The White House Correspondents’ Association at its annual dinner April 29 honored two legendary and deeply missed journalists – the late Gwen Ifill of the PBS NewsHour and Washington Week and the late Bill Plante of CBS News.

The WHCA honored their memories with the Dunnigan-Payne Prize, name for two trailblazing women journalists.

Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News, the WHCA’s vice president, presented medallions to family members Bert Ifill and Chris Plante, and recalled her own relationships with the late journalists.

“Gwen and I were colleagues at NBC back in the 90s. I didn’t know her well then, as I was visiting DC covering my first presidential race. I casually shared that I didn’t really get why a campaign made certain behind the scenes moves. As Gwen headed to her car, she stopped, turned around, and offered up her experienced and smart take on what was really going on,” O’Donnell said.

“That helped me in the moment but she gave me something bigger. She showed me that real pros… stop, turn around and help out. Her example made me want to be that kind of colleague. Thank you Gwen.

“And Bill, more than 50 years at CBS, was a master of the shouted question at the White House. Many of us also knew Bill’s gift for making presidential trips real life memories by finding time to experience the flavor of places we visited. Around the world, he would select a perfect restaurant, the right bottle of wine and bring together a group of us to hear his stories and share our own. A rooftop in Vietnam hearing about his war coverage was exceptional. He encouraged us to savor the journey of this job. Thank you Bill.”

The medallions were presented to Bill’s son Chris Plante and Gwen’s brother Bert Ifill.

About the award

The Dunnigan-Payne Prize was created in 2022 to raise up the achievements of Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, the first two African American women to serve as members of the White House press corps. In the prize’s inaugural year, Ms. Dunnigan and Ms. Payne were the initial recipients of this award that will carry their names to honor the career achievements of White House correspondents.

William “Bill” Plante was one of the longest serving White House broadcast journalists in history, working on the beat for 35 years covering the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He served as WHCA president from 1986-87. He was beloved in the press corps for his kindness, but didn’t pull punches with the politicians he covered. He used his recognizable baritone voice to lob questions, even when the White House wished he wouldn’t.

“Our asking questions should not be dependent on what the White House thinks the mood or the tone of an event should be,” Plante said in 2007. “And the fact that they say ‘no questions’ or don’t allow time for questions really has nothing to do with it. They don’t have to answer, but I think we need to preserve and aggressively push our right to ask.”

About the honorees

In addition to his long career covering the White House, Plante also covered the State Department and had served four tours covering the war in Vietnam, including the fall of Saigon and Cambodia, the civil rights movement and all the presidential elections from 1968 to 2016.  His remarkable tenure at CBS News spanned 52 years.

Gwen Ifill, PBS NewsHour and Washington Week

Gwen Ifill was a groundbreaking journalist who covered eight presidential campaigns, moderated two vice presidential debates in 2004 and 2008 and in 2016, while battling cancer, moderated a Democratic primary debate. She was a co-anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour and moderator and managing editor of Washington Week on PBS. She joined the network in 1999 to helm Washington Week, becoming the first African American woman to host a nationally televised public affairs program. At that time, she also joined the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a senior correspondent, again making history in 2013 alongside Woodruff as the first female anchor team for a national evening newscast.

Ifill covered the White House for the New York Times from 1991-1994 and moved to broadcasting at NBC News covering politics and Capitol Hill from 1994-1999. She began her reporting career with the Boston Herald, followed by assignments with the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Washington Post.

WATCH IT LIVE STREAMING HERE.

6 – 730 PM EDT. Wednesday March 22

The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce an event discussing the press and the presidency in cooperation with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

The panel discussion will explore the relationship between the White House press and presidents, including how both reporting and presidential communication have changed with new media such as radio, television, and Twitter.

“A big goal of mine for this year is to educate the public about how White House correspondents do our jobs and the important role an independent press corps plays,” said Tamara Keith, president of the WHCA and moderator of the discussion. “We are grateful for the partnership of the Kennedy Library since President Kennedy was the first president to truly harness the power of television.” 

The event will be at the library in Boston from 6 pm – 730 pm EDT, March 22, with attendance open in person and viewing available online.

The panel will include:

Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. In that time, she has chronicled the final years of the Obama administration, covered Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for president from start to finish and documented the Trump administration, from policy made by tweet to the president’s COVID diagnosis and the insurrection. In the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration, she focused her reporting on the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. She went on to work at member stations KQED, KPCC and WOSU. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association and is currently its president.

Darlene Superville

Darlene Superville is a veteran Associated Press White House reporter who has covered Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Her portfolio included coverage of first ladies Michelle Obama, Melania Trump, Jill Biden and a little bit of Laura Bush. She is a co-author of “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady,” about Jill Biden. Before being assigned to cover the White House, Ms. Superville was a supervisor on the AP’s national political desk in Washington for the 2008 presidential election that saw Obama become the nation’s first Black president. She also held that role during the 2012, 2004 and 2000 election cycles. Darlene has covered Congress, federal agencies and spent several years on an enterprise writing team. She is a native New Yorker and graduate of New York University.

