan said.

Recent Cronkite students have benefited from an expanded faculty that has doubled in size during the past three years. Partnerships with major corporations such as Gannett, Knight Foundation and Carnegie Corporation build the school’s programs and reputation for excellence.

The school’s new 223,000 square feet, six-story building in the heart of downtown Phoenix offers students the chance to learn in a state-of-the-art facility equipped with seven digital media laboratories, seven digital computer labs, five working newsrooms and two TV studios with adjoining digital control rooms for daily newscasts and satellite feeds.

“This is one of the best journalism schools in the country today,” Callahan said.

The new building, which Cronkite shares with Eight/KAET, also reflects the most important values of great journalism. Floor-to-ceiling versions of the First Amendment are displayed on each of the six floors, and inspirational quotes about journalism and the free press are visible throughout the building.

With a past that is built on excellence, the school’s future looks bright.

“Over the next 3 to 5 years, we’ll take the Cronkite School to the top school in the country by focusing on the future and traditional journalism values,” Callahan said.