Peabody Award Winners Named

ATHENS: Among the recipients of Peabody Awards at the 70th annual event, honoring the best in electronic media, were HBO’s The Pacific and TNT’s Men of a Certain Age.

Also scoring Peabody wins were Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, an Independent Lens documentary, and The Moth Radio Hour, in which the ancient art of storytelling is honored and expanded weekly.

International recipients include Report on a New Generation of Migrant Workers in China, a report from Hong Kong’s Phoenix InfoNews Channel, as well as Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children, BBC Four’s presentation of Xoliswa Sithole’s secretly-filmed documentary.

Entertainment programs receiving nods include The Good Wife, a CBS political drama, and Justified, FX’s modern-day Western. Peabodys also went to Sherlock: A Study in Pink, Masterpiece/Mystery!’s 21st-century update of Sherlock Holmes, and Temple Grandin, an HBO movie about an animal-rights activist who is autistic. Degrassi, the long-running youth drama, was honored for the "My Body Is a Cage" two-part episode that dealt with a transgender teenager.

For arts programming, the documentaries LennonNYC and Elia Kazan: A Letter to Elia took home honors. Peabodys also went to William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible and Macbeth, a Great Performances production.

The documentary honorees include If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, from Spike Lee about the recovery efforts in New Orleans; Wonders of the Solar System, about the celestial surroundings; and Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, about two iconic athletes. The Peabody-winning 30 for 30 is a collection of docs commissioned by ESPN to mark its 30th anniversary.

War reports also played a prominent role in the Peabodys this year. Recipents included My Lai, a documentary that sheds new light on one of the worst atrocities in U.S. military history; The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a P.O.V. account of one man’s personal decision and its lingering impact; The Wounded Patrol, a FRONTLINE special that dealt with the psychiatric casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and The Cost of War: Traumatic Brain Injury: Coming Home a Different Person, a multimedia Washington Post website report about soldiers’ concussive injuries and the science being used to treat them.

A trio of HBO films round out the doc winners. These are For Neda, which examined the life and death of Neda Agha-Soltan; 12th and Delaware, looking at the abortion debate; and Burma VJ, which chronicles the heroism of video journalists who recorded the Burmese government’s vicious crackdown on human-rights protests in 2007.

"For 70 years the Peabody Award has defined excellence in electronic media," said Horace Newcomb, the director of the Peabody Awards. "This list of Peabody recipients continues the commitment of the University of Georgia and the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, the stewards of the award. With that commitment, we challenge media makers and distributors to reach higher, try harder and be ever mindful of their central role in public life."

"The Peabody Awards were established with deep respect for the critical role played by electronic media in contemporary society and culture," added Newcomb. "The annual announcement of the recipients continues in that spirit to recognize work that sets the highest standards for the media industries."