It’s no secret that mainstream journalism awards have gone to the dogs. The Washington Post and the New York Times both received Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on Russiagate, for example, though their stories desperately hinted at a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia that didn’t actually exist. The NYT‘s Nikole Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer for the widely debunked 1619 Project. The Walter Cronkite Award has previously been given to NBC News’s Chuck Todd for excluding so-called “climate deniers” from his broadcasts, a CNN journalist who described the 2020 riots in Kenosha as “fiery but mostly peaceful” was nominated for an Emmy, and the New York Press bestowed CNN’s Jim Acosta with a “Truth to Power” award.
I suppose it’s not surprising, then, that the Walter Cronkite Awards this year are once again completely absurd.
The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is behind the Walter Cronkite Awards, and they decided that 2023’s honorees should be journalists who paid special attention to “disinformation”. I’ve written here before that the “disinformation” reporters are themselves the worst purveyors of disinformation, from the lies they spread about Russiagate to the Hunter Biden laptop to the Covid pandemic.
Ben Collins, the NBC News reporter who cried on television and demanded reporters do better in the wake of the Club Q nightclub shooting, received special recognition from the Cronkite Awards.
Collins, they said, had done “brilliant, brave work” on online extremism, particularly in regard to the Club Q and Buffalo shootings. Collins claimed that the Buffalo gunman’s manifesto was “in short… a rant from a 4chan addict, obsessed with ‘the Great Replacement,’ CRT and white grievance.” Collins conveniently doesn’t mention that the shooter also rejects conservatism and describes himself as an environmentalist who is either right- or left-wing — or even a socialist — depending on the definition. When Collins discovered that the Club Q shooter identified as nonbinary, he conveniently shifted his narrative about the violent attack: the gunman wasn’t motivated by anti-queer hatred, he was a victim of it!
Collins’s breakout year also consisted of being suspended from the Twitter beat at NBC News after he accused Matt Taibbi of doing “humiliating shit” by reporting on the Twitter Files. Collins has also used his new stardom to advocate for more social media censorship of content he finds personally objectionable or “hateful”.
Other 2023 awardees stand out, like ABC News’s Terry Moran. Moran earned his national program award for a Hulu special about voter fraud, and was at least partially recognized for his incredibly dogged reporting “from a Tudor Dixon rally in Michigan”. Remarkable stuff! Members of VICE News were awarded for “airing death threat voicemails to poll workers — and calling the perpetrators back.” One judge called the hard work of pressing play on another person’s iPhone “compelling and courageous.” Jordan Klepper, a comedian with The Daily Show who, naturally, only pillories the political right, received a “special recognition for using humor to inform and engage audiences.”
Walter Cronkite was not the perfectly objective journalist that some older generations like to romanticize. But he certainly was a lot better than the clowns who are receiving honors under the award named after him!