Longtime CBS Chicago anchorman Walter Jacobson honored with DiFrisco Lifetime Achievement Award

Longtime CBS News Chicago anchorman Walter Jacobson was honored Thursday by the Joint Civic Commission of Italian Americans.At the 2025 Dante & DiFrisco Awards luncheon Thursday at Galleria Marchetti, 825 W. Erie St., Jacobson won the Dominic DiFrisco Lifetime Achievement Award. The award was established in 2020 to honor the life and legacy of the public relations executive who founded the Dante Awards.Meteorologists Kylee Miller and David Yeomans, reporter Sabrina Franza, digital producer Elyssa Kaufman, vice president of broadcast operations and engineering Tom Schnecke, and executive assistant to the general manager/associate producer for community impact Raleshia Brumfield were all in attendance on behalf of CBS Chicago — and posed for a photo with Jacobson.

Meanwhile on Thursday, Chicago Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet won the Dante Award at the luncheon. This award is presented to a member of the local news media who the Joint Civic Commission of Italian Americans deems to have answered Dante Alighieri’s call to be “no timid friend to truth.”

Jacobson, now 87, first joined Channel 2 in 1963 — first as a writer, but soon appearing on air. He worked as a reporter and later political editor for the station before switching to NBC 5 in 1971.

In 1973, Jacobson was recruited to return to Channel 2 as an anchor and commentator — working alongside anchorman Bill Kurtis, at the time a CBS News West Coast correspondent who had also previously been an anchor and reporter for CBS Chicago. In what became the most famous era of Channel 2 News, Jacobson sat with Kurtis at a horseshoe-shaped anchor desk in the front of the station’s newsroom to read the headlines, while providing his nightly “Perspective” commentary from his own desk in a corner of the newsroom.

Jacobson co-anchored Channel 2’s 10 p.m. news with Kurtis from 1973 until 1982, with Don Craig from 1982 until 1985, and with Kurtis again from 1985 until 1989. Jacobson also anchored the Channel 2 News at 5 p.m. solo from 1976 to 1986, and co-anchored other afternoon and early evening news programs for several years afterward.

He also hosted the “Newsmakers” Sunday morning program political roundtable program for several years.

Among his work as a reporter for Channel 2, Jacobson remains well-known for his February 1991 “Mean Street Diary” series, in which he spent 48 hours wandering the streets homeless with a hidden camera, and for his May 1992 exclusive interview with John Wayne Gacy.

Jacobson switched stations to Fox 32 in 1993, and remained there until 2006. In 2009, Jacobson and Kurtis returned for what was initially to be a one-night reunion on Channel 2’s 10 p.m. news, but in August 2010, the acclaimed anchor pair returned on a nightly basis for the station’s 6 p.m. news. Kurtis and Jacobson’s CBS Chicago encore run continued until February 2013.

Jacobson had most recently been providing his “Perspective” commentaries on Chicago’s WGN Radio — a role from which he stepped back in March of this year.