Colleagues and Club honor Ifill at Fourth Estate Dinner

NPR special correspondent Michele Norris, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and former PBS reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault paid tribute to PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill as she received the Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement in journalism at a dinner Oct. 15.

“Journalism was what I was meant to do,” Ifill told a ballroom full of current and former colleagues. “I embrace this honor tonight because it is bestowed by peers who also know what journalism is and what it can be when we can achieve, when we fall short, and when we aspire to more.”

In a far-reaching career that has dented racial and gender barriers in journalism, Ifill has been chief congressional correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a national reporter for The Washington Post, among other gigs. As the 43rd recipient of the award, Ifill joined “journalism’s true hall of fame” alongside past winners such as Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward, NPC President John Hughes said.

NPR special correspondent Michele Norris paid tribute to Ifill by recounting when, years ago, Norris went to The Washington Post newsroom for an interview. Ifill recognized her and came up to give Norris some advice. “‘Before you go in and do this interview, ask for $10,000 more than you were prepared to ask for because that’s what the boys would do,” Norris recalled Ifill saying. “What you actually said was, ‘That’s what the white boys would do.’”

Ifill’s smile lit up the room throughout the evening, as it has done for living rooms across the country that tune into PBS NewsHour and Washington Week, the Friday show in which Ifill moderates a roundtable of journalists.

As moderator of Washington Week, “she has taken an institution known primarily as a domain of white men…and turned it into a reflection of the real America,” said The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, adding: “It has been done in the way Gwen would do it, simply by making sure that the arena was fully staffed with the best in the business.”

A video montage displayed clips of Ifill’s reporting over the years and tributes from some of the field’s top journalists. In one clip, Ifill, the daughter of a preacher, embraced a survivor of the mass shooting at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a veteran journalist, said that her and Ifill’s shared background as African American daughters of preachers meant that “early in her life, she, like I, was equipped with a layer of armor from the church’s teachings…as we traversed roads not usually traversed by women who look like us.”

Ifill, who moderated the 2004 and 2008 vice presidential debates, picked up on the ecclesiastical theme. “There’s no better place to learn about politics, it turns out, than the church, which is a deeply, deeply political environment,” she said.

The New York City native offered the audience some editorial advice as she accepted the award: “At our best, we reject bias and understand that the most dangerous bias is found in the stories that we do not tell.”