Katie Couric is among the ten winners of the 2009 Walter Cronkite Awards for excellence in television political journalism for her "persistent and detailed" interviews with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. Other winners include ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (for national network program) and Hearst-Argyle Television (for station group).
The awards have been given biennially since 2000 and recipients are selected from a panel of eight judges chaired by Geneva Overholser, director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.
The judges recognized local broadcast stations KING-TV Seattle, which broadcast over 100 minutes of political coverage each week, and WGAL-Lancaster, Pa., which was recognized for its "surprisingly probing and revealing" interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain during the '08 election season.
Greg Fox, of WESH-Winter Park, Fla., won the award for individual achievement at a local station for helping viewers evaluate candidate's pledges in a "Truth Tests" series. It was Fox's second award.
News 8 Austin won its third local cable network award, this time for its ethnically diverse political reports and discussions with four families on key issues.
Other winners were Wisconsin Public Television, Now on PBS, and Jo Wan, of KTSF-San Francisco, who was recognized for her Mandarin-language reports on minority and female presidential candidates.
The awards will be presented to the winners at the University of Southern California campus on April 15.
