Bill Whitaker joined the Board of Directors of The GroundTruth Project in 2020. He has covered major news stories domestically and across the globe for CBS News over four decades.
He is the 2018 winner of the RTDNA’s highest honor, the Paul White Award for career achievement. He was named a 60 MINUTES correspondent in March 2014. Whitaker’s investigation with the Washington Post into the origins of the opioid crisis has won more awards than any other 60 MINUTES work, including the DuPont-Columbia University award, the Peabody, an Emmy, and an RTDNA Murrow award.
At 60 MINUTES, his reporting took Whitaker to Asia, Africa, Europe, Mexico and the Middle East. In the U.S, he has covered hot-button issues like race and policing, death penalty and the heroin epidemic. Before joining 60 MINUTES, Whitaker covered the West from Los Angeles for the CBS EVENING NEWS and other CBS News broadcasts. Prior to his assignment to Los Angeles in 1992, Whitaker served as CBS News' Tokyo correspondent (1989-‘92), covering the pro-democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square and the military coup attempts in the Philippines. He was in Baghdad for the build-up to Desert Storm. Before Whitaker joined CBS News as a reporter in November 1984, he began his broadcast journalism career at KQED-TV in San Francisco.
Whitaker graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a BA in American history and from Boston University with a master's degree in African-American studies. Whitaker also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1997.
