The Peabody-winning segment aired on NPR’s Morning Edition and featured interviews that had been adapted as animated shorts for PBS’s POV. The award, one of nine presented for pubcasting programs this year, recognized the oral history project’s treatment of interviews with the relatives of 9/11 victims in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.
NPR received two additional trophies for its radio reporting. Judges cited “Arab Spring from Egypt to Libya” by foreign correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for “exemplary coverage throughout the Middle East,” and “Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families,” a three-part NPR News Investigation by Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters.
POV received another Peabody for “My Perestroika,”a doc following five young Russians over several years after the collapse of communism. Credited for the production were American Documentary/POV/Red Square Productions, Bungalow Town Productions and ITVS International in association with YLE.
American Experience, the PBS history series produced by WGBH in Boston, drew accolades for its body of work, with three documentaries that Peabody judges described as exceptional — “Triangle Fire,” “Freedom Riders”and “Stonewall Uprising.” WGBH’s American Experience unit produced the films in association with Apograph Productions, Firelight Media and Q-Ball Productions.
Peabody judges honored three additional documentaries produced for PBS:
- “Bhutto,” a biography of former Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto that was presented by Independent Lens;
- “Charles and Ray Eames – The Architect and the Painter,” an American Masters biography of the inventors of mid-century Modern furniture; and
- “Who Killed Chea Vichea?,” investigating the 2004 assassination of a Cambodian trade leader, co-produced by ITVS and Loud Mouth Films and presented on POV.
KLRU’s Austin City Limits was also honored among this year’s Peabody winners. It received a “rare Institutional Peabody Award” recognizing its status as the world’s longest-running live music TV program. The music show has aired for 37 seasons on PBS. Judges cited outstanding performances by Coldplay, Widespread Panic and Randy Newman in 2011.
In addition, Japanese public broadcaster NHK won a Peabody for “Surviving the Tsunami,” a documentary presented on PBS by Nova.
The George Foster Peabody Awards, first presented in 1941, honor “excellence in its own terms” by all electronic media, “from large broadcast networks to tiny online outlets, from popular entertainment programs to independently produced documentaries, and all types in between.”