Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Arizona
State University is awarding its Walter Cronkite
Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2017 to Judy Woodruff and the late Gwen Ifill, co-anchors and managing editors of PBS NewsHour. An announcement Monday by the university’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication says Woodruff will accept the award for herself and Ifill on Oct. 19 in Phoenix. Ifill had served with Woodruff as co-anchor and co-managing editor from 2013 until her death from cancer in November. Woodruff said in the announcement that she was honored to be selected for the award named after Cronkite, the late and longtime CBS Evening News anchor. Woodruff said Ifill “left a legacy of excellence and dedication that touched all who knew her.”
■ New York filmmaker Laura Poitras endured extra screening at airports for years. Between 2006 and 2012, she was stopped more than 50 times when she tried to set foot back in the U.S., and dozens more times on domestic trips. Then, the extra searches suddenly stopped in 2012. Only now, after suing the government in 2015, the 53-year- old Poitras has learned that her travel nightmare stemmed from a movie she filmed in Iraq in 2004. U.S. troops alleged that she had gotten a heads-up about a deadly ambush but didn’t alert the military. That would have been a crime, but she was never charged. The Homeland Security Department said the government determined in 2012 that she was no longer “high-risk,” allowing Customs to stop its enhanced screenings. Poitras, who has made films on National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is worried that robust security screenings might start again and is seeking more information from the government.
■ Through three days of Bill O’Reilly’s vacation, his show’s viewership declined by 26 percent in the hands of substitutes Dana Perino, Eric Bolling and Greg Gutfeld. O’Reilly is on a nearly twoweek vacation at the same time Fox News Channel’s parent company looks into a woman’s accusation that her career was slowed when she spurned his advances. Dozens of his show’s advertisers have fled after reports about harassment settlements paid to other women. O’Reilly has denied any wrongdoing. Nielsen company figures show that so far, viewers aren’t as interested in The O’Reilly Factor without O’Reilly. Bolling did the best, with his 3.11 million viewership, down 16 percent from O’Reilly’s performance a week earlier. The 2.32 million who watched Gutfeld on Friday was down 39 percent from the previous Friday. O’Reilly’s viewership hit an average of 3.71 million after an April 2 New York Times report on the harassment claims.