Doug Mills

Doug Mills has worked as a photographer in the Washington bureau of The New York Times since 2002. Previously, Mr. Mills served for 15 years as chief photographer for The Associated Press in Washington. He joined The A.P. after working for four years in the Washington bureau of United Press International. Mr. Mills won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1993 with The A.P. for team coverage of the Clinton/Gore campaign and won a second Pulitzer Prize for photography with The A.P. for its team investigative coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Mr. Mills has also won numerous awards in the White House News Photographers Association. Born in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Mr. Mills studied at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Va. Mr. Mills is married with two daughters and lives in Arlington, Va.

Ellen Fitzpatrick

Ellen Fitzpatrick, who holds a PhD in History from Brandeis University, is Presidential Chair and Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and has taught previously at Harvard University, M.I.T. and Wellesley College. She is the author and editor of eight books, including The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016), the New York Times bestselling, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation (Ecco, 2010); and History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980 (Harvard University Press, 2002). She has been interviewed as an expert on modern political history by numerous print, television, and radio outlets including the PBS News Hour, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio. In 2021, she received the University of New Hampshire’s highest award for excellence in teaching.

Click HERE To register for onsite attendance

For more information, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press

The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that comedian Roy Wood Jr. will be the featured entertainer at its annual dinner on April 29, 2023. A correspondent for The Daily Show, Wood is an accomplished standup comedian and podcast host who uses satire to shed light on serious topics including race and discrimination in the US. His latest hour-long standup special Imperfect Messenger is now streaming on Paramount+. 

Wood was a broadcast journalism major at Florida A&M University in 1998, when he fell in love with comedy and launched his career in standup. He has been featured on just about every late-night comedy show on network TV, HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, and was one of the top three finalists on Last Comic Standing on NBC. He also executive produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary The Neutral Ground.

While still finishing his degree and touring as a comedian, Wood was “the voice of morning news WVHT 105.7” in Tallahassee. He later hosted The Roy Wood Jr. Show on WBHJ in his hometown of Birmingham and spent three years in Atlanta at WALR. 

Wood joined the “Best F#@ing News Team” as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in 2015. But Wood doesn’t just play a reporter on TV. Journalism is in his genes. His late father Roy Wood Sr. was a pioneering radio and television journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the South African Soweto race riots, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe civil war and went to the front lines in Vietnam to report that members of black platoons were dying faster than white soldiers. Wood Sr. received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“It’s an honor to be a part of a long-running tradition of celebrating those members of the media, who work so hard to uncover the truth, and hold our government accountable,” said Wood Jr. “It will be a great night that will go down in the history books, or not, depending on which state you live in.” 

This year’s dinner program will again be produced by Bob Bain productions, who helped make last year’s WHCA dinner a success.

“Roy Wood Jr. brings a journalistic eye to his comedy. He’s hilarious – but also makes sure his audiences are thinking as they laugh,” said Tamara Keith, WHCA president and White House correspondent for NPR. “My aim with this year’s dinner is to lift up the importance of a free and independent press to a functioning democracy, so I am thrilled to be able to feature a comedian who gets what journalism is all about.”

The WHCA dinner is traditionally attended by the President and First Lady as well as senior government officials and members of the press corps. Proceeds from the dinner help finance all the WHCA’s work, including awards recognizing excellence in the profession and scholarships for journalism students, awarded with the hope of building a next generation of White House journalists who reflect America.

The WHCA comprises hundreds of members from the worlds of print, television, radio and online journalism. Their work, for outlets based in the United States and overseas, reaches a global audience.

The all-volunteer WHCA board works to ensure that the journalists who cover the White House have the ability to seek answers from powerful officials, up to and including the President. That includes everything from advocating for access and managing the pools of reporters who stay close to the president to remodeling the on-site press workspace and handling logistics for the press corps following the president on overseas trips.

For more information, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press.

Mr. Wood is repped by Mainstay Entertainment, CAA and Sechel PR.

Remarks by WHCA President Steven Portnoy at the association’s annual dinner on April 30:

President Biden, Dr. Biden, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

We journalists are the inheritors of a public trust. 

We’re the guardians of the people’s right to know what their government is doing in their name, with their money.  We are the questioners, the contrarians, posing provocative queries so that government officials may be made to explain their views and defend their actions for posterity and for the whole free world to see.

And as in the case of the women we’ve honored here tonight, we are a privileged few, uniquely positioned to bring public concerns directly to those who hold — or seek — power. 

There is no perfect way to do this work. It is as it ever was. But it is now at all times and increasingly for profit subject to derision and suspicions of bad faith or political motivation. 

