KTLA Wins Peabody Award for King Video : Awards: The station is cited for its ‘courage . . . without sensationalizing the event or its aftermath.’

KTLA Channel 5 has been honored with a Peabody Award for distinguished broadcasting for being the first station to show the amateur-shot videotape of Los Angeles Police Department officers beating motorist Rodney G. King.

Other TV winners of the Peabodys for 1991 programming included CBS’ “Murphy Brown,” NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman,” PBS’ “Dance in America: Everybody Dance Now!,” ABC’s “Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World” and Falahey-Austin Street Productions, the company that makes CBS’ “Northern Exposure” and NBC’s “I’ll Fly Away.”

Radio winners included National Public Radio for its coverage of the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, and “Joe Frank: Work in Progress,” which is produced at KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica.

KTLA was cited “for its courage in presenting an explosive tape produced by an amateur photographer, and doing so without sensationalizing the event or its aftermath.”

Cable winners included CNN for its coverage of the Soviet coup, HBO’s “America Undercover: Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth,” Nickelodeon’s “It’s Only Television” and the Discovery Channel’s “People of the Forest: The Chimps of Gombe.”

One individual was among the 27 Peabody winners: Peggy Charren, president and co-founder of Action for Children’s Television. The judges said that her “commitment to improving children’s television for nearly a quarter century embodies the highest ideals and the tenacity required in our participatory democracy.”

The winners, selected from more than 850 entries, will be honored at a luncheon in New York City on June 1. The awards are administered by the University of Georgia College of Journalism and Mass Communication.