On Thursday afternoon, the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Awards were announced by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and, like we saw with the Pulitzers and White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) Awards, liberal, elitist outlets like ABC, CBS’s 60 Minutes, CNN, MS NOW, The New York Times, and NPR secured wins for tiresome anti-Trump topics like DOGE (including the story on the image accompanying this blog) and age-old liberal concerns about Gaza, immigration, guns, and policing.
The RTDNA – which bills itself as “the world's largest professional organization devoted exclusively to broadcast and digital journalism” – handed out 33 awards for work in TV and radio (with roughly half having a leftist tinge), starting with ABC and the now-defunct CBS News Radio capturing the top awards in their respective mediums for “overall excellence.”
ABC also took a top honor for “Continuing Coverage” in Trump’s “Immigration Crackdown” in 2025 (so, pre-Minneapolis) and “Newscast” for a World News Tonight episode covering California wildfires, while CBS News Radio’s other award was for a “newscast” covering the January 2025 air disaster over the Potomac River.
The biggest tell for how much of a leftist crock these awards are? TV and radio each had a category called “Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.”
For TV, that went to Arizona State University students and PBS’s Frontline for a package titled “Alaska's Vanishing Native Villages.” Over in radio, the DEI prize went to “Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting” with their DOGE-centric story, “Will the National Parks Survive Trump?”
The Trump-hating CNN took three awards, starting with “Breaking News Coverage” for the June 2025 U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Their win in the “Digital” category was where we got the Gaza pity party. The title of the piece read: “Three Voices from Gaza: What survival looks like after 15 months of war.”
CNN’s third win was for “News Series” that also targeted the President’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal government. CNN debased itself as pro-Taliban for this one: “The Trump administration says no one has died due to aid cuts. We went to the Taliban's Afghanistan to investigate.”
60 Minutes also had a few wins that Status’s Oliver Darcy made sure to trumpet in his newsletter Thursday night, with both coming from correspondents who’ve left the show (one resigned, the other fired).
“Excellence in Writing” went to pompous Scott Pelley for a story titled “The Bus on Route 62,” which was about the war in Ukraine, and “Feature Reporting,” was from Anderson Cooper for his profile of what became an Oscar-winning documentary called The Empty Rooms, starring CBS correspondent Steve Hartmann’s visits to the bedrooms of children murdered in school shootings.
NBC only took home one award, but it was no less political. For “Excellence in Innovation,” NBC teamed up with Stanford University for a series on “The Vaccine Divide.”
Elsewhere on the TV side, woke winners included the top “Podcast” title to MS NOW for a Rachel Maddow-hosted, anti-immigration-enforcement series entitled, “Burn Order.” In an unsurprise move, the episode linked to would seem to make reference to the Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rounding up of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
Of course, the implication would be President Trump has been doing something similar in his second term.
Pivoting to radio, National Public Radio (NPR) still won seven of the 16 categories for its work in 2025 despite having been defunded (thanks in large part to the Media Research Center). The awards haul showed they both deserved to be defunded and could survive on their own.
Two of its awards screamed virulent partisanship. In the “Digital” category, they won for screeching about “The Trump Administration's Dismantling of Immigration Courts” and a gag-worthy, pompous set of stories in the news series category, branded as “The State of the First Amendment: The Right From Which All Other Rights Flow.”
PR also took home the top “Breaking News Coverage” award for its reporting on Pope Leo’s election, “Excellence in Innovation” for the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, “Excellence in Sound” for a story involving the war in Ukraine, “Excellence in Writing” for a piece on the post-Assad regime in Syria, and “Feature Reporting” on AI.
Three other awards of note went to ABC News Radio for a fear-mongering piece, “Start Here: Inside El Salvador’s Mega-Prison” that took the “Hard News” honor, and then the Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting team (think Mother Jones on the radio) for stories in “News Documentary” about “The Landlord Gutting America’s Hospitals” and “Investigative Reporting” for a series about a wildly corrupt police department in Mississippi (in conjunction with The New York Times and Mississippi Today).
In other words, nothing on TV or radio for, say, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, or Salem Media Group.
