Gayle King wears many hats—“CBS Mornings” co-host, Oprah Daily’s editor-at-large, on top of also hosting a live weekly Sirius XM radio show, “Gayle King in the House.” But now King has a new accolade for her already impressive resumé after being chosen as the 39th Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism awardee.
Since 2011, King has been with CBS News, and her star power only continues to grow. It is clear why King was chosen as this year’s honoree. One only has to look at her impeccable reporting over the course of her career, including her insightful interviews with Cherelle Griner, wife of WNBA star Brittney Griner who was formerly imprisoned in Russia, and controversial singer R. Kelly.
As we celebrate joy this Black History Month, we wanted to salute King before her receipt of this award in Phoenix on February 21, 2023.
For background on what this honor truly means, every year Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication presents “a leading figure in journalism…with the prestigious…[a]ward…The recipient list reads like a Who’s Who of the media world: Al Roker, Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner, Bob Woodward, Bill Moyers, Katharine Graham, Allen Neuharth, Don Hewitt, Helen Thomas, George Will, Ben Bradlee, Bernard Shaw and Roone Arledge, just to name a few,” and Anderson Cooper was the 2018 recipient.
The inaugural Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism was bestowed in 1984, and is named for Walter Cronkite, a broadcast legend, who is said to have “set the standards of television news when the medium was new and malleable. He was loyal to those standards, and his large audience was correspondingly loyal to him.” Director Sydney Lumet even said that Cronkite “seemed to me incorruptible…in a profession that was easily corruptible.”