House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks at Newhouse’s 12th annual Toner Awards

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Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications hosted a virtual ceremony Monday night for the 2022 Toner Prizes for Excellence in Political Reporting. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the guest speaker at the ceremony.

This year marks the 12th annual awarding of the Toner Prizes, which was created in honor of late Newhouse alumna Robin Toner, the first woman to be a national political correspondent for The New York Times. She graduated from SU in 1976 with a dual degree in journalism and political science and died in 2008.

Previous speakers of the ceremony include political figures such as former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-vice president Joe Biden.

CNN anchor Boris Sanchez, a 2009 Newhouse alumnus, served as the master of ceremonies in the prerecorded celebration video.

Newhouse Dean Mark Lodato made his remarks at the beginning of the ceremony.

“Our students are beginning their careers during a fraught time for the profession. Either financial, political or technological, the factors affecting journalism and its future are many,” Lodato said. “Yet as the dean of a communications school, I am heartened to find that our students are undeterred. In fact, they are invigorated by the challenges of this new era.”

Introduced by Lodato, SU Chancellor Kent Syverud also made his remarks.

“The award is a fitting legacy for its namesake. Robin Toner’s insightful and exacting political reporting never lost sight of the real people impacted by the issue she covered,” Syverud said. “The entries in this year’s prize competition give us hope that well-sourced reporting and journalistic integrity still matter.”

Syverud then introduced Pelosi to the ceremony, who discussed current world and domestic events in a 25-minute interview with 2013 Toner Prize winner Molly Ball. Ball is a national political correspondent for Time Magazine and the author of the biography, “Pelosi.”

Pelosi highlighted the freedom of the press as “central” to American democracy, especially given the global context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The fact that Putin is suppressing freedom of press in Russia is a sign of his own insecurity, because he knows that if people know, they will think differently about what he is doing,” Pelosi said.

When asked about the biggest challenge of the freedom of press in the U.S., Pelosi responded by referring to former President Donald Trump’s effort to undermine the press by establishing the so-called “fake news.”

“In my view, the press is the most important force for democracy,” she said. “So it was clever of the former president to start talking about fake news and alternative facts and things like that to undermine the acceptance of a common set of facts about what was going on in our country.”

When asked about her visions toward the midterm elections, Pelosi said the Congress Democrats “have every intention of winning.”

“It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,” Pelosi said. “Democracy is on the ballot in November.”

Pelosi also expressed her excitement to see more female representation, as well as the rising number of women of color, in the press corps. She attributed this to Robin Toner leading the way.

“Robin set the tone for that. A person of excellence, a real journalist,” Pelosi said. “She didn’t have the role that she had because she was a woman. She had the role she had because she was the best, and she happened to be a woman and a model to so many other young women in journalism.”

Following tradition, Robin Toner’s twin children presented the awards to this year’s recipients after the interview.

Jacob Toner Gosselin, a pre-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University, presented the prize for excellence in local political reporting to David Wickert, Greg Bluestein, Mark Niesse, Maya T. Prabhu, Tia Mitchell and Isaac Sabetai of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for their story about efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Nora Toner Gosselin, a community organizer and affordable housing advocate with the Cooperative Development Institute in Providence, Rhode Island, presented the prize for excellence in national political reporting to the staff at The Washington Post for their project, The Attack. The project investigated the causes, events and aftermath of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.