DuPont Columbia Award Winners
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/15/2007 8:43:00 AM
NBC was the only network news department to receive a DuPont-Columbia award for excellence in broadcast journalism, in this case coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
There were 14 winners of the prestigious awards, which will be handed out by Columbia University Jan. 17, with PBS—radio or TV grabbing seven of the silver batons, commercial stations collecting four, and HBO, Discovery Times Channel and ITVS collecting one each.
The winners, which are normally announced late in 2006, are not being unveiled until PBS’ portion of the press tour in L.A.Saturday so the noncom service has produced a special featuring the winners that will begin airing this week.
Katrina coverage played a prominent role, with NBC collecting its prize for the broadcasts of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and Dateline, and WWL-TV New Orleans and WLOX-TV Biloxi cited for their continuous coverage, WLOX for its role as a lifeline to the community and WWL for its "outstanding, unflappable, courageous reporting."
From a pool of 526 submissions, the 14 winners, in alphabetical order, were:
American Masters and WNET New York, for Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
Brook Lapping Productions, for PBS' Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace.
Cape and Islands NPR stations for Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands
Discovery Times channel/CBC/New York times, Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb.
Frontline and WGBH Boston, PBS' The Age of AIDS
HBO, Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neil, Baghdad ER
ITVS, Lisa Sleeth and Jim Butterworth, Independent Lens: Seoul Train
NBC Nightly News and Dateline, Katrina coverage
KCET Los Angeles, KPBS San Diego, KQED San Francisco, and KVIE Sacramento, California
Connected: War Stories from Ward 7-D
NPR for coverage of Iraq
WBAL-TV Baltimore, Dirty Secret
WLOX-TV Biloxi, Katrina coverage
WRAL-TV Raleigh, N.C., Focal Point: Paper Thin Promise and Standards of Living
WWL-TV New Orleans, Katrina coverage.
