Post Traumatic Stress and Rubber Chicken Lunches

CBS News foreign correspondent Kimberly Dozier (shown left) told a room full of journalists and lawyers (insert joke here) that despite being peppered with shrapnel thrown by a 300-pound bomb in Iraq, she’s post-traumatic-stress-disorder free, thankyouverymuch. How, you might ask? As soon as she awoke from the explosion, she said, she started talking about what happened: “I’m a woman in her 40s from the Oprah Generation. It’s hard to shut me up.” Dozier was the keynote speaker at the Stephen Philbin Awards luncheon today at the Belo Mansion. Jump for the grand-prize legal-coverage winners, etc.

KDFW Fox 4’s Becky Oliver, Phil Fleming, Michael Tew and Joe Ellis took the grand prize for a story that alleged that firms owned by a Nigerian national received about $8.2 million in Medicare payments under false pretenses. Texas Monthly took the magazine feature honor for Michael Hall’s feature on Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, called “Craig’s List.” The Dallas Morning News’ Brooks Egerton, Maud Beelman and Kye R. Lee were honored for their series “Unequal Justice.”

On an unrelated matter, the chicken was indeed tasty. I simply wrote “rubber chicken” in the headline to satisfy the requirement that all FrontBurner postings contain at least 20 percent snark.