PBS's Erbé Wins Immigration Journalism Award

By CIS on June 3, 2014

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 3, 2014) - Bonnie Erbé, host and executive in charge of "To the Contrary", is the 2014 recipient of the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration. The award, presented annually by the Center for Immigration Studies, highlights good reporting in a field where that is rare.

Erbé's in-depth reporting on immigration's effects on health care, poverty, and natural resources, as well as on birth tourism, have gone beyond the horse-race coverage of proposals before Congress that seems to crowd out so much else.

View the video from the 2014 Katz Award Ceremony

View the transcript from the 2014 Katz Award Ceremony

View more information on the Katz Award

"To the Contrary", now in its 22nd year on the air, features a rotating panel of well-known women journalists and commentators, with a variety of political views, covering the gamut of significant issues, including presidential and congressional politics, family and medical leave, women in the workplace, the environment and population, health care, Supreme Court decisions and gun control. Erbé's program has been repeatedly honored, just this year as Best TV Talk Show from American Women in Radio & Television. The program has also been recognized for financial reporting, for its coverage of mental illness, and more.

Erbé has covered politics for decades, starting in local TV in Tampa, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, then on radio at UPI, Mutual, and NBC. She was also a columnist for Scripps Howard for more than two decades, until the news service was closed last year.

The Katz award was inaugurated in 1997 to highlight good reporting in a field where so much of the coverage is marred by more than the usual degree of bias. It is named in memory of Eugene Katz, a native New Yorker who, after attending Dartmouth and Oxford, started his career as a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman. In 1928, he joined the family business, working as an advertising salesman for the Katz Agency, and in 1952 became president of Katz Communications, a half-billion-dollar firm which not only dealt in radio and television advertising but also owned and managed a number of radio stations. Mr. Katz was a member of the Center for Immigration Studies board until shortly after his 90th birthday in 1997. He passed away in 2000.

Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-466-8185, [email protected]