CPB’s EDWARD R. MURROW AWARD
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro was honored for distinguished reporting from the world’s most volatile regions.
NPR’s Jerusalem-based foreign correspondent received CPB’s highest award, recognizing outstanding contributions to public radio, during an April 9 dinner attended by top pubcasting execs.
Garcia-Navarro reported from NPR’s Baghdad bureau from 2008 to 2009, and was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after last year’s uprising. She made in-depth reporting of events from the world’s most volatile regions a hallmark of her reporting, providing “powerful and sound-rich descriptions” of the conflict in Libya and other hotspots.
“It is fitting that Lourdes receive this award named after the famed war correspondent,” said CPB Chair Bruce Ramer. “We honor her dedication and service, as well as the courage of those like her who ensure that we are all informed about important world events and issues.”
“Oh, Lulu — you have made us so proud,” said Margaret Low Smith, NPR programming chief, in a videotape reel of congratulations from colleagues. “Your reporting from Libya was nothing short of extraordinary.”
“Never has covering the world been more dangerous, and more vital,” Garcia-Navarro said. She accepted the award “on behalf of all the foreign desk staff,” and acknowledged the support and mentorship of two foreign desk editors who were in the audience — Loren Jenkins, who hired her as NPR’s Mexico City–based correspondent after hearing an autobiographical story she produced about a trip to Cuba, and Doug Roberts, who “hates the spotlight.”
Prior Murrow Award recipients include Nina Totenberg, NPR legal affairs correspondent; Ira Glass, host and creator of This American Life; and Laura Walker, president of WNYC in New York.
GEORGE FOSTER PEABODY AWARDS
StoryCorps’ multiplatform production on the anniversary of 9/11 earned a prize for public radio and TV.
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.” American Experience 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.”
RADIO AND TELEVISION DIGITAL NEWS ASSOCIATION
WUFT, VPR led pubcasters in regional Edward R. Murrow Awards.
Among the 54 public stations receiving regional Edward R. Murrow Awards for electronic journalism, WUFT-FM of Gainesville, Fla., won eight, and Vermont Public Radio captured seven.
Five additional pubradio stations — KUNC, Greeley, Colo.; South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB); KCCU, Lawton, Okla.; WBUR, Boston; and WITF, Harrisburg, Pa. — each won six Murrows in regional RTDNA competitions among broadcast and online news outlets.
Awards for overall excellence among large market stations went to KUT in Austin, Texas, and WUNC in Chapel Hill, N.C., while WUFT and Alabama Public Radio were recognized among small-market stations in their regions.
The Radio Television Digital News Association honored broadcasters across 13 multistate U.S. regions for outstanding news reporting. Winners in large- and small-market divisions of each region now compete for national Murrow Awards, to be announced this summer.
A full listing of regional Murrow recipients by region is on RTDNA's site.
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF COMMUNITY BROADCASTERS
WFMU’s Ken Freedman will receive the 2012 Bader Award.
The award honors individuals and organizations for single innovations or lifetime contributions to community radio. It’s presented in memory of the late Michael Bader, an attorney who was a fierce advocate for community radio.
“Ken Freedman has been well ahead of the technological curve and need for innovation in public radio long before it was ‘fashionable,’” said Sue Matters of KWSO, Warm Springs, Ore., NFCB board chair. She described Freedman as a “stunning example of the trend set in motion by Michael Bader many ‘radio dials’ ago.”
Freedman is widely credited for preserving and advancing WFMU’s freeform music format and volunteer-powered community radio ethos after its licensee, Upsala College, went bankrupt in 1995.
Now operated by the independent nonprofit Auricle Communications, WFMU complements its adventurously programmed broadcast service on 91.1 FM with a robust and interactive website wfmu.org.
“Without Ken, WFMU would have been just another asset in Upsala College’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy process,” said Irwin Chusid, veteran WFMU deejay and longtime champion of its freeform approach. Freedman negotiated the deal to buy WFMU’s broadcast license, founded Auricle as the nonprofit license-holder and raised money to complete the purchase. “That’s how we came to own ourselves and become beholden only to our listeners.”
