Katie Couric won a journalism award Tuesday for her multi-part interview of Sarah Palin that led to endless mocking of the Alaskan governor on late night shows and that some said helped derail John McCain's campaign.
The Normal Lear Center, part of USC's Annenberg School for Communications, honored Couric with a special Walter Cronkite award for national impact on the 2008 campaign.
The interviews -- in which Palin struggled to name a news source that she read daily and touted living near Russia as a foreign policy qualification -- were a "defining moment in the 2008 presidential campaign," judges for the award said.
After the interviews aired, Palin continued to be skewered for weeks on late night talk shows and, most notably, by Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey.
"I can see Russia from my house," Fey would later say in her best Palin imitation, a caricature that the real Palin struggled to shed during the waning weeks of her campaign.
Others honored with Walker Cronkite awards were ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, NOW on PBS and a slew of local broadcasters.
