Recipients of the coveted Peabody Award, one of the highest honors in broadcasting, were announced yesterday. As my friends at Crooks & Liars noted, one of the award winners stands out.
Comedy Central’s spoof news show won its second Peabody Award for election coverage Thursday, with many of the other broadcasting awards going to overseas reports.
“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” was awarded the honor for its “Indecision 2004” campaign reports, which judges called “the kind of cathartic satire that deflates pomposity on an equal opportunity basis.” The show won its first Peabody in 2000 for its election reports that year.
And as long as we’re on the subject of Peabody Awards, I can’t help but find it amusing that Jon Stewart is modest about having won two of the awards, in contrast with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who’s bragged about winning a Peabody without actually having earned one.
Many have forgotten about O’Reilly’s pre-FNC background, but O’Reilly hosted a tabloid-TV program called Inside Edition. Like its tabloid brethren, it was highly sensationalistic and tended to focus on celebrity controversies. There’d be an occasional political segment, but only if it had some kind of shocking element. O’Reilly enjoyed some notoriety while hosting the program and parlayed its success into getting his own show on Fox News.
It was shortly thereafter that O’Reilly started bragging about the alleged awards he had won.
“I anchored a program called Inside Edition, which has won a Peabody Award for investigative reporting,” O’Reilly said on August 30, 1999.
A year after this initial claim, O’Reilly was at it again, expanding on the original boast.
“Well, all I’ve got to say to that is Inside Edition has won, I believe, two Peabody awards, the highest journalism award in the country,” O’Reilly said on his Fox News program on May 8, 2000. “We won Peabody Awards. A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you’re going to denigrate it?”
True? Of course not. O’Reilly was wrong — on a couple of levels.
First, Inside Edition never won a Peabody Award. The show did win a lesser prize, the Polk Award, which in and of itself is odd, considering the low quality of the program. But his argument about repeated Peabody honors was ridiculous.
Second, when Inside Edition won its Polk, O’Reilly had already left the program. (It must have gotten better with a new host.) O’Reilly’s incessant claims that “we” won an award failed to mention that show was honored after his departure.
Third, and perhaps most amusingly, O’Reilly then insisted he never actually made the claim in the first place.
On March 31, 2001, O’Reilly said on his Fox News show, “Guy says about me, couple of weeks ago, ‘O’Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.’ Never said it. You can’t find a transcript where I said it. There is no one on earth you could bring in that would say I said it.”
It was enough to almost make me feel sorry for the guy. Almost.