RT America’s Chris Hedges nominated for Daytime Emmy

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who hosts ‘On Contact with Chris Hedges’ on RT America, has been nominated for one of the most prestigious accolades in the TV world, the Outstanding Information Talk Show Host in the annual Daytime Emmy Awards.

Hedges’ weekly interview show recorded at RT America’s New York bureau, features “dissident voices” often missing from the mainstream media. On RT, the American author of 11 books, and social critic, who is also a Presbyterian minister with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, is “On Contact” with the black sheep of the establishment.

"RT America is being nominated for the American Emmy award for the first time. Not the International Emmy, but exactly its domestic award for US channels," RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said, calling the nomination a "fantastic" achievement.

"Now we have news as just one of the innumerable revenue streams for Viacom or General Electric or Rupert Murdoch News Corp competing against revenue streams, and this has created a kind of vacuum. I think the last show on national television, on PBS that dealt with power was Bill Moyers – that's gone now. And that's fatal to a democracy," Hedges told RT.

"We need programs where dissident voices that challenge the dominant narrative, that critique systems of power, including of course corporate power, can be heard. And there is almost no space left, and that's what we've tried to do with 'On Contact,' to fill that void," he added.

Activists, intellectuals, revolutionaries, and radicals are the journalist’s conversation partners on the show, often exposing the assault on democratic systems, the ecosystem, and the greed of big corporations.

The RT America host previously spent 20 years (15 of them with the New York Times) reporting from Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and criticized the media coverage at the time of the military campaign as “shameful cheerleading.”

In 2002, Hedges won the Pulitzer Prize with a team of reporters for his coverage of global terrorism.

The 44th Daytime Emmy awards ceremony will take place in Pasadena, California on April 30. Meanwhile, you can watch Chris Hedges ‘On Contact’ every Saturday on RT America, at 4pm EST, with repeats at 6:30pm and 10:30pm.

RT has previously made it to the finals of the International Emmys News category. As the only Russian TV channel to garner four nominations for the prestigious awards, RT has been honored for its coverage of Barack Obama's first visit to Russia in 2009, for its reports on the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, for a series of special reports on Guantanamo detainees hunger strike, as well as for the coverage of the UN 70th General Assembly in 2016.