CNN and PBS were the big winners at the duPont-Columbia Awards, given out February 6 at the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University in New York. CNN won for the documentary Navalny and for coverage of the war in Ukraine. PBS won for the NOVA episode Arctic Sinkholes, and for PBS Newshour’s and Jane Ferguson’s The Fall of Afghanistan and War in Ukraine.
Five TV stations won duPont-Columbias: KARE Minneapolis, WXIA Atlanta, WBRZ Baton Rouge, WTVF Nashville and KXAS Dallas. KARE also picked one up in 2022.
Norah O’Donnell, CBS Evening News anchor, and Amna Nawaz, co-anchor of PBS NewsHour, hosted the awards. “Tonight’s honorees are recognized for the quality of their work … this truly phenomenal journalism,” O’Donnell said. “But we also want to recognize the courage it took to embark on reporting these difficult stories and the doggedness to complete them. As any journalist knows, this type of journalism is met with resistance, but you never gave up.”
The awards are given out by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
CBS News’s 60 Minutes won for National Security in the Information Age. PBS won for Arctic Sinkholes, and for NewsHour’s The Fall of Afghanistan and War in Ukraine. This American Life was honored for Talking While Black, an audio report about Black Americans caught up in the backlash against Black Lives Matter. Audible won for “Finding Tamika”, a podcast about a Black woman that went missing. KARE Minneapolis won for The GAP: Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect, where A.J. Lagoe looked at violent criminals with severe mental illness. HBO won for documentary The Janes, about a group of women who ran an underground abortion operation in the 1960s.
WXIA Atlanta won for Rebecca Lindstrom’s #Keeping report on a special-needs child who was abandoned in an emergency room. ABC News Studios and Hulu won for Leave No Trace: A Hidden History of the Boy Scouts. WBRZ Baton Rouge won for Chris Nakamoto’s Murder-Lies-Hidden Evidence: Holding Louisiana State Police Accountable.
CNN won for Navalny, about the Russian opposition leader, and coverage of the war in Ukraine. WTVF Nashville was honored for Phil Williams’ report Revealed, about the relationships between politicians and lobbyists in state government. KXAS Dallas was honored for Paper Tag Nation, about criminal activity behind paper license plates.
The Washington Post won for Caroline Kitchener’s reporting on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Gimlet Media/Spotify won for the podcast “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” about abuse in Canada’s residential school system.
“This has been such an extraordinary year of events, both in trouble spots abroad and troubling stories at home, requiring reporters to span the world and dig deep locally,” said duPont director Lisa R. Cohen. “We are humbled, as always, to honor these brave and dogged journalists.” ■
