NPC board member quits over award to Hume

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- A member of the board of the National Press Foundation has resigned her position because of plans to present Fox News' Brit Hume with an award.

Hume, the managing editor of Fox News and its chief Washington correspondent, was selected to receive the NPF's Taishoff Award as Broadcaster of the Year during a Feb. 19 awards dinner.

But Geneva Overholser, formerly ombudsman at the Washington Post and currently a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, told USA Today Hume doesn't deserve the award because he practices "ideologically connected journalism."

To make her point, Overholser resigned from the NPF board, saying: "Fox wants to do news from a certain viewpoint, but it wants to claim that it is 'fair and balanced.' That is inaccurate and unfair to other media who engage in a quest, perhaps an imperfect quest, for objectivity."

According to USA Today, Ed Fouhy was chairman of a four-person panel that unanimously voted to give the Taishoff Award to Hume. Fouhy was Hume's boss when both were at ABC.