2022 Edward R. Murrow Award
2021 was a year when the world, live on their screens, witnessed a shocking, armed insurrection on America’s Capitol while trying to make sense of a continuing, confusing and still-catastrophic global pandemic. The country was still emerging from 2020’s racial reckoning, the overwhelming reality of a warming planet - and all of this happening in the wake of the most politically divisive election in modern American history. Through it all, ABC News covered this extraordinary and unrelenting year of news with distinction, supporting an audience trying to make sense of their constantly changing and often stressful world.
2021 truly was a transformative one for us at ABC News. We welcomed our new president and leader, Kim Godwin, a fierce advocate for excellence, collaboration, inclusion and the vital role of accurate and transparent news reporting. You will see Kim’s vision for the network throughout this entry. In 2021, ABC developed a slate of innovative, culturally impactful long-form content, initiated a specialized climate unit, launching it with an ambitious month-long series, created a slate of sharp, original documentaries for streaming on Hulu, continued to expand our live streaming service with breaking news and special programming and reached an increasingly diverse audience with an unprecedented nine-hour primetime docu-series about Black life in America.
ABC News was proud to spearhead a partnership between ABC’s owned station group and Report for America (RFA), a rapidly growing national service program, to place four emerging broadcast journalists at our local stations in Houston, Philadelphia, Fresno and Raleigh-Durham. The program helps stations fill critical coverage gaps by streamlining recruitment of diverse talent, creating a pipeline for both personnel promoted to national platforms and stories elevated to national concern.
As you will see with the rest of our entry below, ABC News Digital took major steps forward as a news division in 2020 in the digital space, whether with our record-breaking, expanding ABC News Live streaming service, impactful long-form documentaries for Hulu, in-depth original series, chart-topping podcasts, new delivery of news to a younger audience through TikTok, or our unmatched statistical analysis for political and scientific stories on FiveThirtyEight.com. Our diverse digital platforms have given viewers unprecedented on-the-ground news coverage in real time, bringing every day Americans face-to-face with the human impact of the issues that shape their world.
ABC News respectfully submits a selection of our strongest original storytelling and news coverage for your consideration, and sincerely hope you find us deserving of the 2022 Edward R. Murrow Overall Excellence Award.
Click here for 2022 ABC News Overall Excellence Video Rundown
ABC NEWS DIGITAL EXAMPLES
ABC News led the way in 2021 by fearlessly embracing new technologies to expand our global footprint and deliver more compelling on the ground stories. We enhanced ABC News Live in 2021 with a renewed focus on breaking news, outstanding exclusive interviews and specials that package all of ABC’s vast global reporting for extensive context. Despite working from home while navigating the global pandemic, the team excelled in its first year producing Prime with Linsey Davis, and added hourly anchored news updates along with special event coverage. ABC News Live had an average of 24 million monthly users in 2021, an increase of 47 percent from 2020.
ABC NEWS LIVE SPECIALS
It's Not Too Late Earth Day Special
A journey across the globe with ABC News Chief Meteorologist Ginger Zee. Through a series of unique interviews and exclusive access, the program focused on what the world can do to help slow the climate emergency.
Love and Service: The Carter Story
This half-hour special marks the 75th wedding anniversary of Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter. The two know very well that they are in the sunset of their lives and through this special they give us all a masterclass on relationships.
ABC News Live Prime with Linsey Davis
In an era when most traditional TV-news programs might try to keep the length of stories to a minimum, Linsey Davis has moved in the opposite direction. She takes the time to peel back the onion, diving deeper into the day’s headlines.
Baby Roe
In her first television interview, Shelly Thornton opened up to Linsey Davis about her mother Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. Jane Roe, who left an indelible mark on American history. She is the face behind the controversial landmark decision Roe V. Wade. Its effects are still rippling through the Supreme Court. McCorvey’s story is a familiar one, but what many don’t know is that the fetus in question survived.
Lost in the Forest
As Belarus’ authoritarian President Lukashenko stood accused of using human lives as collateral in a geopolitical battle, ABC News Prime was there to document the illegal crossing of over 16,000 migrants to the Poland-Belarus border.
ABC News Deep Dive Initiatives
America has a gun violence problem. What do we do about it?
It's a state of affairs that has become all too familiar -- and distressing -- to many across the nation and generations. It also makes the U.S. an anomaly in the developed world -- a wealthy country with an endemic gun violence issue and the seeming inability to solve it. So, ABC News decided to dig deeper -- attempting to define the problem, explain key concepts and explore solutions in this multimedia series. The team developed a Gun Violence Tracker to help illustrate the daily toll of gun violence in America in partnership with the independent, nonprofit Gun Violence Archive because of the lack of up-to-date federal data.
Original ABC News Documentaries Produced for Hulu
3212: Un-Redacted
When ODA 3212, an elite U.S. Special Forces team, is caught in a surprise ISIS attack in the Saharan Desert, four soldiers were killed and the rest stranded with no rescue or reinforcements sent their way. Military brass immediately start spinning a fractured tale to hide the full truth from both the public and the families of the fallen. Top generals and the Pentagon’s highly-redacted report on the ambush near Tongo Tongo, Niger implicated the team in their own demise by accusing them of going on an ill-conceived, rogue mission to kill or capture a top ISIS commander.
The documentary is the result of an exhaustive three-year ABC News investigation which contains explosive interviews with a top Pentagon whistleblower, the former general in charge of special operations in Africa, the team’s own commander in Niger and the families of all four fallen soldiers united in their quest to learn the truth of what happened and why.
