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Peabody Awards: History and Expanded Profile
The roster of 2003 winners was indicative of this trend. For example, CBS News won a Peabody for its documentary investigation titled All in the Family. Working from a premise much in favor with the political left, this documentary alleged that the Halliburton Corporation was awarded a no-bid contract for reconstruction projects in Iraq not because of its vast experience in international reconstruction projects—which CBS did not challenge—but rather because it was alone among major corporations in being, as a synopsis that appeared on the Peabody Awards Web site put it, “politically-connected.” Plainly aiming to give credence to this highly tendentious claim, All in the Family suggested that former Halliburton CEO, American Vice President Dick Cheney, was guilty of rewarding his friends unjustly, at taxpayers’ expense. This attack against Cheney earned a special commendation from the Peabody presenters, who lauded the documentary for bringing “to light a broader problem—that government officials and advisors who make important military decisions often have existing financial ties to the companies that benefit from them, leading to military contracting procedures replete with conflicts of interest.” Other documentaries honored with a Peabody Award in 2003 surpassed the excesses of mere partisanship, falling into the category of unalloyed propaganda. One was a virulently anti-Israel documentary called Israel’s Secret Weapon. Produced by the BBC, it cast harsh scrutiny on Israel’s nuclear weapons program while leveling a number of baseless charges against that country. The narrator, BBC reporter Olenka Frenkiel, is an inveterate critic of Israel who has regularly used her reportorial assignments as vehicles by which to express her contempt for the Jewish state. Frenkiel had previously raised eyebrows in England when she parroted anti-Jewish libels purveyed by the Arab media, scandalously asserting that in 1947, Jews had poisoned the water in Egypt’s wells. Frenkiel’s approach in Israel’s Secret Weapon likewise displayed her penchant for purveying Arab conspiracy theories. Making no attempt to provide a counter-view, the documentary quoted Palestinian Arab activists who charged Israel with secretly with using biological weapons against them—an incendiary claim in support of which Frenkiel could summon no evidence. In addition, making no mention of threats posed by terrorism-sponsoring rogue states seeking nuclear capabilities, like Iran, the documentary instead condemned Israel for advancing nuclear proliferation, at one point likening the democratic country to the toppled dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. So crudely propagandistic was the documentary’s tenor, that Danny Seaman, the director of the government press office in Jerusalem, was moved to issue a boycott against the BBC following the program’s airing; Seaman issued an injunction banning Israeli government spokesmen from granting interviews to the BBC, canceling press credentials to BCC reporters, and precluding authorities from facilitating BBC reporters’ travel across Israeli borders. Venting his outrage at what he called the “ridiculous false assertions” contained in Israel’s Secret Weapons, Seaman noted, “We had to draw a red line rather than just complain about a consistent attitude in which successive BBC programs attempt to place us in the same context as totalitarian, axis-of-evil countries such as Iraq and Iran.” Presenters of the Peabody Award took a very different view of Frenkiel’s exercise in moral equivalency, hailing Israel’s Secret Weapon for its “bravery and determination in bringing to light this story of nuclear proliferation.” Related political considerations seemed to inform the Peabody board’s decision to honor another documentary, Hugo Chavez: Inside the Coup. Produced by two Irish documentarians, this film offered a plainly biased glimpse into the political climate surrounding the 2002 coup that briefly evicted Venezuela’s leftwing dictator Hugo Chavez from the seat of power. The documentary’s leftwing biases were so pronounced that even New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden, in the course of an otherwise approving critique, drew cursory attention to the fact that the documentary whitewashed the repressive character of Chavez’s rule while offering a glowing presentation of the strongman. Observed Holden, “The documentary hints that the C.I.A. might have been involved, but no evidence is offered. And Mr. Chávez is portrayed uncritically as a heroic reformer and robust man of the people.” In a synopsis of Inside the Coup, the Peabody board applauded the film for providing a sympathetic view of the “charismatic leader.” As further evidence of the Peabody board’s intention to make its award synonymous with leftwing ideology, the board presented a Personal Peabody, its version of a lifetime achievement award, to Bill Moyers. Throughout his prolific 30-year career in journalism, Moyers, a former aide to president Lyndon Johnson, regularly used his commentaries to inveigh against what he called the pernicious influence of the “right-wing media.” When he announced that he would retire from broadcasting following the November 2004 elections, Moyers said, “I’m going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has [sic] become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee.” Though the Peabody board made no mention of Moyers’ leftwing views, it praised the broadcaster “for a career distinguished by the highest standards of excellence in the use of television to educate, inform, and challenge received ideas.” In previous years, Moyers’ television career had been honored with a Peabody Award on no fewer than eight occasions.
