A new award, the Cronkite/Jackson Prize, was announced at an event at the National Press Club Tuesday May 22 by Annenberg Public Policy Center Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Click here to view Jamieson’s announcement.) The Cronkite/Jackson award will honor the best local and best national broadcast or cable reporting on political ads. It will join the list of distinguished honors under the umbrella of the University of Southern California’s 13-year-old Annenberg Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism honoring exemplary campaign coverage.
The two Cronkite/Jackson prizes will recognize TV journalists’ best practices in reducing the level of deception and confusion in U.S. political ads in 2012. The honorees will be selected by a special jury convened by the APPC. News directors will be able to submit their entries between November 15, 2012 and January 11, 2013. The award ceremony will take place at a luncheon at the National Press Club in April 2013.
The Cronkite/Jackson award is named for CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and Brooks Jackson, who pioneered the broadcast "adwatch" and "factcheck" form of stories debunking false and misleading political statements while at CNN and founded APPC’s award-winning FactCheck.org in 2003. Before coming to the Policy Center, Jackson covered Washington and national politics at the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal. He is author of Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process (Knopf, 1988); Broken Promise: Why the Federal Election Commission Failed (Twentieth Century Fund, 1990); and co-author of unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007). In January 2013, Jackson will move from his role as director of FactCheck.org to emeritus status. In that capacity he will continue to write for FactCheck.org.
