Pat Simon awarded prize from Military Reporters & Editors
WASHINGTON — During its annual conference for journalists who cover the military, Military Reporters & Editors presented awards to winners of its 2025 MRE Journalism Contest. Pat Simon earns MRE’s TV/Video News Division 2 award for his coverage on WJZY Queen City News of former POW Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson.
Award Summary
Story: “Veterans Voices: US Army’s first Black female prisoner of war recounts her horrifying Iraqi experience, WJZY Queen City News, 11/11/2024
Prize Category: Best TV/Video News Division 2, Journalism content broadcast via television or video published in online media.
Best news coverage on a single topic related to the military, veterans, or war published by a local station, designed primarily for local or regional audience.
Judges’ Comments:
Shoshanna Johnson was the first Black American female prisoner of war. In this video profile, she shares her greatest fears and concerns while in captivity for 22 days. She says her saving grace now is being able to help fellow veterans with their journey through PTSD, which she continues to experience as well.
Watch the Winning Story
You can also see this story’s inclusion (starts at 11:17) in the full special program on WJZY Queen City News.
Journalist Biography
Pat Simon
Pat Simon is a Louisiana native with 40 years of radio and television broadcast news experience.
Pat truly fell in love with visual storytelling and tv news in the late 90’s when he joined the CBS affiliate in Baton Rouge as morning anchor. He covered veterans issues, politics and major stories like the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 stories of troop deployments.
Pat then moved on to anchor and report in TV markets in North Carolina, northern Alabama, Charleston, WV and South Texas. His hard-hitting investigative reports on dangerous and fatal wrong-way driving on a busy bridge in Texas led to the closure of a number of bridge exits. For that, he won the prestigious Carole Kneeland Award.
Pat also won six Murrow Awards – including one for his coverage of the opioid crisis and another for his documentary “Summer of ’42: The Coastal Bend Goes to War.”
Pat has been nominated for more than 20 regional Emmy Awards and won an Emmy for his Human Interest story about a teenager who built food pantries for veterans who suffered from food insecurity. An Iraq war combat veteran himself, Lt. Col. Pat Simon served 30 years in the US Army (Active, National Guard and Reserve) and retired in 2018.
Pat most recently was recognized as a Top Ten Military Veteran in Journalism in the nation.