Sixteen years earlier, in 1988 a Peabody Award was given to Bill Moyers for his PBS series, World of Ideas. The Peabody judges raved that the series demonstrated “that television can stimulate to think and reason.” Specifically, what Moyers stimulated his viewers to think about was reflected in no uncertain terms in a June 1988 episode of the program. With his standard failure to provide a balanced assessment of politically charged issues, Moyers railed against the outgoing Reagan administration’s policy of cutting taxes, insisting that “the poor and the working poor have borne the brunt of the cost of the Reagan revolution.” By 1991, the Peabody Awards’ political overtones were on stark display. In that year, two awards were presented to National Public Radio (NPR), whose coverage of legal issues was congruent to the leftwing political bent of the judging board: One award went to NPR for its pointedly critical coverage of the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, which amplified charges of sexual harassment by law professor Anita Hill; another acclaimed an NPR documentary called The Case Against Women: Sexism in the Courts, which sought to lend authority to anecdotal charges that women were consistently the targets of discrimination in legal cases concerning allegations of child abuse. For the remainder of the 1990s, the Peabody Awards’ judges would unfailingly pay obeisance to the political Left. To mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America, the 1992 Peabody was awarded to the Institute of American Indian Arts for a documentary titled Surviving Columbus. Directed by Dale Kruzic, an independent producer whose resume included stints with the BBC and the National Audubon Society, Surviving Columbus rendered a tendentious portrait of the interaction between European settlers and Pueblo Indians. Making little attempt to abide by the historical record, the documentary made the case that the arrival of the Europeans had amounted to a death sentence for Pueblo culture. These revisionist efforts did not go unappreciated by the Peabody’s judging panel, which enthusiastically credited the Surviving Columbus with providing a “corrective” to the historical texts “traditionally presented the European version.” The following year (1993) saw a repeat of this political plotline, when Peabodys went to two liberal media personalities, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour and National Public Radio’s Terry Gross. The same was true in 1994. Among the winners that year was a six-part miniseries called American Playhouse: Tales of the City. A scabrous adaptation of the eponymous book by the leftist writer and gay activist Armistead Maupin, the series was a paean to the excesses of gay life in pre-AIDS-era San Francisco. The series, which originally ran on London’s “progressive” Channel 4, starred the feminist activist and actress Olympia Dukakis. The Peabody Award’s adulation of leftwing politics also extends beyond the world of journalism and documentaries. Leftwing celebrity icons are regularly honored with the coveted prize. Among its recent recipients are celebrity-activists like Barbra Streisand, writer Studs Terkel, and Norman Lear, the founder of People for the American Way. In 1995, to cite another prominent instance, the Peabody for personal achievement went to Oprah Winfrey. Nor is American citizenship a necessary qualification for the Peabody Award. All that is required is that the politics of the would-be recipient are consistent with those of the Peabody’s presenters. For instance, in 1996 the Peabody for personal achievement was accorded to Peter Gzowski, a noted Canadian journalist for the CBC and a leading icon of the Canadian left. More familiar to Americans was the next year’s winner of the Peabody Award for personal achievement: Ted Turner. Soft-peddling the media mogul’s lifetime of political activism, including his well-reported sympathies for the Cuba’s Castro dictatorship, the Peabody committee instead hailed Turner as a righteous businessman with a passion for doing good. While the Peabody judges allowed that “some disagree about his [Turner's] manners and his methods,” they nevertheless maintained that “Turner has consistently combined the zeal of an entrepreneur with a passionate commitment to make the world a better place than he found it.” In 1998 a Peabody Award went to an NPR program celebrating another enthusiast of dictatorship: the singer and communist activist Paul Robeson. In describing the winning program, titled I Must Keep Fightin': The Art of Paul Robeson, the Peabody Awards characterized Robeson, a notorious Stalinist who once remarked that opponents of the Soviet government ought to be shot, as an “international civil rights activist.” In 1999 the Peabody judges returned to the controversy that continued to surround the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill saga. On this occasion the award went to a Showtime movie called Strange Justice. Adapted from the book of the same name by reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, the Peabody judges praised Strange Justice as an objective portrayal of the background to Justice Thomas’ electric confirmation hearings, explaining that the film “wisely