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College of Liberal Arts honors David Kerley (Journalism ’79)

By Shelly Cone, journalism senior

War, presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, the shootings at Virginia Tech. ABC News correspondent David Kerley has seen it all, and yet being recognized as the 2015 College of Liberal Arts Honored Alumnus surprised and humbled him, he said.

“I saw these ceremonies when I was here 36 years ago and never thought that I would be honored by my university,” said Kerley, who returned to campus in November to accept his honor and address the campus.

David Kerley; honored alum
David Kerley meets with students in the newsroom of Mustang News.

Every year each of Cal Poly’s six colleges names an Honored Alumnus, and this year Kerley was one of those honorees. Kerley has remained an active alumnus, even sitting on the Advisory Board of the Journalism Department. He said he credits Cal Poly with changing his career pathway and his life.

“That journalism department meant so much to me that when it fell on hard times and somebody asked ‘Can you help?’ I joined a lot of my former colleagues who came out of a really halcyon time of the journalism department in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. I want to see that again for Cal Poly,” Kerley said.

His wife, Janet Kerley, whom he met when the two worked together in Seattle, talked about how proud she is of her husband’s honored alumnus status as well as all his achievements. She called Kerley a smart man who has the ability to observe things quickly. Even more impressive, she said, is his commitment to journalistic integrity.

“It truly is about truth to him,” she said. “He is very good about presenting the full truth and facts and not letting emotion or points of view get in the way.”

Classmate and former colleague Kevin Riggs (Journalism ’78) said he was thrilled when he heard Kerley was given the honor.  

“Dave is the real deal,” said Riggs, who was assistant news director at Cal Poly’s KCPR-FM when Kerley was news director there in the 1970s. Now senior vice president at Randle Communications in Sacramento, Riggs spent 30 years as a TV reporter, some of those years working alongside Kerley.

“Dave is somebody who really does believe in the mission of journalism,” Riggs said, “and to be performing to a national and global audience the way he does really speaks to his abilities – and also to the education he got here at Cal Poly.”

During his campus presentation, Kerley discussed the changes in journalism and new news outlets like “Vice,” which Kerley called point-of-view journalism – and it’s nothing new. “To suggest to me that Vice is like the new journalism, uh uh, not in my mind,” Kerley said.

Instead he said he likes to use a perspective he learned from another journalist: journalists are like the first person to take a torch, go to the back of the cave and tell the others what’s back there.

“That’s what we do. We go to the back of the cave and tell people what’s going on,” Kerley said. “And the only thing that changes is what do we decide we want to talk about at the back of the cave? Is it Kim Kardashian or is it the battle against ISIS in Syria?” 

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