Lehrer: ‘In the beginning, there must always be the news.’
ASU's Cronkite School honored Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil of the NewsHour on PBS with its Cronkite Award of Excellence today in a luncheon at the Arizona Biltmore.
More so than in past years, I really appreciated the awardees' remarks.
Lehrer was really funny but made the serious point that all of the media's noisemakers (bloggers, comedians, talk-show hosts and the like) who are perennially pegged as potential death knells for serious journalists actually depend on said serious journalism as fodder for their subsequent noisemaking.
MacNeil echoed that sentiment by focusing more on language and semantics, very fitting for the man behind the PBS documentary "Do You Speak American?" from a few years back.
For more on the two men's take on the state of journalism, check out this story from Cronkite News Service that ran in this morning's State Press.