Leaders of the TV and radio industries gathered in New York Monday to celebrate the achievements of two of their own while reflecting, in the shadow of a receding pandemic, the resilience of their business.
In the limelight at the annual Broadcasters Foundation’s Golden Mike Awards dinner were legendary sportscaster Leslie Visser, who received the organization’s inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, and Hilton Howell, chairman, president and CEO of Gray Television, who accepted the organization’s 2022 Golden Mike Award.
The glittering event, held as always at the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, was for many the first opportunity to dress up, abandon Zoom screens and come together in person since March of 2020, when a pandemic transformed lives and their way of operating at work. Tales of missing shoes, overly snug dresses and forgotten accessories abounded as people laughed and reunited to catch up and talk shop.
About 250 people were in attendance and the foundation raised $300,000 to aid its longtime efforts to “to improve the quality of life and maintain the personal dignity of men and women in the radio and television broadcast profession who find themselves in acute financial need due to a critical illness, accident, advanced age or other serious misfortune.”
Visser, who began her career as a sportswriter at the Boston Globe and then moved into broadcasting, regaled the crowd with tales of making her way as a pioneering woman in a male-dominated profession. Realizing she wouldn’t be allowed into the locker room for post-game interviews in her early days, she headed for the parking lot, where she waited for players to emerge and secured interviews.
Later, after becoming the first woman to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the first woman to report from the Super Bowl sidelines and the first woman to cover the NFL as a beat, she recalled her mother’s early advice in the title of her memoir, Sometimes You Have to Cross When it Says Don’t Walk.
Howell, who acquired Gray Television in 1993 and gradually built it from a small-market specialist into the second largest TV station group in the U.S., reminded his audience of the industry’s profound staying power.
“Who could have written the script of the past two years?” he asked. As stations “broadcast from people’s dining rooms and anchors presented from their back yards,” the industry served its audiences and “reasserted its local connection with our communities.”
“That connection has always saved us,” said Howell, who grew up in Waco, Texas, as the son of a station owner. “I heard from childhood about how the sky is falling in local TV, that the arrival of the remote control and later the arrival of streaming would be an extinction event for local broadcasting. Yet here we are.”
“Good local broadcasting gets results,” Howell said. “We innovate and collaborate to create compelling content, to inform, engage and protect our communities.
“We seek solutions,” he continued. “We do in fact change the world for the better… and despite all the Chicken Littles out there, the sky is still pretty darn blue.”
The Broadcasters Foundation of America provides grants to people in the industry who fall upon hard times due to disease, disaster or other unforeseen circumstances. It provides an anonymous safety net in cases of critical illness, death of a spouse, advanced age or serious misfortune. To learn more and make a donation, click here.
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