Working journalists in the United States have come under assault: harangued while covering street demonstrations, taunted at political rallies, harassed on social media, their equipment gleefully destroyed at the Capitol on January 6th. 

In dangerous places all over the world, journalists are subject to jailing and intimidation for their use of pen, pad, camera and keyboard. They’ve been tortured, murdered, kidnapped, and we must never forget. 

Mr. President, at Table 48 tonight is a woman named Debra Tice. Mrs. Tice, would you please stand? 

Mrs. Tice’s son, Austin, is a colleague of ours at the Washington Post, McClatchy and CBS, and he should be here with us tonight. But he’s been held captive in Syria since 2012.

As we take note of Trevor Reed’s return, our thoughts tonight are with Austin Tice, and our collective hopes are that after nearly ten years in captivity he will soon return home safely to his mother, his father, his colleagues and his friends.

We are thinking tonight of our colleagues in unsafe places everywhere — of Northern Virginia resident and Washington Post contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza, arrested this month in Russia for the high crime of speaking the truth about Vladimir Putin’s war atrocities in a speech to American lawmakers. The charge is an affront to free people everywhere. 

The brave journalists you’re about to see have been killed in the past two months covering Russia’s war in Ukraine.

(VIDEOTAPE OF JOURNALISTS) 

Needless to say, our prayers are with their families and with Benjamin Hall of Fox News, who continues his recovery tonight. 

Seventy-five years ago, before he demonstrated the power of television to highlight hypocrisy, and allowed Americans to see and reject demagoguery, Edward R. Murrow read to his CBS Radio audience from his contract. He noted that he agreed in writing that his broadcasts would contain facts reported “as fairly as possible to enable the listener to weigh and judge for himself.”

We who enjoy the protections of a free press know and should always remember those protections were established for the people. It is the people’s right to know. It is the people’s right to decide this country’s future course. 

To gird our democracy, we reporters believe that in the United States no man or woman who holds — or seeks — power is above being questioned. Our democracy depends on journalists shining light and truth upon darkness and lies, and bringing accountability to officials at every level of our government.

We gather here tonight to honor that work and to celebrate the American freedoms of speech, press, religion, petition and peaceable assembly, without which our democratic constitutional republic could not survive. 

And in that respect, we proudly continue our tradition of raising a glass in a toast to the First Amendment and to the President of the United States.

Pioneering African American Reporters Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne to be First Recipients of the New “Dunnigan-Payne Prize”

WASHINGTON, April 25 – The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce the creation of its first-ever lifetime career achievement award, named after the first two African American women to serve as members of the White House press corps.

From here on, the Dunnigan-Payne Prize for Lifetime Career Achievement will be awarded on an occasional basis at the discretion of the WHCA board to recognize meritorious service throughout an individual’s career as a White House correspondent.

The namesakes of the award, the late reporters Alice Dunnigan of the Associated Negro Press and Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender, will be the first recipients of the prize. Their relatives will be on hand to accept the posthumous honor at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington on April 30.

Gayle King, co-host of “CBS Mornings,” will present the award at the dinner.

“This association of White House reporters has never given its due to these two pioneering WHCA members who paved the way for so many,” said WHCA president Steven Portnoy.  “We are proud to see to it that Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne will be forever remembered for their service to the profession and to the American public.”

Ms. Dunnigan was the first African American female reporter to be credentialed at the White House in 1947.  She was joined on the beat by Ms. Payne a few years later.  Both women distinguished themselves during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, regularly pressing him at his press conferences – when no other reporters would – about his administration’s support for civil rights for Black Americans.

Eisenhower insisted that he eschewed racial discrimination, and that his administration was aiming to do what was “decent and just.”  But in the summer of 1954, in response to a question about whether Black Americans could count on his support for a ban on segregation in interstate travel, Eisenhower sternly told Ms. Payne that he would not act “to support any particular or special group of any kind.”

The moment – which occurred just two months after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling – sparked the headline in the Washington Evening Star: “President Annoyed by Query On Travel Race Ban Support.”

Ms. Dunnigan repeatedly asked Eisenhower about segregated schools on military bases in the south, as well as the president’s overall support of civil rights legislation. 

He eventually stopped calling on the two women at his press conferences.

As one of the first ten reporters to be recognized by President John F. Kennedy at his first press conference in 1961, Ms. Dunnigan asked about Black sharecroppers who were being evicted from their land in Tennessee simply for registering to vote.  Jet Magazine reported it was the first time Ms. Dunnigan had been called on in two years. 

“In the face of the racism and sexism of the era, these two women fearlessly brought the concerns of their readers directly to the most powerful man in the world,” Portnoy said. “It is our honor to lift up their legacies.”

The WHCA board voted to approve the creation of the Dunnigan-Payne Prize in January 2022. Portnoy credited board members Fin Gomez and Justin Sink, whom he said were key to the efforts to bring the honor to fruition.