2020 Fourth Estate Award Gala

CBS News president Susan Zirinsky will receive the National Press Club's most esteemed prize, the Fourth Estate Award, at a gala in her honor on November 18, 2020.

Zirinsky became CBS News president and Senior Executive Producer of CBS News on March 1, 2019, and within nine months she oversaw an overhaul of the news division. An acclaimed journalist and highly respected senior executive producer at CBS News, Zirinsky began her career in the CBS News Washington bureau two weeks after the Watergate break-in. Over the next four decades she produced a wide variety of award-winning documentaries and programs, and she covered a range of historic stories, from the Gulf War to the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, from the White House for 10 years to the 9/11 attacks, and from the Paris terrorist attacks to the mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla. School.

Susan Zirinsky is the personification of journalistic perseverance, tenacity, and integrity.

- NPC president Michael Freedman

The 2020 Virtual Fourth Estate Award Gala will be the first of its kind, historic in the evening’s long tradition of honoring journalists who have made significant contributions to the field. This year’s virtual gala will present the elegant face-to-face experience you expect but from the comfort and safety of your own home. The gala, attended by hundreds of members, guests, and media luminaries, raises the majority of the operating expenses for the Club’s nonprofit affiliate, the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The Fourth Estate Award is the top honor bestowed on a journalist by the National Press Club Board of Governors. Previous winners include Amanda Bennett, Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Wolf Blitzer, Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell, Bob Woodward, Jim Lehrer, Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour, and David Broder. The gala dinner is a fundraiser for the National Press Club Journalism Institute, the nonprofit affiliate of the Club, which advocates for press freedom worldwide, equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement, and provides scholarships to aspiring journalists. 

The evening will also honor the winners of the John Aubuchon Press Freedom awards, Linda Tirado and Maria Ressa, and the winner of the Neil and Susan Sheehan award for investigative journalism, Ed Yong of The Atlantic.

Tirado, an author and freelance photographer, was taking pictures of a street protest in Minneapolis on May 30 when a policeman’s foam bullet hit her left eye, costing her most of her sight in that eye. Tirado is among the journalists around the country who were injured, harassed or arrested while covering protests that took place nationwide after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Ressa, executive editor of Rappler, was convicted in the Philippines on trumped-up charges of cyber libel. Ressa and Rappler have been the target of repeated efforts by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte to silence her. Ressa has emerged as one of the leading voices for press freedom in the Philippines amid threats to independent journalism in the country.

Yong’s in-depth analytical writing has explained, week after week, everything from the mask debate to long-haulers to how the coronavirus has seeped into America’s fault lines, and why the United States has been hit more severely than most other countries, with one-quarter of the world’s confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths, but just 4 percent of the global population. Through 5,000-word features, cover stories, interviews, Twitter updates, even advice to young journalists, Yong has shown compassion and integrity in a high-stakes moment when every word matters.

For table assignments at the gala, you will be contacted after you purchase tickets and can make requests at that time.

To explore sponsorship opportunities for the Fourth Estate event or for other questions, email Julie Moos, Executive Director of the National Press Club Journalism Institute at [email protected].

More Info & Tickets

Press Release