Bob Dotson, an award-winning NBC correspondent, gives a speech as the recipient of the 2015 William Allen White Foundation National Citation, Thursday at Woodruff Auditorium on the Kansas University campus.

The people with money and power may appear to make the world go ’round, especially the way they’re reflected in the media.

Not so, says Bob Dotson. Instead, take a look at the people standing behind them, or even completely out of view.

“Names we don’t know, but should know, are reasons our country survives and thrives,” Dotson said.

Bob Dotson, an NBC correspondent, received the 2015 William Allen White Foundation award at Kansas University's Woodruff Auditorium on Thursday.

Dotson, an NBC News Correspondent who carved his journalism career out of those people’s stories, gave the William Allen White Day public lecture Thursday at Kansas University, where he also accepted this year’s William Allen White Foundation National Citation.

Dotson graduated from KU’s William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications in 1968. Since then, according to his biography, he’s racked up more than 4 million miles criss-crossing the United States to find and interview everyday people.

Dotson’s professional awards are bountiful. Among them, he won scores for his long-running “American Story with Bob Dotson” on the “Today” show, and his third book, “American Story: a Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things,” is a New York Times Bestseller.

While at KU, Dotson earned a number of awards in journalism, said KU Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Theatre and Film Bruce Linton, who introduced Dotson.

“But he was just getting started,” Linton said. After moving on from KU, “Bob found his niche.”

Dotson — with humor, and TV-polished delivery — shared anecdotes of a railroad station janitor, a man no one had heard of who was responsible for establishing a national park, a tiny town with a big will to survive, as well as his own parents and grandparents.

In more than 40 years of storytelling, Dotson said, he learned important lessons through the people he interviewed. Americans who thrive embrace differences, they are pioneers, and they keep their promises, he said.

Dotson said his work isn’t simply “good news” journalism. Rather, he said, he aims to do an “investigative report” on seemingly ordinary people, because often they’re the ones with solutions to today’s big problems.

“Wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit,” Dotson said.

The William Allen White Foundation has bestowed its National Citation annually since 1950 to an outstanding journalist. White, for whom the KU journalism school is named, was a nationally influential editor and publisher of The Emporia Gazette who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and posthumously in 1947.

Also during Thursday’s William Allen White Day event, the journalism school presented its annual student awards and scholarships ceremony.