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By Sharron Hannon
shannon@uga.edu
Two prime-time series that debuted in 1999, NBC’s The West Wing and HBO’s The Sopranos,  and millennium offerings from ABC, ESPN and NPR are among a record 36 winners of the 59th annual George Foster Peabody Awards, considered the broadcast and cable industry’s most prestigious prize.
The award winners, chosen from more than 1,200 entries of programs broadcast in 1999, were announced last week by UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which has administered the Peabody Awards program since its inception.
The awards will be presented at a May 22 ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, with Matt Lauer of NBC News’s Today serving as emcee.
“It’s highly unusual for two series to win Peabody Awards in their debut season,” said Peabody Awards director Barry Sherman in announcing the award winners at a press conference at the Freedom Forum in New York. “These two programs are indicative of the creativity, innovation and commitment to quality that was evidenced by all the award winners this year.”
The millennium programs included ABC 2000, a 24-hour tour of global events conducted by Peter Jennings; ESPN SportsCentury, a retrospective on North American sports; and Lost-and-Found Sound, a sonic anthology featured on NPR’s All Things Considered throughout 1999.
In addition to The Sopranos, four other HBO programs, including two from HBO Sports, were honored: A Lesson Before Dying, a made-for-TV movie from the Ernest J. Gaines novel; Goodnight Moon and Other Sleepytime Tales, the first TV adaptation of Margaret Wise Brown’s beloved bedtime story; Dare to Compete, a chronicle of women in sports written by Mary Carillo and Frank Deford; and Fists of Freedom, a look at the 1968 Summer Olympics where U.S. medal winners Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave the black-power salute from the victory stand. Sheila Nevins, executive vice president for original programming at HBO, also was recognized with a personal Peabody Award for her work in overseeing the development and production of HBO’s critically acclaimed documentary and family programs.
Three PBS documentaries were honored: Ken Burns’s Not For Ourselves Alone, the story of Susan B. Anthony’s and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s decades-long fight for voting rights for women; Bill Moyers’s Facing the Truth, an examination of the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and Frontline: The Lost Children of Rockdale County, a shocking look at the sexual habits of suburban teens. This is Burns’s third Peabody and Moyers’s eighth; both won Peabodys last year.
ABC’s new version of the perennial favorite Annie, featuring Kathy Bates and a roster of Broadway stars, was among the TV movie winners, along with CBS’s Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years and Showtime’s Strange Justice, an account of the contentious confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
C-SPAN’s ongoing series American Presidents: Life Portraits was another award winner, along with a decidedly different biography series, MTV’s BIOrhythm, which sets its subjects’ lives to music. MTV Networks also collected an award for the VH1 Save the Music campaign.
Veteran newsmen Bob Edwards and Bob Simon won awards for their work on NPR’s Morning Edition and CBS News, respectively. Local commercial stations in Atlanta (WAGA-TV) and Cincinnati (WCPO-TV) were honored for investigative reporting. WAGA-TV explored how drug searches by U.S. Customs inspectors were unfairly targeting African Americans, while WCPO-TV served as a watchdog on a billion-dollar project to build new sports stadiums for the hometown Bengals and Reds.
Peabody Awards also went to eight international entries, including GMA Network in the Philippines.
The Peabodys differ from other broadcast and cable awards because they are given solely on the basis of merit, rather than within designated categories. Judging is done by a 15-person national advisory board whose members include TV critics, broadcast and cable industry executives, and experts in culture and fine arts. Judges are under no restrictions on the number of annual winners that may be selected.
All entries become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the UGA Libraries. The collection is one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
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