2018 Honoree

Gwen Ifill

Prior to moderating the vice presidential debates in 2004, journalist Gwen Ifill had spent 23 years building her reputation as a knowledgeable, pioneering and ethical journalist. Thanks to her career-long commitment to the craft, few doubted her ability to be objective when she became the first African-American woman to moderate a VP debate. She would go on to host the 2008 debate as well. Between 1981 and 1994, she worked her way from the Baltimore Evening Sun to The Washington Post to The New York Times, where she covered the White House. She joined NBC as a Capitol Hill reporter in 1994 and moved to PBS in 1999, where she became the first African-American woman to host a national political talk show, Washington Week in Review. At PBS, she was a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Ifill died of cancer in 2016.