RIAS Media Prize Winners: Whitaker and “60 Minutes” on prison reform

CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and correspondent Bill Whitaker won the RIAS Media Prize once again in 2020 for their stirring report about prison reforms being enacted in Connecticut and how those reforms were inspired in part by looking across the Atlantic at Germany, the country’s treatment of prisoners and the emphasis placed on rehabilitation.

Below is a segment from the story aired in 2019 that the RIAS Media Prize Germany picked in 2020 as the Best TV story of the year. It was Whitaker’s second RIAS Media Prize in three years after a related story he did looking at German prisons won the 2017 RIAS Media Prize.

The RIAS Media Prize ceremony will be held in Berlin in early June for the first time since in 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the annual awards ceremony in 2020 and 2021. An independent jury of journalists continued to pick winners in the television, radio and digital categories for German-American exchange program. A total of 17 winners from all three years 2020, 2021 and 2022 will be honored at the ceremony.