‘Yugoslavia’ Gets Top Honor From DuPont-Columbia

NEW YORK —  “The Death of Yugoslavia,” a five-part series made for the BBC and the Discovery Channel by Britain’s Brian Lapping Associates, won the Gold Baton, the highest honor of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards for broadcast journalism.

The series, narrated by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, details the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and, according to the citation it received, “carefully explains how Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic systematically and brutally increased the territory under his control.”

The winners of the awards were announced Thursday night in ceremonies televised by PBS. The programs aired between July 1, 1995, and June 30, 1996.

ABC’s “Nightline” was cited with a Silver Baton for three programs: a weeklong examination of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, a two-part piece on treating AIDS patients and a two-hour debate in Israel after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

CBS’ “60 Minutes” received a Silver Baton for two segments: “Punishing Saddam,” a report on the devastating impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, and “Too Good to Be True,” a report on the success of a private school in a poor neighborhood.

NBC’s “Dateline” program received a Silver Baton for “Class Photo,” a project that took nine months to make in which members of a 1982 fourth-grade class at a Brooklyn ghetto school were tracked down. The report discovered that the women were successful, while many of the men in the class were in prison or had been involved in crime.

The PBS program “Nova,” the PBS network and WGBH-TV in Boston were given a Silver Baton for their report on the fight in Zaire against the deadly plague Ebola. A “Nova” crew was the only film unit allowed in the “hot zone” of the epidemic near Kikwit and risked their lives to film “the heroic scientific war against the disease.”

A three-hour “Frontline” program on PBS called “Shtetl” was also given a Silver Baton. The program recorded the journey of filmmaker Marian Marzynski to his native Poland to see what was left of the Jewish village in which he grew up.

Other winners included an “American Masters” profile of Buckminster Fuller on PBS, HBO for its overall work in the documentary field, and National Public Radio for programs about the former Soviet Union and the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory against Japan.