Winners Announced for Peabody Awards

ATHENS, April 3:
Recipients of the 67th Annual Peabody Awards, including 30 Rock and Dexter, were unveiled at a ceremony at the University of Georgia campus, and
will be presented to winners on June 16 at a luncheon at New York City’s
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Recipients include Comedy
Central’s cable-news satire The Colbert Report, the documentary A Journey Across Afghanistan:
Opium and Roses, the public-radio
series Whole Lotta Shakin and
the public-service campaign Univision’s Ya Es Hora.

Entertainment series
selected include 30 Rock, which
airs in the U.S. on NBC, and Project Runway, Bravo’s fashion-designer competition. AMC’s Mad
Men scored a nod, as did Nimrod
Nation, an eight-part documentary
series from Sundance Channel, and Dexter, Showtime’s serial-killer drama that has been repurposed for CBS.

News reports receiving
Peabodys are Wounds of War—The Long Road Home for Our Nation's
Veterans, a series of reports by ABC
News correspondent Bob Woodruff; CBS
News Sunday Morning: The Way Home,
about two women veterans who lost limbs in Iraq; and 60 Minutes for “The Killings in Haditha” which questions the
conventional wisdom about the killing of civilians by U.S. soldiers.

Planet Earth was honored, as was Independent Lens for Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life. NATURE: Silence of the Bees and Design Squad were also among this year’s recipients.

Awards also went to Taxi
to the Dark Side, which nabbed an
Oscar this year; Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which focused on the controversies surrounding
the teaching of evolution in public schools; and mtvU: Hall of Us, a public-service campaign and website for
colleges students struggling with depression.

Among the other
documentaries to receive Peabodys are Sisters in Law, another installment of Independent Lens; Cheney's Law, from Frontline,
which explores the current U.S. VP’s three-decade long campaign to expand the
power of the presidency; Art:21—Art in the 21st Century, where four artists explain their “protest” art;
and Craft in America: Memory, Landscape and Community, which focuses on furniture makers, quilters
weavers and other craft-artists.

The winners were chosen by
the Peabody Board, which is a 16-member group comprised of television critics,
broadcast and cable industry executives, and experts in culture and the arts.
The awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, with Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly
News, as the master of ceremonies.

"The range of genres,
the variety of topics and the consistently high quality of submissions for
Peabody consideration indicated again that amazing work is being done in
electronic media," said Horace Newcomb, the director of the Peabody
Awards. "The Peabody Board labored through many hours of discussion and
deliberation to select these works from among more than a thousand outstanding
entries.”

He continued: "As
always, it was exciting to discover deeply serious work in entertainment,
entertaining work in documentaries, education in news reports and thoughtful
perspectives on the news in everything from game shows to parody. The Peabody
Awards, in all their diverse and innovative examples, are models for what can
and should be done across the board."

—By Kristin
Brzoznowski