International reporting in any medium which demonstrates concern for humanity
AWARD YEAR: 1980
AWARD NAME: The Madeline Dane Ross Award
AWARD RECIPIENT: Bill Kurtis
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: WBBM-TV Chicago
AWARD HONORED WORK: “American Faces”
The tragic human legacy of war is the subject of award-winner Bill Kurtis’ compassionate video statement: “American Faces.”
Five years after the last G .I. departed Vietnam, Kurtis and his WBBM-lV crew returned to Ho Chi Minh City. He found the new Vietnamese “untouchables,” the 8,000 children of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Ostracized and outcast by their own society, denied schooling, the children are abandoned to the streets of Saigon. Kurtis’ reports on TV and in The New York Times Magazine were the first on this story. The U.S. has since waived immigration requirements to speed up the reunification of children and fathers.
Kurtis has been WBBM-lV news anchor since 1973, and is executive producer of a special news team to break major news and investigative stories.
Citations for Excellence went to Adam Hochschild for “In the Final Days” in Mother Jones, and to Willard Ogan and Beverly Payne of WJBK-TVin Detroit for “Somalia-Detroit Cares.”
Judges: Lawrence Stessin, Marguerite Cartwright, Julia Edwards, Meyer Lurie and Gloria Zukerman.