Couric, Burns, Cochran, Rohrs To Be Feted

The seventh annual Giants of Broadcasting Awards ceremony and luncheon will take place in New York's Grand Hyatt Hotel on Oct. 1, sponsored by the national Library of American Broadcasting, which has among its missions defining and honoring individuals who played pivotal roles in creating and advancing the electronic arts.

Charles Osgood of CBS Sunday Morning and CBS Radio will continue in his role as master of ceremonies. The luncheon is LAB's largest fundraising event, providing the resources to maintain its broadcasting archives and collection of oral histories. The cocktail reception begins at 11:30 a.m. and the awards ceremony begins at noon.

Reservations for tables and individual tickets to the event may be arranged through Jessica Wolin at 212-685-4233 or jessicawolin@hotmail.com.

THE HONOREES

Katie Couric became the first female sole anchor of a weekday network evening broadcast when the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric debuted in September 2006.  During her extraordinary career, Couric has interviewed a diverse collection of newsmakers, from presidents and prime ministers to captains of industry and cultural icons.

Prior to joining CBS, Couric completed a 15-year run as co-anchor of NBC News' Today. She has covered most of the major breaking news events both domestically and internationally, including the Sept. 11 attacks, the Columbine tragedy, six Olympic Games, the funeral of Princess Diana, the Oklahoma City bombing; the Timothy McVeigh execution, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the historic 2008 presidential election.

After losing her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer in 1998, Couric embraced the fight against the country's No. 2 cancer killer and launched the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance with the Entertainment Industry Foundation and Lilly Tartikoff to fund new medical research in colorectal cancer and educational programs encouraging the prevention and early detection of the disease.

Following Couric's own on-air colonoscopy in 2000, a scientifically documented 20 percent increase was noted in the number of colonoscopies performed nationwide. Researchers at the University of Michigan dubbed this "The Couric Effect." Last year, Couric joined primetime anchors ABC's Charlie Gibson and NBC's Brian Williams to launch "Stand Up 2 Cancer," which has raised more than one hundred million dollars to battle the disease.

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 30 years, bringing the late historian Stephen Ambrose to say: "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." Burns has produced and directed some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; Brooklyn Bridge; Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

His most recent film, The War, which was broadcast on PBS in 2007, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of nearly 40 men and women from four quintessentially American towns.

Currently, Burns is once again partnering with long-time collaborator Dayton Duncan, producing and directing a major series on the history of the national parks. Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales, The National Parks: America's Best Idea focuses on the ideas and individuals that helped propel the parks into existence. The film will be broadcast on PBS in the fall of 2009. Burns' films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 10 Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Burns was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Woo Paik is known throughout the industry as the "Father of HDTV," primarily for his development of digital compression, the building block for both satellite TV and the ongoing digital and HDTV revolution.

He is president and chief technology officer of LG Electronics and is responsible for directing all of the company's R&D activities, encompassing more than 15,000 engineers worldwide. Prior to joining LG Electronics, Dr. Paik was EVP, technology for the General Instrument Communications Division (now the broadband division of Motorola). He led the Advanced Development team that vaulted General Instrument to the forefront of digital television technology.

His team developed the DigiCipher HDTV system in 1990, which is the world's first all-digital HDTV system, and later worked as a key member of the Grand Alliance Technical Oversight Group and various technical specialist groups that developed the U.S. HDTV broadcast standard.

Paik is the author of numerous technical papers and co-inventor of more than 25 inventions earning U.S. Patents in the area of digital video compression, digital transmission and digital signal processing.

Barbara Cochran's career as a professional journalist has been surmounted for the past 13 years as president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association and its foundation). An industry insider, Cochran worked as a journalist and news executive in Washington for 28 years in both print and broadcasting. She has also been vice president and Washington bureau chief at CBS News, executive producer of NBC's Meet the Press and vice president of news at National Public Radio.