Candy Crowley Receives Journalism Career Award

News anchor Candy A. Crowley was awarded the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism during a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Thursday evening.

Crowley hosts the CNN program “State of the Union with Candy Crowley” and has also moderated a 2012 presidential debate.

Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics, and Public Policy, called Crowley “one of the savviest and most decisive political analysts on the air.”

During her acceptance speech, Crowley emphasized her concerns about journalism today as it comes to terms with the advent of the internet and social media. While she praised the internet for its unprecedented dissemination of news, Crowley also said that she was skeptical about whether it was being used effectively.

“I think [the internet] is an amazing tool that we now have in front of us that opens up so much information and so many forums for people to talk and speak and discuss,” Crowley said. “But I think as far as journalism is concerned, I worry that so far the internet has mastered us, rather than us mastering the internet.”

Crowley said that over the last two decades she has seen the pressure for news organizations to produce breaking news articles rapidly increase.

“I worry that the speed of social media is pressuring daily news into putting something out before it actually passes what used to be really stringent rules,” she told the crowded forum.

Crowley is the 23rd recipient of Goldsmith Career Award. She follows last year’s winner, Nicholas D. Kristof ’81, a New York Times columnist and former Crimson news editor.

The Shorenstein Center also awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting Monday evening.

The Book Prizes were awarded to four authors: Matthew S. Levendusky for his book “How Partisan Media Polarize America,” Jaron Lanier for “Who Owns the Future?” and Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson for “Changing Minds or Changing Channels: Partisan News in an Age of Choice.”

The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting went to a team of ABC News reporters for their article “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine.”

According to a press release last month, the Investigative Reporting Prize carries a $25,000 award, while the finalists receive a prize of $10,000.

—Staff writer Forrest K. Lewis can be reached at forrest.lewis@thecrimson.com.