Peter Lisaor's breezy Chicago Daiily News writing helped establish Chicago’s mid-century reputation for muscular, no-nonsense journalism.
Peter Lisagor died in 1976, just before I graduated from j-school at Wisconsin. As the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, his political reporting was syndicated in large and midsize newspapers nationwide, which its how I would have read them (when Erin Gessert, a journalism graduate student at DePaul University, asked about Lisagor, I suggested checking archives such as NewsBank).
Lisagor was a lively writer; a collection of Daily News reporting, Done in a Day, reprints a 1959 dispatch on a trip to the U.S. by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in which he writes, “Traveling with Khrushchev is like holding a stick of dynamite with a sputtering fuse.”
One sign of Lisagor’s reputation was his frequent TV appearances on “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.” The format of the Sunday talk shows at that time was a panel of reporters would be assembled to ask a newsmaker questions for 30 minutes straight. Lisagor was also the long-running, early host of “Washington Week in Review,” essentially first with the now common political news format in which reporters analyze recent events. I remember his reporting of both parties as closely observed and nonpartisan.
The Chicago Headline Club started its annual local journalism awards in 1977 in Lisagor’s name, The idea of establishing a memorial to Lisagor was likely the driving force in getting the awards program started. The early format is essentially unchanged, from the judging by Society of Professional Journalists chapters to the sketch of Lisagor oy Daily News editorial cartoonist John Fischetti engraved on award plaques. As a new member, I attended the first Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism presentation at Marina City. Howard Dubin would have been a club officer about that time; he was president in 1977-78.
For the first 10 years of the Lisagor Awards, a “Washington Week” retrospective was part of the awards program; when I chaired the Lisagor Awards in the 1990s, I found wire-service photos of Lisagor with LBJ and “Face the Nation” clips in which Lisagor would respectfully but persistently press for direct answers. Lisagor’s reporting has faded from memory but the awards do justice to his drive to look for the revealing moment and tell it without pandering to his audience.
