The 43rd Annual Southern California Journalism Awards

Laurie Cohn
Mirror contributing writer

   This past weekend I attended the Los Angeles Press Club’s 43rd Annual Southern California Journalism Awards where Dan Rather was given the Joseph M. Quinn Award for Journalistic Excellence and Distinction. 
   Though I have written this column for nearly two years (happy almost 2nd birthday, Santa Monica Mirror), I don’t particularly consider myself a part of the local journalistic community. I’m not even a member of the organization. I tried to join last year, but the club leadership was in transition and my application fell through the cracks. Nonetheless, my husband is a member and wanted to go, so we left our overcast part of town and headed to Universal City.
   The event was long, but very well-paced, and the interested crowd listened enthusiastically to snippets of winning radio pieces, while viewing brief segments from television winners. Close-ups of winning print articles were projected on a large screen. I like to think I’m pretty well informed about current events, between listening to KCRW all day, glancing at Los Angeles’ biggest daily newspaper, and going to the CNN website several times a week, but as the evening wore on I was very aware of how many stories I had never heard anything about. Until that night I didn’t feel out of touch with the community outside of the areas I spend most of my time in – Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Marina del Rey, Venice – but now I’m not so sure. I think I need to expand my listening and reading avenues.
   One man I was happy to see win was Warren Olney, as I do tend to root for the home team. I listen to his KCRW show (now he has two) whenever I’m in my office at 1:00. I find he has an impeccable knack for letting his guests speak freely yet he takes back control whenever necessary. His questions are poignant and insightful, and he listens well to viewpoints he might not personally agree with. It was good to see him looking so well after the surgery that kept him off the air earlier this year. 
   In a town where an award is given for just about anything, it was heartwarming to see people accepting awards for meaningful deeds. Los Angeles Times staff writer Virginia Ellis was given the President’s Award for her investigative piece entitled, “Exploring Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush.” She thanked Quackenbush, who wasn’t in attendance, for helping to make the story because he was incredibly handsome and incredibly stupid. The Entertainment News Story was won by the “San Gabriel Valley Tribune’s” Martin S. Gonzalez for “Why Can’t Our Next President Be More Like Martin Sheen.” If only he could be Martin Sheen, I thought to myself, instead of the current buffoon in office.
   Another Santa Monica winner was Adelphia Communication’s Bill Rosendahl, a big favorite in the Rosenthal-Cohn household and himself a big fan of the “Mirror.” His win for Television Talk-Public Affairs Show was cable television’s sole win, and he was also the runner-up in the same category. All the rest of the television winners were either with KCBS Channel 2 or KTTV Channel 11, and, for local news I tend to watch KTLA Channel 5 and KNBC Channel 4, so I wasn’t familiar with anybody.
   The presenters ranged from locally known, such as Los Angeles Press Club President Mary Moore, to the internationally loved actor Michael Keaton. Keaton seemed truly happy to be there and very excited for the winners. Actor and former Screen Actors Guild President Richard Masur, lawyer-activist Gloria Allred, and columnist Patt Morrison all added a bit of levity to their presentations while CBS President and CEO Les Moonves commanded the attention of everyone in the room while he told Dan Rather stories and presented Rather with his award. 
   The clips of Rather’s many years in news showed him ducking bullets in the trenches in Vietnam, in Dallas in 1963, being pushed around at the 1972 Republican Convention, in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, at the Berlin Wall as it came down, in Afghanistan, and so on. They were some of the most important events of modern times, and there he was, reporting on all of them. His acceptance speech was poignant, witty, and humble, and one of the first things he said was that he wished his parents were alive and present. In that instant, Dan Rather, the star CBS anchor, became just another person who cherishes his mom and dad.
   The Los Angeles Press Club, with event producer Alex Ben Block, did a spectacular job of recognizing Southern California’s dedicated journalists in every medium. I look forward to next year’s event, and hope that one day soon I’ll be hootin’ and hollerin’ for some of my fellow “Mirror” columnists and reporters as they take to the stage to receive their awards.