Editor’s Note: On Dec. 20, 2017, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism rescinded the 2010 lifetime achievement award it gave to Charlie Rose after it was revealed that he had engaged in a pattern of sexually harassing women over many years.
For Charlie Rose, master of the intimate, on-air roundtable interview, journalism is about “what makes people tick. Why, why why do people do what they do?”
Speaking before 300 guests at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Third Annual Awards for Excellence in Journalism on May 10th at TheTimesCenter in New York, Rose also said “the issue for journalism is competence and how good we can be, and the better we can be, the better will be the response from people who watch us, who listen to us, who read us.” He noted that places like the CUNY J-School teach that competence as they help young people come to the most noble of professions.
Rose made his remarks as he accepted the J-School’s Lifetime Achievement Award from his good friend and last year’s winner, Barbara Walters. “I had very mixed feelings about giving this award because I also do interviews,” she joked. She went on to say, “But the truth is that Charlie is the best, the most accomplished…He’s probably the most sought after interviewer in America and in the world. Anybody who’s anybody wants to be interviewed by Charlie.”
Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, co-host with Rose of the Charlie Rose Brain Series on PBS stations, introduced his colleague as “the major reasoned intellectual and cultural voice of our time.” Dr. Kandel, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000, said Rose “has wiped out the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture. He understands that television does not have to choose between informing us and entertaining us. His programs do both at the same time.”
In addition to Rose, the CUNY J-School honored four graduates from the Class of 2009: Aisha Al-Muslim, Jenni Avins, Collin Orcutt, and Karina Ioffee. The first three received a $1,500 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Journalism. Ioffee was the second recipient of the $1,500 Frederic Wiegold Award for Business Journalism, established in memory of a longtime business journalist who was a senior editor for Bloomberg Markets magazine at the time of his death in 2008.
Before presenting the awards to alumni, Dean Stephen Shepard broke some news: James Greenfield, who spent a long career as an editor at The New York Times, and his wife, Ene Riisna, formerly of ABC News, have set up a trust fund to allow foreign journalists to study at the CUNY J-School and students from the CUNY J-School to go abroad for summer internships. The legacy gift has a present value of $730,000.