AWARD DATE: 1967
AWARD NAME: Best TV Interpretation of Foreign Affairs
AWARD RECIPIENT: Eric Sevareid
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: CBS
AWARD HONORED WORK: Commentaries on Evening News programs with Walter Cronkite
Eric Sevareid, internationally acclaimed for his adroitness with the pungent, often poignant phrase, is back for the second consecutive year on the list of OPC award recipients.
This time he is given the salute in category 8, for his week-night commentaries on the television news program of CBS headed by Walter Cronkite, on topics as far ranging as the unpredictability of baseball scores, and the profundities of the international monetary system under onslaught by speculators in gold. Poker-faced whatever his mood of the moment, from frivolity to solemnity, he is an oracle for millions of auditors to whom his reasoned, articulate opinions, constitute a caress to the ear, regardless
of their content.
A year ago Eric Sevareid was as easily distinguished, for his excellence in the written rather than the spoken word. He took the OPC title for the best magazine interpretation of foreign affairs with his interview in Look with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Fulbright, on “Why our Foreign Policy is Failing.”
Television’s gain was the newspaper field’s loss on the one time club reporter of the Minneapolis Journal traded his ballpoint pen for a tape recorder. In the intervening years, a plethora of distinctions from various media testifies to the keenness of his news sense, and to his expertise in projecting it to the looking and listening world.
Citation for Excellence: James Fleming, producer ABC News, for “Africa,” a citation in addition to that for TV reporting from abroad.