Freedman established an online presence for WFMU in 1992 on Gopherspace, a text-and-audio digital platform that was a precursor to the web. That move set WFMU on a path to providing an immersive online listening experience for rock music freaks around the globe via live and archived streams, podcasts and an iPhone app that provides access to a deep catalog of music programming. With startup funding from the New York Music Fund, WFMU launched the Free Music Archive, an interactive digital platform offering free high-quality music downloads, in 2009.
Freedman has also been an outspoken advocate for student-operated college radio stations, provided assistance to community and college broadcasters during times of crisis, and served on NFCB’s board of directors.
The award will be presented during the 2012 Community Radio Conference, June 13–16, in Houston.
—Theodore Fischer and Karen Everhart
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS
California Watch and San Francisco’s KQED received an IRE Medal for “On Shaky Ground.”
The medal is the highest honor presented by IRE in its annual competition, and one of three presented to investigative reports produced and presented by public media.
Reporters spent 19 months researching “On Shaky Ground,” a probe examining systemic breakdowns in state enforcement of seismic safety standards during public school construction.
udges praised the scope of the California Watch/KQED investigation, which included examining more than 30,000 pages of documents, creating online maps and databases, and reporting on seismic hazards at schools throughout California. Their investigative reporting was published in more than 150 news outlets and translated into four languages, and prompted state lawmakers to set new standards for bringing school buildings into safety compliance.
IRE also honored a collaborative investigation between ProPublica, NPR and Frontline — “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America,” which won for multiplatform reporting and the NPR investigation “Rising Violence in California Psychiatric Hospitals,” topping the audio/radio reporting category.
The collaborative reporting project studied practices for investigating sudden and suspicious deaths throughout the United States and found “a patchwork of different systems that bear little resemblance to the work seen on television shows such as CSI,” IRE’s judges noted.
For their investigation of California’s psychiatric hospitals, NPR’s Ina Jaffe and Quinn O’Toole of NPR looked into claims of increased violence and linked the change to “government policies and inaction by psychiatric hospitals, which rarely forwarded cases to the district attorneys for prosecution,” judges said.
In addition to recognizing outstanding investigative reporting, the IRE Awards identify the techniques and resources members used to complete their stories. Winners were selected from more than 430 entries, all of which will be added to the IRE Resource Center.
This year’s awards will presented at the 2012 IRE Conference, June 14–17 in Boston.
GEORGE POLK AWARDS IN JOURNALISM
This American Life’s “Very Tough Love” gets very big prize for radio reporting.
The program, reported by TAL host and creator Ira Glass, examined unusually harsh sentencing practices of a drug court judge in Georgia’s Glynn County, and won top prize for radio reporting in Long Island University’s annual journalism competition. "Drug courts were set up to emphasize rehabilitation instead of incarceration, but Glass’ investigation revealed that Judge Amanda Williams strayed far from the principles and philosophy by routinely piling on jail sentences for relapses," LIU said in its awards announcement. After an inquiry by the state’s Judicial Qualifications Commission last year, Williams resigned from the bench.
The Polk Award for medical reporting went to California Watch, the nonprofit investigative news service launched by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Its winning reportage, "Decoding Prime, was a year-long series by Lance Williams, Christina Jewett and Stephen K. Doig that exposed improper Medicare reimbursement practices of a California hospital chain. The stories were published by newspapers across California, and “offered a glimpse into the broader problem of waste, fraud and abuse within the nation’s $2.5-trillion health care system," LIU said.
The Polk Awards, presented last week in New York City, honor special achievements in enterprise and investigative journalism. LIU began presenting them in 1949 in memory of CBS correspondent George W. Polk, who was slain covering the civil war in Greece in 1948.
STUDS TERKEL COMMUNITY MEDIA AWARD
Two pubradio journalists were honored for vox populi reportage.
