Best in Broadcast Honored with Murrow, UNITY Awards

Just a week ago, NBC News opened its new state-of-the-art world headquarters at “30 Rock,” but as president Steve Capus said Monday night, all of the high-tech tools in the world will not make you a great journalist. After viewing powerful video and audio clips from the 79 national Edward R. Murrow Award and five RTNDA/UNITY Award winners, he added, “Newsrooms are just a conduit to get the great work of our people into the homes of our viewers and onto the screens of our web users.”

The quality of the work overall -- the reporting, the choice of stories, the commitment from the team -- is what really matters, Capus said. And it was those hallmarks that were on display at the RTNDA Awards Dinner at the Grand Hyatt in New York.

In accepting NBC News’ award for overall excellence, Capus called the honor “particularly gratifying considering the high level of reporting” evident in this year’s entries, and he challenged the nearly 500 broadcast journalists in the room to continue to take a stand for the type of news that matters, including investigative reporting and international news.

Among the network winners, NBC won seven Murrows. ABC News took home six awards for radio and one for television, while CBS News won three for television and three for radio, including overall excellence in radio. For a fourth year in a row, Washingtonpost.com took the award for best non-broadcast affiliated website in a large market.

The large- and small-market stations winning national Murrows this year took time to thank members of their news teams, many of whom attended the black-tie event. Mark Miller, the news director at Murrow-winning WBAL-AM in Baltimore, individually thanked many in his newsroom and other colleagues who have given him inspiration over the years. “Being a news director is a lot like being a bus driver,” he said. “It’s a terrific job when you have the right group of passengers on board.”

Murrows and UNITY
Since 1971, RTNDA has honored excellence in electronic journalism with the Murrow Awards. For the past eight years, RTNDA, in partnership with UNITY: Journalists of Color, have honored outstanding achievements in the coverage of diversity with the RTNDA/UNITY Awards. Broadcast veterans Anderson Cooper, Natalie Morales, Michele Norris, Brian Ross and Harry Smith helped present the Murrows, while UNITY president Karen Lincoln Michel joined RTNDA president Barbara Cochran in honoring the UNITY winners.

About the Stories
Some years, Murrow winners share a common major national or international story and its many threads, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina last year. Although a couple of this year’s big stories yielded award-winning coverage for more than one outlet -- the foiled London terror plot, for instance -- this year’s subjects and topics were as varied as the newsrooms that covered them. The stories warned communities about local concerns, like a motorist purposefully running down pedestrians. Or they gave context to global concerns, like the Israel-Lebanon conflict. The reporters introduced the audience to people that have demonstrated amazing strength and spirit, like retired FDNY Lt. Mickey Kross, who was among 14 people trapped for hours in the stairwell of the World Trade Center’s North Tower when it collapsed. And the unrelenting investigations have held government agencies accountable -- as was the case of the 9-1-1 calls that bounced from dispatcher to dispatcher when no one could decide whose jurisdiction covered a stretch of interstate.

The five news organizations recognized with RTNDA/UNITY Awards this year shared stories of high school students in Vermont with a mixed-race campus, native Hawaiians fighting to preserve their culture, Muslims struggling to live in the West, longtime California immigrants fearing deportation over minor infractions and residents of a Mississippi town who tell us how racial division persists 40 years after the civil rights movement.

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