Best international reporting in the broadcast media dealing with human rights.
AWARD YEAR: 1999
AWARD NAME: The Eric and Amy Burger Award 1999
RECIPIENT: Diane Sawyer, Catherine Harrington
AFFILIATION: ABC News–20/20
HONORED WORK: “Unwanted Children of Russia”
Іп wrenching detail, Diane Sawyer and her team take viewers behind the walls of Russia’s orphanages, focusing оп SAWYER HARRINGTON children labeled as handicapped by a system that dooms them to lives of crippling neglect. Using hidden cameras when necessary and talking with some of the children and their overwhelmed caretakers, Sawyer offers a close-up view of the nightmare at work. We meet a young boy with club feet who has been left to waste in his cot. We go bed by bed through wards of children, emotionally famished, limbs and teeth rotting. We see how a child tagged as an “imbecile” can be sentenced to a lifetime of institutionalized deprivation. All in all, this was a devastating portrayal of the misery inflicted upon the most helpless members of Russian society.
Citation for Excellence:
Bob Simon and Randall Joyce
CBS News—60 Minutes II
“Shame of Srebrenica”