Shepard retired his dean 2013 a year after publishing his journalistic memoir Deadlines and Disruptions by a turbulent panic from crank to digital. For as many years contributions as a journalist, editor and valiant dean please join me in honoring Steve Shepard. Thanks very much, man. Thank you all very, very much for this work for the award. It's a special honor for me to share this award time with Jerry and Larry. Congratulations, guys. I want to thank two people who are here tonight. First one of my colleagues from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism who's been acting as a PJ for many years. Jerry Hester, thank you for all you do. And of course my wife from nearly 40 years, she'll a journalist Lynn Poherch. I know this is a festive evening, but I do want to take a few minutes to say a few words about a problem that concerns me and I'm sure also concerns you. And that is the low and falling levels of public trust in the news media. It would be easy to blame God the Trump for problems. As a tax on the media are outrageous, of course, to weaken our democracy and the media's role in it. But Trump is nearly panic claims that have been raging for years. According to Gallup, trust in the news media has declined steadily since it peaked at 72% way back in 1976. It has been below 50% to the last decade. And just before the election last year, trust in the news media hit an all-time low of 32%. Among Republicans, it was just 14%. Like many of you, I struggle to understand why a profession we revere so much is so mistrusted by so many people. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for the distrust. One is the perception that we are biased politically. A view most badly held by conservatives who have been told for years by top radio and Fox News that we're just so-called liberal media. But bias is hard to curve. If you have any other studies that have been done, tend to show that bias is often in the eye of the beholder. If you're a conservative, you tend to see liberal bias. If you're a liberal, the coverage looks right and right. And the deeper your conviction, my or less of study shows, the deeper your perception that things of bias against you may be its just human nature. But there is a second reason for a life trust. A reason that makes more sense to me. Many people believe that the mainstream news media is a leader. And by mainstream media, I think they mean the big city news favor of the TV networks, the leading magazines, and perhaps even the journals and schools. They charge that we ignore the concerns of every day fully. That we tend to look down at the average Joe or Jamie. That we are just coastal slums who regard the rest of America as a slide on the country. And on our news coverage reflects this bias. We cover the cross surely in a lead sport while largely growing stock are racing, which attracts millions of fans. We regularly cover the eye-to-lead and other elite colleges, but really examine community colleges, which educate nearly half of the undergraduates in the United States. We write about income inequality as an economic problem, but hardly ever looked at its victims or their communities in working class America. We cover advanced medical research at our finest big city hospitals, but we did not understand the causes of the emerging opioid epidemic on the streets of Albuquerque, Louisville, or the rest of the North America. Is it any wonder that we have mainstream media, a mystic story of the angst in America's homeland? Is it any wonder that we were stunned when Trump won the election? Hillary Clinton may not have gone to Michigan in Wisconsin, but neither did mainstream media. We just didn't know what was happening on the ground in many battleground states. Yes, for the most part, we blew it. Not just because our polling was wrong, but because our reporting was negligent. In the past, we might have relied on our strongest regional newspapers, like the Des Moines Registered in Detroit Free Press, for the Milwaukee Journal, to provide substantial reporting in the Midwest. But those papers have suffered substantial cutbacks in circulation, coverage, and staffing. Well, we might have read the question translaries in our three National News magazines, Time Is We Can US News, but two of them were essentially gone and the other one had to be shadowed and formed self. It's true that we have fresh coverage in new outlets, such as Politico, ProPublica, Busweeb, Huffington Post, or the Texas Tribune, but they're not yet enough to offset the closed bureaus and cutbacks in mainstream media. Our profession must find a better way to cover Middle America, Blue Color America, or Wurfing Class America, whatever you want to call it. We need to widen our gaze, hire more reporters with diverse economic and geographic backgrounds, and change whatever unique attitudes exist in our exclusions. Not as well easy at a very tough time for journalism, but we have no choice. If the problem is indeed the leaders of the mainstream media, it's long past time we got over. I'm really sorry if my remarks are a bit of a downer tonight. It is a festive evening. I'm grateful to all of you, SBJ, for this on, and I'm thrilled to be with you. Thank you all very much. Thank you all very much.