Laurels for 1949

The annual Peabody Awards (radio's "Oscars") last year recognized television for the first time. This year, treating TV as a full partner of radio, the Peabody Advisory Board singled out the MARCH OF TIME'S 26-episode Crusade in Europe (ABC-TV) as "television's major contribution to education."*

The other Peabody Award winners announced this week in Manhattan:

Radio

Reporting: Eric Sevareid (CBS), who "goes where the news originates . . . And, in his reporting, he reveals a depth and clarity, a perspicacity and lucidity."

Entertainment: Jack Benny (CBS), "for developing so brilliantly a comedy program which has avoided habit, staleness and artificiality" and "because he makes laughter sound so easy and natural."

Music: Manhattan's station WQXR. "No station anywhere has devoted more time or more intelligent presentation to good music."

Education: Author Meets the Critics (ABC). "The most provocative, literate and exciting program concerning books on the air."

International understanding: United Nations Project (NBC). A "concentrated, coordinated effort to explore the . . . agency most concerned with world harmony."

Public Service: Detroit's station WWJ and station KXLJ of Helena, Mont.

Television

Entertainment: the Ed Wynn Show (CBS-TV), which "has brought to television . . . the best techniques of stage, screen and radio."

News: U.N. General Assembly (CBS-TV). "The most ambitious and worthwhile undertaking in the news area."

Children's programs: Kukla, Fran & Ollie (NBC-TV), for striving to achieve "the whimsy and gentle satire of the James Barrie-Lewis Carroll sort."

The Peabody Advisory Board-also made a low bow in the direction of magazines and newspapers by giving special citations to Editor Harold Ross and The New Yorker for "their successful Grand Central campaign in behalf of the rights of the so-called captive audience," and to Cartoonist H. T. Webster for his weekly cartoon, Unseen Audience, "the most economical, unanswerable, the most graphic and civilized criticism of radio."

* M.O.T.'s second Oscar for 1949. The first came with the Hollywood Academy Award for the short-subject movie on homeless children, A Chance to Live.

* Which includes the University of Georgia's Dean John E. Drewry, now fully recovered from the shooting for which his ex-wife was sentenced last month to serve two to four years.

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