The Informant: Fear and Faith in the Heartland
Reported on, filmed, and crafted for over a year and a half is an exclusively-booked, element-rich, and cinematically-shot yarn led by George Stephanopoulos that contains within itself much larger pieces of the very themes, challenges, darkness, and potential greatness the United States and its people are grappling with to this very day.The story traces the heights of fear in the United States around ISIS, and then-candidate Trump’s rhetoric towards Muslims and his proposed Muslim ban, and how as those fears and messages of hate continued to grow and spread in right-wing media as Trump went into office, how that influenced and was weaponized by militia groups and right-wing extremists.
GameStopped
ABC News Originals’ “GameStopped” was the first comprehensive feature documentary to chronicle the rollercoaster saga that unfolded when an army of Reddit users banded together to take on some of Wall Street’s most powerful hedge funds. The special took viewers inside the events leading up to this cultural phenomenon, its unraveling, and comprehensively explained the ramifications for years to come.
In just four weeks, under the constraints of a global pandemic, the team put together a premium-feel documentary, following the stories of several amateur investors who bet big on GameStop to varying ends, and secured newsmaking, sit-down interviews with virtually every key player, slowing down the frenetic pace of the news and really explain how things spiraled so quickly.
goodmorningamerica.com
The Inspiration List
Who is making LGBTQ+ history right now: GMA Inspiration List 2021
Throughout 2021, Good Morning America paid tribute to those who have enriched their communities with activism, knowledge, art, pride and respect, to mark Black History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, LGBTQ+ Pride Month and Hispanic Heritage Month. The first-of-its-kind lists ask celebrities and trailblazers in each of these communities who they think are making history now. With the intention of elevating new voices and movements across these communities, the Inspiration List franchise spotlights and celebrates today's changemakers.
Taboo Health Series
What do women really struggle with emotionally and physically after having a baby? This is one of the often hidden conversations explored in Good Morning America Digital's series, "Taboo Health." The series’ mission is to destigmatize taboo health topics that disproportionately affect women and women of color on everything from mental health to infertility, STDs, breast cancer and alcoholism.The women profiled in this episode dedicated to postpartum health spoke out in order to let women know they are not alone. A mother-of-two from Maryland and a mother of an infant daughter in New York have a candid conversation about what they went through emotionally and physically after giving birth. Like so many moms, the two women researched everything they could about pregnancy and taking care of a newborn, but never encountered anything on postpartum depression, even in conversations with friends.
For a variety of reasons — some long-standing, some intentional, others newer or incidental — the political institutions that make up the field of American politics are increasingly stacked in favor of one side: the Republican Party.
This stitches together a series of analysis, graphics and illustrations to show why Democrats have to win large majorities in order to govern while Republicans don’t need majorities at all.
The Negro League Stars That MLB Kept Out - And Is Finally Recognizing
In late 2020, Major League Baseball announced that it was officially recognizing the statistics of around 3,400 players who played in seven Negro Leagues between 1920 to 1948. This project is an interactive exploration of the players from the Negro Leagues. The piece displays characteristics and skills from all MLB players and provides contextual comparisons to modern/active MLB players to tell the stories of these players and their impact on the game..The comparisons in this sports feature help offer a glimpse into baseball’s biggest, and most shameful, unanswered question: What if the game had not been segregated for nearly half of the 20th century, and instead these Negro Leaguers were able to play alongside the rest of the game’s greats, free from the discrimination of the color line?
ABC NEWS ON TIK TOK
While people generally do not think of TikTok as a source for news, in 2021 ABC News reached younger audiences, delivering straightforward news through TikTok, providing a new and trusted outlet for them to get their news. Many of our top anchors have participated in content for our TikTok accounts including Diane Sawyer on her investigative two-hour special on the Turpin children, David Muir from Madagascar and George Stephanopoulos from Ground Zero.
With a robust strategy in 2021, our digital team built up a following from zero to a million, growing at a faster rate than other broadcast news organizations.
ABC NEWS PODCASTS
Start Here is ABC News’ flagship podcast - The team’s 20-minute straightforward analysis leaves listeners informed and ready to start their day. In December, Start Here traveled to Kentucky to cover America’s longest-track tornado in nearly a century. They retraced its path, talking to survivors, emergency workers and neighbors as they pieced their communities back together. Over and over again, as they recounted the chaos, the memories seared into their minds weren’t images, but sounds. In this special edition, the team pieced together the sounds that have shaped the state.
Following the award-winning first season of The Dropout, which chronicled the unbelievable rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the same team tackled the sensational and long-awaited trial of Holmes for season two. Because the trial proceedings could not be recorded, the team instead mined hundreds of hours of deposition recordings from earlier SEC and civil suits exclusively sourced for season one, and used these audio excerpts to bring witness testimony to life.For the duration of the 4-month trial, the team released a new episode each week, working virtually around the clock. Less than 48-hours after the verdict, The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial was the first and only outlet to take its audience inside the jury deliberations, releasing a full episode, including an exclusive interview with juror No. 6, Wayne Kaatz, as well as insights about the lasting impact of Holmes on Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship, journalism, and legal precedent.
Soul of a Nation: Tulsa's Buried Truth
This powerful three-part episodic telling of the Tulsa Race Massacre looks at sensitive issues involving race, historical accuracy, state-sanctioned violence, and the questions over who should be responsible for the atrocities of yesteryear.
Over nearly two years, correspondent Steve Osunsami and his team made multiple visits to Tulsa, attending all of the virtual public oversight committee meetings where Black residents have fought with local authorities on how to mark the centennial anniversary of the tragedy and the search for victims’ remains. Osunsami was standing there when bulldozers first tore through the earth, searching for the missing, and there again when scientists discovered more than a dozen bodies, finally confirming Tulsa’s age-old rumors.
