John Quiñones: 1952—: Broadcast Journalist

In recent years correspondents for ABC and other network news teams have been assigned stories to be used on a variety of news programs. During the 1997-98 television season, Quiñones was a member of the ABC News team assembled to report on the Albanian refugee crisis in Kosovo, for a one-hour 20/20 special and other ABC News programs. The following season ABC ran four editions of 20/20 each week, emphasizing investigative journalism and medical and consumer news. Although his reporting on 20/20 was nominated for a 1999 ALMA award as Outstanding Correspondent in a Primetime News Magazine, Quiñones told USA Today: "There was a lot of sameness, whether it was Dateline or 20/20. We had fallen into that trap." So in October of 1999, ABC introduced 20/20 Downtown, hosted by Quiñones and featuring more emotionally-charged first-person "stories with attitude," as Quiñones called them.

In November of 2000 20/20 Downtown broadcast Quiñones' "Childhood of Shame," an exposé of violence and abuse in boarding schools run by the Hare Krishna religious group in the United States and India during the 1970s and 1980s. In his 20/20 Downtown program "DanceSafe or Sorry?," Quiñones reported on the widespread use of the drug ecstasy, particularly among teenagers, and on DanceSafe, an organization that tested drugs at raves or underground dance parties and then returned the drugs to the patron. In 2001 Quiñones anchored a 20/20 Downtown program, "Law and Disorder: U.S. Disagrees with Holland's Solution to Illegal Drugs." The season premiere of 20/20 Downtown in January of 2002 featured Quiñones' investigation, "Vanished: The Mystery of the Missing Girls," about the disappearances of young girls from suburban San Francisco East Bay neighborhoods over a period of 30 years.

Quiñones was also a correspondent for ABC News's 24-hour, live, global millennium broadcast. It won the George Foster Peabody Award for 1999 and an Emmy in 2000 in the Special Classification for Outstanding News and Documentary Program Achievement. In January of 2001, Primetime Thursday aired Quiñones' undercover investigation that exposed insurance fraud by rings of doctors, chiropractors, lawyers, and medical centers, causing insurance rates to soar. For the opening Quiñones returned home, to the San Antonio Police Department, where women in the main lobby sorted through the day's accident reports and faxed them to telephone solicitors who contacted victims.