Rachel Maddow accepted the 2025 Cronkite Award for her show's reporting on nationwide anti‑Trump protests, calling the decentralized movement the "story of our age." She credited producers Aisha Williams, Holly Klopchin and Johanna Izzo and local news partners for a painstaking verification system that reviewed user‑generated material and unpublished local footage across the campaign. Maddow urged journalists to focus on citizens' resilience and responses to threats against democracy rather than only on leaders' words or actions.
Rachel Maddow Calls Nationwide Anti‑Trump Protests the "Story of Our Age" as She Accepts 2025 Cronkite Award
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow accepted the 2025 Cronkite Award on Friday, honoring her program's in‑depth reporting on nationwide anti‑Trump protests in a segment she titled "Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once." In her acceptance remarks, Maddow described the decentralized protest movement opposing what she framed as rising authoritarianism tied to former President Donald Trump as the most important "story of our age." She praised her production team and the many local journalists whose reporting helped shape the show's coverage.
A New, Labor‑Intensive Reporting System
Maddow singled out video producers Aisha Williams, Holly Klopchin and Johanna Izzo for developing a rigorous, resource‑heavy system to gather and verify footage. The process combined verification of user‑generated and social media material with a systematic scan of local news coverage from newspapers and TV stations. Her team proactively contacted local newsrooms to request unpublished footage, recorded livestreams or other material that could be amplified—always promising to credit the original outlets.
“It involves not just looking at user‑generated content and social media content and chasing those things down and verifying them and figuring out whether we can corroborate that information that we can find online relatively easily. It also means systematically scanning local news coverage from both newspapers and local TV stations, and then contacting those news organizations and asking if they’ve got anything good that they didn’t publish,” she said.
Maddow acknowledged how taxing that work can be on local journalists, expressing both gratitude and concern that the specialized skills they've honed might not be needed once the immediate surge of coverage subsides. She stressed the indispensable role of local news partners in enabling national outlets to fairly represent a decentralized movement.
Focus on the People, Not Just the Powerful
Maddow argued that in a healthy democracy journalists should prioritize reporting on citizens' responses to threats against democratic institutions rather than only obsessing over the words or actions of leaders. To illustrate, she offered a hypothetical about a distant nation where a would‑be autocrat consolidates media and power: foreign correspondents, she said, should judge that country's prospects by the resilience, creativity and scale of the public's reaction—right down to playful details like protesters wearing inflatable frog costumes.
“The story of our age, I really believe—the story of our democracy right now—is not a Washington story. And it is not easy to cover. But right now, it is the most important story in the world,” Maddow said.
She closed by thanking colleagues who adapted to a new form of reporting and urged fellow journalists to look to civic resilience as a measure of democratic health. With a final light note, she told peers when traveling to big cities: stay on the air, stay big, no state TV.
Thanking the award presenters and the newsroom community, Maddow emphasized that the people's response will determine whether free press and public institutions endure.
