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Breaking news narratives serve as the first draft of history—and often form most of our memories of any given major event as the media cycle moves onto something else. But these Peabody-recognized works revisit key points in American history, revealing the ways we have misremembered, misinterpreted, or forgotten many important turning points in ways that radically alter what we think we know about the HIV epidemic, hate crimes, and race relations. Learn the real stories by watching and listening to these works.
This Peabody-winning season of WNYC Studios’ podcast series Blindspot, hosted by Kai Wright with Lizzy Ratner, tells stories from the early days of AIDS, painting a picture of brave resistance by those who refused to be shamed into invisibility—and showing that the crisis encompassed more than just gay men. Through intimate interviews, The Plague in the Shadows demonstrates the ways the crisis affected the Black community, women, and children, and how activism and connection bloomed among survivors.
Where to Listen: WNYC Studios
An Audible Original, Pulse: The Untold Story won a Peabody for its investigative reporting that upends public understanding of the 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub that killed 49 people and wounded 53 others—the deadliest attack on the LGBTQ+ community in U.S. history. Journalist Trevor Aaronson carefully makes the case that shooter Omar Mateen was not, as widely reported, a secretly gay Islamist carrying out a planned hate crime. Instead, he suggests that the attack is part of a more complex story involving Mateen, his father, and the FBI, which perpetuated the false story to distract from its own involvement.
Where to Listen: Audible
‘American Coup’
PBS’s American Experience documentary series illuminates the long-suppressed story of the only successful coup d’état in U.S. history. A group of white supremacists led the organized insurrection in North Carolina’s largest city, which had a duly elected multi-racial government. Black residents were attacked, killed, and run out of town, and the event was buried and denied in the telling of history until survivors’ descendants and scholars went digging.
Where to Watch: PBS
Kai Wright Accepts a Peabody Award for ‘Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows’
“At a time when leaders failed, when institutions that were supposed to help instead became weapons of oppression, when so, so many people turned away from the devastation that HIV created, the people whose stories we told in this podcast took action.”