anew. Also winning their first awards were FX, for the police series "The Shield," and the Sundance Channel, for presenting "The Staircase," an eight-part documentary about a North Carolina murder case.

HBO picked up three awards. The pay cable outlet was honored for "Children of Beslan," a documentary about the aftermath of the September 2004 terrorist capture of a Russian elementary school and "Yesterday," a South African-produced film. Also winning was "Classical Baby," which judges called "an inventive, whimsical marriage of animation to classical music."

Besides the two Gulf Coast broadcasters that were honored, two more local TV stations won Peabodys. KNBC-TV in Burbank, Calif., won for its investigative coverage of an apartment development built on a toxic and potentially flammable site, and KCNC-TV in Denver won for what judgescalled a "funny and frightening" expose that showed how far the Army would go to lure recruits.

Internationally, CBC/Radio-Canada picked up an award for its report on how global warming is affecting the Arctic and the Inuit people living there. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. also won for its eight-part documentary on the impact of electricity on music. Madrid's TVE was awarded for its coverage of China's sweeping rural-to-urban shift.

The British Broadcast Corp. received four Peabodys, including one for its multimedia campaign to encourage organ donations and another for the dramatization of Charles Dickens' "Bleak House."