Washington, DC – March 31, 2010 – BBC World News America has received double honors in the 69th Annual Peabody Awards announced today.
The newscast has been honored for overall excellence and described by the judges as: “A nightly newscast like none the United States has ever had, it places our actions and concerns in a global context.”
BBC World News America also won a second Peabody for a gripping report on maternal mortality in Afghanistan, Where Giving Life is a Death Sentence, by BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet. This same piece was recently bestowed The David Bloom Award at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, DC on Wednesday, March 17.
In the report, which aired on BBC World News America on October 27, 2009, Lyse Doucet traveled to Badakhshan province, in northeast Afghanistan, to report from the part of the world with the worst-ever recorded rate of maternal mortality. It has nothing to do with war; the region is so remote that the Taliban never established a presence here. Doucet made the grueling, bone-jarring journey along narrow, bumpy mountain paths to the region’s only available health facility. Pregnant Afghan women have to travel by foot, donkey, or – in the unlikely event that the family can scrape together enough money – car, in order to see a doctor. No matter the means of conveyance, many women do not even survive the journey.
The piece can be seen in full here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8573606.stm
BBC World News America Executive Producer Rome Hartman says: “We could not be more proud of this recognition. In the words of the Peabody’s mission statement, the award ‘is determined by one criterion – Excellence,’ and we are humbled by the honor. The BBC World News America team set out more than two years ago to do something unique and special: to create a program that really ‘brings the world home’ to Americans each night, and to do it in a way that’s consistently smart, sophisticated, lively, and impartial. We still have a long way to go, but this is a profound validation of that idea and mission.”
BBC World News America has now won a total of three Peabody Awards. In the program’s inaugural year it was awarded a Peabody for White Horse Village, an extraordinary three-part story looking at a sleepy rural community in China undergoing rapid urbanization.
Other BBC programs that received Peabody Awards today were The Day That Lehman Died (BBC WORLD SERVICE), Iran and the West (BBC TWO) and No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (HBO).
The award ceremony takes place on Monday, May 17 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.