doesn’t take sides.” In fact, however, the film reflected the leftwing biases of the book, which mounted the insupportable argument that of the two protagonists, Hill was the more truthful—an argument for whose lack of substantive evidence the authors attempted to compensate by darkly alluding to the influence of the “Right.” In 2000, the Peabody Awards recognized the work of another leftwing journalist, John Merrow, a reporter on education for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and a former scholar-in-residence at the liberal think-tank The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Peabody went to a PBS segment called School Sleuth: The Case of an Excellent School, which Merrow narrated. Billed as a “pragmatic piece” by the Peabody Awards, School Sleuth contended that there were a many ways to evaluate the quality of a school. In keeping with Merrow’s views on education, however, it concluded the rigorous testing was not one of them. Against the background of this increasingly politicized history, it came as no surprise when, in 2001, the Peabody Award went to Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule, for A Huey P. Newton Story, Lee’s reverent film adaptation of a play about the notorious Black Panther militant, convicted felon, and cop-killer. So great was the Peabody board’s approval of this tribute to Newton, that in 2003 Peabody director Horace Newcomb invited the actor who portrayed Newton, Roger Guenveur Smith, to the University of Georgia to discuss his role. Explaining his enthusiasm for the film, Newcomb described it as “a mesmerizing portrait of the complex co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.” Judging by the composition of the current board of Peabody judges, the awards’ partiality towards left-liberal work will continue undiminished for at least the foreseeable future. Announcing the addition of several new members to the judging board in December of 2004, Peabody Awards Director Horace Newcomb said, “Their perspectives will add to our discussions as we continue to recognize the most distinguished examples of electronic media produced around the world.” A review of these members reveals exactly which perspectives Newcomb had in mind. Among the new members was Susan Douglas, a leftist professor of communications studies at the University of Michigan. Inadvertently, Douglas shed light on some of the criteria she values in good programming in a May 2003 article for The Nation. Therein, Douglas lavished praise on Comedy Central’s left-leaning program The Daily Show for its animus against the Bush administration—or, as Douglas put it, for “expressing utter incredulity over what Team Bush tries to get away with week in and week out.” Warming to this theme, Douglas applauded host Jon Stewart for opposing the war in Iraq and for having a “keen eye for Bush’s hypocrisies.” She also registered her appreciation of the program for its attacks on the Bush administration’s policies, specifically its willingness to “expose them [the policies] as utterly absurd, as nonsense, deranged.” “Central to the show’s sensibilities, and to its success,” said Douglas, “is Stewart’s insistence that the news generated by Team Bush be treated on its own terms, not as news at all but as fatuous PR, ludicrously out of touch with reality.” Douglas concluded by noting that “it is important to itemize, carefully and seriously, all the reasons Team Bush is lethally dangerous to all except the upper echelons of the Fortune 500.” Douglas joined a judging board already tilting heavily to the left. In 2004, Peabody judges included Peter Fiddick, a columnist for one of Britain’s leading leftwing newspapers, The Guardian. Another was Bel Herandez, a Latin-American activist claims that American culture has rejected Latinos. As Hernandez informed a CNN interviewer in 2000, “In short, there has been a lack of inclusion of Latinos in the history of this country that has led to the misconception of who U.S. Latinos really are.” Yet another member of the board was Meryl Marshall-Daniels, the president of the television production company Two Oceans Entertainment Group, whose credits include an animated HBO series titled Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, which retold classic fairy tales with “multiethnic images.”
Lobbyist Ben Barnes, the third biggest fundraiser for Democrats in the United States, appeared in the same "60 Minutes II" story in which Rather first displayed the forged documents, which were purported to substantiate Barnes' claim that he had used political influence to get a young George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard (so as to avoid combat duty) during the Vietnam War, a claim Barnes' own daughter has said her father told her was a lie. In introducing Barnes, Rather told the CBS audience nothing about the shipwreck of Barnes' political career amid a bribery and stock fraud scandal, nor that Barnes stood to become very wealthy as a toll-collecting "gatekeeper" for White House favors if John F. Kerry were elected President. This column on September 8, 2004 documented the sordid past of Barnes, who raised at least $500,000 in campaign contributions for Kerry. |
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