The Peabody Awards were announced Wednesday to honor the best in electronic media – and many programs you’ve seen and heard on KERA were recognized.
PBS programs earned 12 awards, including ones for “The Central Park Five,” Frontline’s “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” and five for films from Independent Lens and POV. Three public radio efforts also received awards.
The Peabody Awards will be presented on May 19 in New York.
The Peabodys are administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. They honor both journalistic efforts and entertainment programs.
Here's a listing of the public media programs that earned awards:
180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School
Chronicling a year at Washington Metropolitan, aka DC Met, it’s an intimate, unvarnished portrait of a high-poverty high school and the challenges facing students, teachers and administrators.
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
This history of African Americans, their trials, their triumphs and their ongoing influence on this nation, reaches back five centuries to find stories that inspire, unsettle, surprise and illuminate.
POV "Best Kept Secret"
The “secret” at Newark’s poor John F. Kennedy High School is its unexpectedly resourceful program for special-needs students, especially autistic teens. The documentary immerses viewers in the struggles of three autistic kids and one dedicated teacher.
The Central Park Five
The Central Park Five reexamines not only the case of black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were railroaded and wrongly imprisoned for a rape but the climate of fear and the media frenzy that surrounded their trial.
A Chef’s Life
A cooking/reality series revolving around a high-end, farm-to-fork restaurant in North Carolina’s low country, it’s made all the more appetizing by generous sides of local color, stereotype-defying rural neighbors and Southern food-lore.
Frontline "League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis"
Frontline’s investigative team produced a high-impact documentary about the extent of brain damage among players, a story still reverberating throughout the world of sports.
Great Performances "Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy"
A tune-filled dissertation on the incalculable influence of Jewish composers – from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz – and Jewish musical idioms on the evolution of a great American art form.
Independent Lens "How to Survive a Plague"
A real-life medical thriller, David France’s documentary evokes the alarm and enterprise surrounding AIDS in the late 1980s, when the activists in groups such as ACT UP and TAG took their fates into their own hands and changed the course of a global pandemic.
Independent Lens "The House I Live In"
Forty years and 45 million arrests after the U.S. declared war on them, illegal drugs are cheaper, purer and more available than ever. What went wrong with the campaign? The House I Live In counts the ways, not just with hard statistics but with powerful human stories.
Independent Lens "The Invisible War"
With powerful interviews with rape survivors at its core, The Invisible War is the most exhaustive report to date on the extent and causes of sexual assault in the U.S. military.
The documentary series’ six installments traced a people’s history that’s older than the United States itself and showed how Latinos, rendered to foreigners in a land their ancestors colonized, are now reshaping it.
POV "The Law in These Parts"
Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s documentary offers a long, hard look at the legal system his homeland created in 1967 to govern the newly occupied Palestinian territories and what it has meant and still means to both sides in this lasting conflict.
Public radio programs
This American Life: Harper High School
This American Life's five-month embed at Chicago’s Harper High School, where “Gun violence was epidemic.” Judges laud This American Life for producing "a pair of hour-long documentaries that were vivid, unblinking, poignant, and sometimes gut-wrenching."
Morning Edition: The Race Card Project
NPR’s partnership with The Race Card Project explores a different kind of conversation about race. The project invites people to distill their "thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words." The Peabody judges say those six-word submissions "became the basis of compelling reports about race, pride, prejudice and identity." Here’s more on the project from NPR.
The Center for Investigative Reporting and Public Radio Exchange: "Reveal: The VA’s Opiate Overload"
The Center for Investigative Reporting and Public Radio Exchange investigated a huge increase in opiate prescriptions at Veterans Administration hospitals.
