The Promise: Season 2 has won a Peabody Award, which represents the most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and streaming media during 2020. The podcast is hosted by Meribah Knight of Nashville Public Radio’s flagship station WPLN News.
Former NBC News anchor and Nashville native John Seigenthaler presented The Promise: Season 2 with its award.
The Peabody Awards are based at the University of Georgia. Sixty nominees were announced in May 2021, chosen by unanimous vote of 19 jurors from more than 1,300 entries from television, podcasts/radio and the web in entertainment, news, documentary, arts, children’s/youth, public service and multimedia programming. The 30 winners are being announced throughout this week.
“In 2019, when host Meribah Knight began reporting what would become the second season of The Promise podcast, Warner Elementary was one of Tennessee’s lowest performing schools. It was also one of the most racially and economically lopsided schools in Nashville; the school is almost all Black and all poor,” the jurors said.
“As Knight’s reporting elucidates, Warner is emblematic of the structural inequities that are rampant in public education, especially when you compare it, as she does, with a high-performing, almost all-white school less than two miles away. Using Warner’s pivotal 2019-2020 school year as its frame and taking aim at nice, well-meaning white parents in an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, Season 2 of The Promise chronicles the decades-long fight against desegregation in Nashville as well as Warner’s uphill battle, led by its charismatic new principal, to turn itself around. The podcast carefully lays out how the current school system is inherently dependent on the resources white households provide, both creating and perpetuating systemic inequality in the process that most affects Black students. For crafting an engrossing history lesson and a vibrant snapshot of a school, a neighborhood, and a city at a crossroads, The Promise is awarded a Peabody.”
The Promise, which was edited by WPLN’s Emily Siner, grapples with public education and race in Nashville, revealing a city that’s resisted school desegregation at every turn.
“Meribah, our News Director Emily Siner, and the entire WPLN News team consistently create impactful and compelling original local journalism,” says Steve Swenson, President & CEO of Nashville Public Radio. “Meribah’s two seasons of The Promise reflect the quality, depth and independence of all our journalists and are emblematic of our public service mission.”
Over nearly two years, Knight immersed herself in the neighborhood. She gathered more than 300 hours of tape, conducted more than 60 interviews, filed numerous public records requests, and traveled to the National Archives in Morrow, Georgia, to sift through thousands of pages of court documents from Nashville’s 43-year court battle over school desegregation.
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