CNN’s Clarissa Ward to accept 2022 National Press Club Fourth Estate Award

Clarissa Ward, CNN’s multi-award winning chief international correspondent based in London, will receive the National Press Club’s most esteemed prize, the Fourth Estate Award, at a Press Club gala in her honor on Wednesday, Dec. 7, in Washington. Ward is the 50th recipient of the award, which recognizes journalists who have made significant contributions to the field.

Ward has spent nearly two decades reporting from the front lines in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Ukraine for CNN, ABC, CBS, and Fox News. 

“I am incredibly honored to receive this esteemed award from the National Press Club at a time when the fourth estate is facing unprecedented threats around the world. From harassment and intimidation to imprisonment and violence, journalists put their lives on the line to challenge and question those in power,” Ward said. “The National Press Club has long been a leading supporter of press freedom, and I’m thrilled by this recognition.”

The Fourth Estate is the top honor bestowed on a journalist by the National Press Club Board of Governors. Previous winners include: Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Lester Holt, Susan Zirinsky, Dean Baquet, Marty Baron, Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell, Tom Brokaw, and Walter Cronkite.

The Gala dinner is a fundraiser for the Club’s nonprofit affiliate, the National Press Club Journalism Institute. The Institute advocates for press freedom worldwide, equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire a more representative democracy, and provides scholarships to aspiring journalists.

The Fourth Estate gala will begin with a reception at 6:30 p.m. followed by dinner and the awards program starting at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for the gala are $150 for National Press Club members, and $300 for members of the public.

Ward is a recipient of multiple journalism honors, including nine Emmy Awards, two George Foster Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, and one George Polk Award. She also authored “On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist,” which details her singular career as a conflict reporter and how she has documented the violent remaking of the world from close range.

Known for her in-depth investigations and high-profile assignments, Ward and her team were the first foreign journalists permitted to enter Myanmar nearly two months after a military coup in 2021. She has since reported from Afghanistan in the weeks leading up to and after the fall of Kabul and most recently from Ukraine, where she has spent more than 10 weeks this year covering the ongoing Russian invasion.

In late 2020, Ward led the two-time Emmy Award-winning investigation of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, even confronting a suspected member of the elite Russian toxins team at his home outside Moscow.

In 2019, her months-long, Emmy Award-winning investigation into Russia’s growing use of mercenaries – Putin’s Private Army – included the first on-camera interview with a former fighter for Wagner, Russia’s most notorious private military contractor. After visiting a diamond mine with ties to a Russian oligarch in the Central African Republic, Ward and her team were followed and intimidated by a car full of Russians. After their reports came out, they were targeted by a Russian media propaganda campaign trying to discredit their reporting.

Ward has reported extensively in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011, with multiple undercover assignments in the country. As one of the last Western reporters to visit rebel-held Aleppo, Ward was asked to address a UN Security Council meeting on the embattled Syrian city in 2016, stating, “There are no winners in Aleppo.”

She has conducted many interviews with world leaders, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as well as former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former CIA Director and retired US Army Gen. David Petraeus.

Ward graduated with distinction from Yale University, and in 2013 received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Middlebury College in Vermont. She speaks fluent French and Italian, conversational Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and basic Mandarin.