Missed It: Garry Trudeau To Receive George Polk Career Award In Journalism

I totally missed the announcement that Garry Trudeau would receive the George Polk Career Award in journalism on April 10. He is the first cartoonist to ever be so honored. Luckily, Alan Gardner caught it.

I'm a great admirer of the achievement of Doonesbury as we start to get well into this final phase of Trudeau's long and admirable career. I caught his television show Alpha House in part because through his work with Robert Altman Trudeau is a pioneer of prestige television as we understand it today. It very much struck me as an older man's show, kind in a way that most shows aren't, and I have great respect for the fact that Trudeau is basically allowed to keep his preferred tone even when working in a milieu that doesn't value the underlying sweetness that's always been a part of what he's done.

Another way to look at his career, though, is as a newsman -- another outdated concept, by which mean Trudeau is someone whose work is constructed to appear in newspapers, serves the papers' mission to inform in a lot of cases, and brings with it some sophisticated editorial commentary. I think there's a chance we'll have a few more great newspaper strips, but we'll not have anything like Doonesbury.
 
posted 2:25 am PST | Permalink
 

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