Maria Hinojosa of Latino USA and Chip Mitchell of Chicago’s WBEZ-FM were honored last month by the Community Media Workshop, a Chicago nonprofit that legendary broadcaster Studs Terkel helped establish in 1989 as a resource for local grassroots journalism.
Hinojosa, host of the NPR-distributed newsmagazine that reports on Latino communities and a recently canceled WGBH-TV series Maria Hinojosa One on One, has also reported for the PBS series Frontline, Need to Know and Now.
Mitchell started his public media career at WORT, a community radio station in Madison, Wis., where he co-founded two daily news programs. He covered immigration news and later reported from Colombia for several public radio news outlets before joining WBEZ in 2006. His reporting now covers a wide range of topics and is primarily focused on news from the city’s West Side.
The awards were presented during a fundraising event benefiting the workshop and commemorated what would have been the 100th birthday of Terkel, a writer and broadcaster who specialized in bringing the voices of working-class Americans into public dialogue. His daily broadcast on Chicago’s WFMT-FM, The Studs Terkel Program, ran from 1952 to 1997; the station continues weekly broadcasts of Best of Studs Terkel.
The Workshop presents the Terkel Awards annually to honor “excellence in covering and reflecting Chicago’s diverse communities,” according to its website. It celebrates journalists “who take risks in covering social issues by offering new or unusual perspectives on topics of general concern” and recognizes media professionals for their bodies of work, rather than a single article or series.
Terkel himself once described honorees as journalists who report news "from the people who made Chicago, news that’s bottom up rather than up, down. That’s what this is all about.”
GOLDEN MIKE AWARDS
KCRW’s Warren Olney was honored for career achievements in broadcast news.
The Radio and Television News Association of Southern California presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Olney, host of Which Way, L.A.? and the nationally syndicated Public Radio International show To the Point, during its 62nd annual Golden Mike Awards recognizing excellence in broadcast news coverage in 2011.
In another highlight for public media from the regional gala earlier this year, KPCC in Pasadena won nine awards in the heated competition among large market radio stations for Golden Mike Awards, and its newest program featuring Madeleine Brand was named best news and public affairs show.
Multiple trophies were also presented to KCLU in Thousand Oaks, which competed among small stations, and pubTV’s KCET in Los Angeles, which won among large-market television stations.
Olney spent 35 years of his career working in television news before signing on at KCRW for a call-in broadcast launched in response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Which Way, L.A.? became a weekday staple in KCRW’s news schedule. In 2000, the production expanded with To The Point, a PRI-distributed talk show examining national and international issues.
RNTA’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individual broadcasters whose careers demonstrate commitment to quality journalism, ethical integrity, community service and promotion of the First Amendment rights for a free press. The association also presented a Broadcast Legend Award to former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw.
In radio divisions of the Golden Mike Awards, KPCC’s winning entries were Patt Morrison, “Boyle Heights,” cited for best documentary; Secure Communities, hard news series reporting; Owens River, feature news series reporting; “Neo-Nazi Murder,” serious feature reporting; “Carmageddon,” news special; Sounds of South Los Angeles: Backyard Barnyards, internet news reporting; “Mars Rover,” individual writing; and “Ball Hawks,” sports reporting.
The Madeleine Brand Show, which took top prize for news and public affairs programming, launched locally in 2010 and is now preparing for a run in national distribution (Current, Dec. 12, 2011).
Five of KCLU’s entries won Golden Mikes: A Fish Tale, for individual writing; “Race for Survival,” sports reporting; “The Sounds of Peace,” entertainment reporting; “Four Legged Landscapers,” business and consumer reporting; and “The Sounds of Peace,” use of sound.
Public TV’s KCET SoCal Connected won the Golden Mike for news and public affairs program. The station picked up trophies “Fur Ban in West Hollywood,” cited for commentary and news analyses; “Separated by War: The Homecoming,” documentary; and, “The Junketeer,” investigative reporting.
In the TV division for small stations, Orange County’s KOCE-TV brought home a Golden Mike for Inside OC, which won for best news and public affairs program.
Copyright 2012 American University