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Columns::April 7, 2003
Three faculty receive university’s Creative Research Awards
Richard Russell Foundation funds new professorship in agriculture
State’s business schools sweep GM competition
Five undergraduates receive mid-term Foundation Fellowships
Formula for success
Choosing a career was ‘elementary’ decision for education professor
Administrative Changes
Kudos
Enhancing Quality Teaching
Training Day
Campus News
Telling tales
Peabodys announced for 62nd year; 31 programs selected for excellence in broadcasting
By Eric Holder
eholder@uga.edu
Probing investigative reporting, compelling drama and powerful documentaries mark the 62nd annual Peabody Awards, given to programs produced in 2002 and announced at the beginning of April. The Peabody board selected 31 programs for recognition
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Ted Koppel
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based on the Peabody’s only criterion: excellence.
In the CNN special “Terror on Tape,” reporter Nic Robertson examines chilling primary documents--videotapes made by the al-Qaida organization to instruct and train operatives in terrorist techniques. Britain’s “File on 4” radio program explores traffic in “dual-use” materials, seemingly innocent machines and supplies capable of conversion to deadly nuclear weaponry. And in Japan the Fuji network chronicles another frightening news story, a government cover-up of blood supplies tainted with fibrinogen, a chemical corrupted with the hepatitis C virus. Thousands of Japanese citizens continued to become infected with the virus until the Fuji special demonstrated the flaw in the blood supply.
Three local television stations in the United States were recognized for outstanding investigative reports. Milwaukee’s WISN-TV reporters exploring fire safety in the home discovered, to their own surprise, that smoke alarms rarely waken sleeping children. Their story also startled the fire safety industry and led to important new research. A new federal statute resulted from the work of KPRC-TV, Houston, following a story on military restrictions on use of DNA databases collected for all military personnel. A murder followed a rape case in which a suspect was never tested because of these regulations. And in “Fake Drugs, Real Lives,” Dallas station WFAA-TV uncovered a conspiracy in which local police framed suspects charged with drug distribution and kept for themselves substantial sums used to buy drugs. The “drugs” cited in the indictments were not cocaine, but a common building material.
“Once again,” says Peabody Director Horace Newcomb, “the Peabody Award crosses all media boundaries and explores all media avenues to recognize excellence wherever it can be found. We set the standard for the media industries and will continue to recognize the most outstanding work in every genre, every medium and every venue.”
Barbara Walters will present the 62nd set of Peabody Awards on May 19 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. The Arts and Entertainment network will air the lunchtime presentation in June.
“A&E network has a long- standing commitment to providing our viewers with excellence in programming,” says Robert Debitetto, A&E’s senior vice president for programming. “In the spirit of that tradition, we are delighted to bring these prestigious awards to a national audience.”
Looking to the most recent television season, the Peabody board selected NBC’s Boomtown, a police program built on an innovative narrative style in which a single event is examined from multiple perspectives. Fox network’s stalwart Boston Public, from producer David E. Kelley, received a Peabody for a single episode, a highly charged exploration of the use of the N-word in the classroom. And HBO’s quirky family melodrama, Six Feet Under, was recognized for presenting “a family searching for the meaning of life in the context of death.”
HBO garnered two more Peabodys, one for the historical drama The Gathering Storm, another for Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam. Storm examines Winston Churchill’s return from political obscurity to the height of power on the eve of World War II. The board felt that Poetry Jam proves that “poetry is alive and well--and loud, funny and provocative”--on television.
A Peabody went to Showtime’s Bang, Bang You’re Dead, a powerful attempt to understand troubled teens and their turn to mass violence. This original film “offers hope for assisting these young people to deal with their problems in a non-violent manner.” Court TV received its first Peabody for its second original film effort, The Interrogation of Michael Crowe, a disturbing examination of how a child can be unjustly trapped inside the criminal justice system.
Sept. 11, 2001, continued to be treated in the media this year, and three Peabodys recognized excellent programming devoted to the event. CBS News/48 Hours presented 9/11, a truly astonishing film by two French documentarians whose cameras captured the collapsing World Trade Center. “The Sonic Memorial Project,” from the National Public Radio “Lost and Found Sound,” captured recollections from a wide range of citizens’ accounts of the day. A painful yet compassionate presentation came in “The Survivors,” from ABC News Nightline. The poignant documentary focused on couples of whom one partner was badly burned in the attack on the Pentagon.
Nightline took another Peabody for Ted Koppel’s week-long examination of war in the Congo, “Heart of Darkness,” a series planned for presentation in the week following Sept. 11 and delayed until the following year.
The international scene was also explored by PBS Frontline in “Shattered Dreams of Peace: The Road from Oslo,” by the WETA/PBS documentary Bringing Down a Dictator, which explored the role of the student movement in the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, and by Taiwan Public Television’s How High Is the Mountain, an exquisite portrayal of the power of family ties to overcome age, illness, geography and politics.
An NPR special, “The Yiddish Radio Project,” provided the Peabody board with some of its most enjoyable listening. The program presents recovered recordings of music and radio programs in Yiddish. Chicago Public Radio/WBEZ received a Peabody for Stories of Home, a complicated and varied array of narratives in which individuals offer their own accounts of the meaning of “home.”
Two PBS fine arts programs received Peabody Awards. Egg: The Arts Show is a regular series from WNET exploring the arts from many angles. “Beckett on Film,” an installment of Stage on Screen hosted by Jeremy Irons, presented original films exploring the work of Samuel Beckett, one the 20th century’s most influential literary artists.
Two PBS dramatic productions from Exxon-Mobile Masterpiece Theatre were recognized. Othello interleaves Shakespeare’s play with issues surrounding London’s first black commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Almost a Woman focuses on the success story of a young Puerto Rican woman.
Two PBS documentaries were also recognized. Nebraska ETV produced Monkey Trial, a new look at the Scopes trial. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow probes the painful question of post-slavery racism in America.
ESPN collected a Peabody Award for a most unusual sports documentary, The Complete Angler--a stunningly beautiful video tone poem celebrating nature, art and fly fishing. BBC America’s Almost Strangers tries to untangle a web of family relationships in contemporary England.
The Peabody list was rounded out with the TNT original movie Door to Door. This tour de force, produced and directed by actor Bill Macy, is based on the true story of Bill Porter, a successful door-to-door salesman despite his life-long battle with cerebral palsy. |
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