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CBS storyteller Steve Hartman to be honored by Iowa group
A journalist many consider the best storyteller on American television today will be in central Iowa later this month to accept the highest honor from the Ray Center at Drake University.
CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman will receive the Robert D. and Billie Ray Pillar of Character Award, which recognizes individuals who exemplify good character as role models.
Most past recipients have been Iowa natives, like Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, and record-setting astronaut Peggy Whitson. Hartman, laughing, says he doesn’t deserve it.
“I really feel like I don’t know how I got here,” Hartman says in a Radio Iowa interview. “I mean, as you said, a lot of people with some pretty amazing credentials have won this award before. And, you know, I’m really humbled. I think sometimes people conflate me with the folks I focus on in my stories.”
The 62-year-old Hartman is an Ohio native who may be best known for his weekly feature segment, “On the Road,” which shares moving, uplifting stories about the extraordinary people he meets. Good character, he says, starts with honesty and integrity, and it’s an evolutionary process.
“I don’t feel like I started out life with a great deal of integrity or character, but I’ve worked on it and I continue to work on it,” Hartman says. “And if I bring any message to the group there in Des Moines, I think that’ll be it, that we’re not defined by who we were in the past, but who we are going to be in the future.”
Ten or 15 years ago, Hartman says he began to notice that whenever he visited schools across the U.S., the kids already knew him. Viewers of the CBS Evening News tend to be older, so the notoriety confounded Hartman. It turns out, teachers had been using videos of his stories to teach kindness and character in their classrooms.
It was decided a curriculum needed to be created using Hartman’s stories, and a relationship blossomed with a Des Moines institution that eventually became Kindness 101.
“It seemed like Drake University and Character Counts would be the perfect partner for us,” he says, “and they’ve created a wonderful curriculum that’s used across the country by school kids who watch the stories that we find in our travels, people of amazing kindness and really true character, and use those to become better people themselves.”
The Kindness 101 video series is now being used by more than 100,000 educators around the world.
Earlier in his career at CBS, Hartman led a project called “Everybody Has a Story.” He threw a dart at a map of America, went to that place, picked people at random out of the phone book, and talked to them about something that mattered in their lives. He says he found amazing people every time.
“Through the course of that project, I realized that Americans are much kinder and have much stronger character than sometimes we give them credit for, and that has carried on to this day,” Hartman says. “We find stories every week, people we profile, but I’d say 95% of Americans probably deserve to be featured on the evening news for something they’ve done.”
Hartman will be honored April 17th at The Ray Center’s All-Star Evening in West Des Moines.
